Is there more to be said about Jason Arday? Well, yes, there certainly is if our attention turns, as it should, to his enablers – chief among them Hilary Cremin. Malcolm Clark at Spiked has been doing some digging:
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….
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….
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.
Let’s not forget the case of Farah Ahmed, as exposed by Andrew Gilligan yesterday. That strikes me as more serious. The Jason Arday case was deeply silly, exposing how a chancer like Arday could so easily exploit the fashionable nonsense that permeates so much of academia now, especially with gullible and frankly ridiculous people like Hilary Cremin in charge. Farah Ahmed, on the other hand, seems quite clearly to be an Islamist seizing the chance to place her extreme anti-western and anti-democratic views within the highest levels of UK education. And, with the state of the Cambridge Education Faculty being what it is, that turned out to very simple matter indeed.
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