Tomiwa Owolade in the Telegraph points to a deeper lesson here – Jason Arday is merely a symptom of the Left’s corruption of excellence:
The fact he was accepted by Cambridge, apparently uncritically, seems to demonstrate the extent to which normal standards of academic rigour were relaxed. This is a damning indictment of that august institution. He was perhaps employed to improve the representation of an ethnic minority among Cambridge professors. He has ended up tarnishing the university.
But to focus exclusively on Arday is to miss a fundamental point. He is the symptom – perhaps even a victim – of a much wider problem. In a way he has performed a great service for all of us: he has exposed a deep rot within our education system that needs to be scrutinised and thoroughly challenged.
Lucy Powell’s agenda is part of this same rot. Labour’s Education Secretary has described the reforms of Michael Gove, which improved the outcomes of countless children, as a “straitjacket”.
According to Powell, in a column from earlier this week, Britain’s education system has “become too single-minded”. And children from “poorer backgrounds with stubborn and entrenched disadvantages” have been especially let down by this.
A focus on rigour, according to this view, doesn’t take into account that children from different backgrounds have different capabilities. Our system needs to be more flexible, more open, to accommodate the wide variety of pupils in our schools to give the best chance of success in life.
And someone like Jason Arday is the logical conclusion to that approach.
That idea that working-class and black pupils should be judged by a different set of standards is condescending in the extreme. In effect, it says to them the “best of what has been said and thought” is not for you.
If Arday had been judged by higher standards, Cambridge might well have been spared a lot of embarrassment. Arday, meanwhile, would not have been exposed to the censure and humiliation that has followed his name in the past week.
But there is a deeper point to this. Many ethnic minority families see a traditional education as the best way to give their children the chance of leading a successful and flourishing life. They would be insulted by the idea that white middle-class children deserve one kind of education that differs from the education offered to their own children. They would be offended by a lowering of standards to accommodate their children, as though there is some inherent fault in them that only positive discrimination can rectify.
And they would be right to be angry. To suggest ethnic-minority children are not capable of gaining as much from a rigorous education is not just wrong as a matter of fact. It is also morally wrong. It would fall under the bigotry of low expectations.
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