To stay relevant and, what for many is rather more important, to keep receiving the money they need to stay in business, academic institutions have to move with the times. This has never been easy for them, but of late it has become especially difficult. For many years, university professors were widely expected to be cranky conservatives who clung to quaintly outdated ways of thinking but this has long ceased to be the case. These days, most academics in the English-speaking world and elsewhere are with-it progressives who are determined to fight the good fight on behalf of their beliefs and root out whatever vestiges of racism, sexism, transphobism, Islamophobia and other equally vile right-wing prejudices that catch their attention.

To achieve their noble objectives and make universities places in which people they regard as victims of historical wrongs can thrive and feel at home, the more zealous have shown themselves to be more than willing to junk the old-fashioned academic standards they think were devised by white supremacists in order to scare off people of colour. This is what happened in, of all places, Cambridge University, a centre of learning which is considered to be one of the best, if not the very best, in the entire world. To move with the times, several years ago its authorities proudly announced that they had appointed the youngest black professor in its history to head a “sociology of education” department. For a while, nothing much happened even though his behaviour must have raised a few eyebrows, but then, just a few days ago, the fun began.

It turned out that Professor Jason Arday, like the disgraced Harvard president Claudine Gay, was a serial plagiarist whose doctoral thesis and other works were a patchwork of unacknowledged quotations lifted from other “scholars,” most of whom, to judge by the material that has been put on-line, were crass mediocrities who churned out the pretentious gobbledegook that passes for prose in the grievance-studies world. But this was only the beginning. It was soon realised that Arday’s curriculum vitae contained much that looked distinctly implausible. He told those interested in his life story that, stricken by autism and subject to occasional bouts of epilepsy, until he was he was unable to speak a single word, and he had had to wait until he was 18 before he learned to read and write. Equally improbable was his claim to be a world-class athlete who kept himself in shape by running 30 marathons in 30-odd days to raise millions of pounds for charity despite suffering a leg injury he overcame by gritting his teeth and carrying on. As more and more information became available, academics who had rallied to his side and tried to make out he was a victim of a racist conspiracy, sidled away into the background. A couple of days ago, he handed in his resignation.

What makes all this significant is Arday’s success in persuading the luminaries at Cambridge that he was just the man they were looking for. They desperately wanted to hire a suitably qualified black academic for a department in which political opinions matter far more than all that guff about high standards, the search for truth and the like that university representatives like to go on about. As far as they were concerned, Arday, who sports dreadlocks that reach the floor, smiles winningly and, with a show of solemnity that would do credit to a Tibetan lama, says peace depends on people loving one another more, fitted the bill. In their way, they proved to be every bit as out-of-touch, and as gullible, as were the legendary eccentrics of the now distant past.

By rights, this bizarre episode should harm Cambridge’s international reputation and send it tumbling down the academic league tables, but it probably won’t because sociology, along with black or gender studies, is not taken that seriously, what with many having come to the conclusion that the subjects are playpens for lefties and have little to do with serious disciplines. As became clear almost immediately, the hardest-hit by the revelations about Arday’s doings have been other black professors who run the risk of being seen as “DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) hires”, a category nobody wants to belong to which includes many people who achieved a certain degree of eminence thanks to the colour of their skin, their sexual orientation or their religious leanings.

The drive to achieve DEI, which led to the appointment to prestigious posts not just in academe but also in government bureaucracies and huge corporations who wanted to improve their image, of individuals who owed more to their “identity” than to whatever abilities they might have had, is now slowing down. After leading to the creation of unabashedly politicised departments in prestigious universities and making big inroads in the humanities, the publishing industry and threatening even the hard sciences, those behind it are fast becoming the target of ridicule. To suggest that a person in a key position is a “DEI hire”, as some clearly are, is now enough to make him or her feel far more uncomfortable that would have been the case even a year ago.

Unlike old-style liberals, who take it for granted that people are individuals, the “woke” ideologues behind DEI put group identities first. According to them, if only 12 percent of professorships go to blacks who, in the United States, account for about 13 percent of the population, it means that academic institutions are structurally racist and should be forced to change their ways. If anyone argues that all candidates for coveted posts should be judged by the same standards, they will say that the criteria being used are racist and should be replaced by others designed to ensure equal outcomes. As a result, a student from a family of East Asian origin who scores high in an exam will be overtaken by youngsters from less studious minority groups whose marks are far lower than his. Similar arguments are made by militant feminists and transgender people and others who insist they are victims of the still “hegemonic” white patriarchy. For them as for the race hustlers, life is a power struggle; for several years, they were winning it hand over fist but, thanks to characters like Arday and those Cambridge dons who thought that hiring him would make them look good, for now at any rate they are on the retreat.