Menopausal Academics and the Mothering of Jason Arday

Clearly, Jason Arday – who is now the former Professor of the Sociology of Education at Cambridge University – is a fantasist who was gifted a position for which he was completely unqualified because he was Black and had a tragic back story of autism, which he may have concocted to garner sympathy. Cambridge University has been humiliated, as have all those whose knee-jerk reaction was to defend Arday and to accuse his detractors of “racism.” Students have emerged to highlight Arday’s appalling teaching quality and to demand that their grades be changed. It is widely assumed that he was appointed as a poster-boy for diversity and this is almost certainly true, but the reaction of his boss, department head Hilary Cremin and the fact that much of his selection committee were middle-aged females, highlights another possible reason: unmet maternal instincts.

As I have discussed in my book, Woke Eugenics: How Social Justice is a Mask for Social Darwinism, when you just look at the more intelligent, particularly among women, the big predictor of never having children is that you are liberal; which is overwhelmingly the case with female academics. Inculcated with feminism, they dedicate their most fertile years to their careers and end up childless. Moreover, women were sexually select to pursue stratus and, now that they are more educated than men in many Western countries, there are too few high-status men for them to choose from. The result of these two factors is childlessness, but those maternal instincts have to go somewhere.

Where do they go? Most obviously, they seem to be transferred over to young, male asylum-seekers of the kind that cross illegally from France to the UK every day in small boats. It is as though the fact that they are of different race somehow tricks their minds into seeing them as helpless rather than the aggressive young men whom they turn out to be. This idealisation of the genetically distant appears to be a natural tendency on the Left. Whereas the moral circle of conservatives is a series of concentric circles emanating from self and becoming ever more genetically distant, the Leftist is more likely to identify with a group a few circles removed from self. Hence, a hundred years ago, upper-class leftists would identify with a (de-fanged, idealised) version of the working class. This tendency allows them to signal their “kindness” to a “marginalised” group and, so, play for status covertly via signalling their superior virtue, in a context in which leftists have elevated Neuroticism and, so, fear a fair fight. In a sense, they de-fang the outsider and make them into a kind of over-grown child.

A BBC report on the appointment of Jason Arday in 2023 records this in striking detail and it shows that Arday is, in some ways, particularly easy to treat in this way. Arday is effeminate and has relatively large eyes, like a child. Hilary Cremin, who dons a mini-skirt despite clearly being past the menopause, gushes over Arday and there is a close-up of them not merely shaking hands – as employer and employee much be expected to – but holding hands, for an extended period of time, gripping each other’s wrists in an affectionate way. Beaming at her, Arday asks whether his election as professor is a “tokenistic appointment.” She replies that the board of electors were “absolutely unanimous” and that “we are so lucky to have you. You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.”

This was objectively false and Cremin must have known that it was. Even in the world of Woke auto-ethnography, where Black academics discuss their feelings and pass it off as scholarship, Arday had an extremely meagre publication record and those publications were little more than verbose, Woke word salad. It is as though Jason Arday is Cremin’s child and she must tell him white lies in order to encourage him.

It might even be wondered if there is a sexual element here. On the one hand, Arday is de-fanged and rendered childlike but, on the other, he represents raw Black sexuality; something that is both primal and childlike at the same. This seems unlikely, however, when you take into account that Arday is so strikingly effeminate, but may be so with other instances.

The Arday case, then, is indicative of far more than merely the corruption of Cambridge University Woke ideology. It reflects something that happens when the universities are taken over by women, as many of them have been. Clearly, there is a move away from male, confrontational academia in which ideas are dispassionately debated and feelings are the enemy of truth. We shift to something more like a nursery school where we try to ensure that everyone gets along and nobody’s feelings are hurt.

But, in a multicultural context, female leadership means that something else happens. Non-White men are idealised as ersatz children and introduced into the department to research their feelings about being non-White men. Naturally, they appoint more people like themselves and, before long, a once great university becomes an international laughing stock.

When Oxford University allowed women to study there it imposed heavy restrictions on their numbers and then tried to reverse the policy completely because the atmosphere of the university changed to being a far more emotional one. The Jason Arday fiasco is, in part, a consequence of this female atmosphere.