‘We are so lucky to have you’, grovelled Professor Hilary Cremin, as she gripped Arday’s hands like a novice nun being introduced to the Pope. ‘You are the best in the world in terms of the research you do’, she gushed. It hasn’t aged well.

After Arday’s resignation last week, prompted by speculation he had plagiarised swathes of his doctoral thesis, there has been almost universal bafflement that Cremin failed to ask questions about Cambridge’s star new appointment and his incredible claims. These included feats of athleticism – such as running 600 miles between London and Edinburgh in six days – that the Bionic Man would have struggled to beat.

Did Arday exercise some kind of Svengali-like charm over Cremin and her team? Or were the academics just unbelievably gullible? I suspect the truth is more concerning. For Arday’s appointment is surely the most egregious example yet of the influence on our educational system of a racialised ideology that makes irrational decisions like Cremin’s almost inevitable.

In the good old days, Britain’s top universities were famous the world over for their rigorous standards and a culture that promoted success. Neither of these things is much in vogue now at Cambridge University’s education department – at least if we are to judge from an interview Cremin gave in November last year. Asked about the alleged failure of racial minorities to succeed within higher education, Cremin blamed US president Donald Trump and the populist right. She also issued a warning about the ‘psychopathology’ of success itself. ‘The people who rise to the top are the worst of us not the best of us’, Cremin declared, as if she’d forgotten how close to the top she was herself. Those who do succeed, she said, skew heavily towards the narcissistic and Machiavellian.

The joke is that she could well have been describing Jason Arday. She probably never would have made that connection, though, for the simple reason that Arday was black. And in the imagination of woke pseuds, people of colour are forever the good guys in a cosmic struggle against baddies – otherwise known as white people – who are, we must never be allowed to forget, the source of all the world’s problems.

This template comes from the gospel of race activism that dominates our educational system now – namely, critical race theory. Critical race theory’s central conviction is that racial inequality in Western institutions is not a flaw, but a design feature. Everything about an institution – from how it is organised to the things it prioritises – is supposed to keep black people down.

This means that academic standards in universities can never be considered value-free. And all for the simple reason that standards themselves, as well as the use of reason and knowledge by which they are met, are tools of white supremacy. Instead, critical race theory devotees insist there are many ‘truths’ and many ways to uncover them.

You can see this idea play out in the work of Cremin’s fellow Arday recruiters, like Michalinos Zembylas. In a recent interview, Zembylas insisted ‘affectivity’ – by which he just means feelings – ‘is a knowledge trajectory that has systematically been ignored by Eurocentric models of knowledge’.

Few have plumbed this cringe-fest of ‘feeling’ more than Cremin herself, who passes for a luminary in the small world of ‘peace education’. This dubious field argues the primary purpose of education should be to foster peace – as if education has, up to now, been about fostering war. For years, Cremin has been exercised by the failure of peace education to bring about actual peace.

Cremin seemingly had a lightbulb moment in 2018, when she delivered a presentation at a conference at Cambridge. Rather than the usual 10-minute Power-Point presentation the audience was probably expecting, Cremin surprised them with a poem of her own composition. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall as she intoned these words:

‘I have no feet,

so I leave no footprint.

I have no hands,

so I do not act.

I have no body,

Prick me, and I will not bleed’.

If it seems cruel to poke fun at a well-meaning rhymester, don’t forget this wannabe Sappho is currently paid what we can assume is a large salary while she experiments with using poetry to promote world peace. Good work, if you can get it.

If Cremin and her team were an isolated example, the Arday scandal might not matter so much. Unfortunately, they’re not. Their careless attitude towards facts and loopy sense of propriety are part and parcel of the ideology that dominates so many of our institutions. Which makes it all the more curious that Cremin’s own discipline is steeped in the views of a despicable anti-Semite by the name of Johan Galtung, the founder of ‘peace studies’ who died two years ago.

You might have thought Galtung’s experience of growing up in Nazi-occupied Norway would have convinced him of the need for strong borders and well-funded military defences. Not a bit of it. Galtung became a lifelong pacifist who argued that the purpose of education should be to create thousands more pacificists like him. His pacifism was remarkably one-sided, however. Galtung urged Hungarians not to resist the Soviet invasion in 1956 and praised Castro’s Cuba. He also described Mao’s China as ‘endlessly liberating’.

As he aged, Galtung’s views grew wilder. Especially when it came to Jews. After Anders Breivik massacred 77 people in Norway in 2011, Galtung suggested he might have been following orders from Mossad. He also recommended people read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Did Cremin try to distance herself from Galtung? Alas, no. Instead, her co-authored book from 2017, Positive Peace in Schools, references him throughout, from the first sentence onwards.

Jason Arday may appear to be a fantasist, but he may have unwittingly done us a favour by revealing the delusions that pass for insights at the very top of the ivory tower.

Malcolm Clark was LGB Alliance’s head of research from 2019 to 2022. Visit his Substack, The Secret Gender Files, here.