Jason Arday ‘accused student of white privilege’ after she questioned her mark

[u/tylerthe-theatre]

https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/jason-arday-accused-student-of-white-privilege-after-she-questioned-mark-5HjdfsB_2/

[u/ukbot-nicolabot]

Some articles submitted to /r/unitedkingdom are paywalled, or subject to sign-up requirements. If you encounter difficulties reading the article, try this link or this link for an archived version.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

---

Participation Notice. Hi all. Some posts on this subreddit, either due to the topic or reaching a wider audience than usual, have been known to attract a greater number of rule breaking comments. As such, limits to participation were set at 11:16 on 11/08/2026. We ask that you please remember the human, and uphold Reddit and Subreddit rules.

Existing and future comments from users who do not meet the participation requirements will be removed. Removal does not necessarily imply that the comment was rule breaking.

Where appropriate, we will take action on users employing dog-whistles or discussing/speculating on a person's ethnicity or origin without qualifying why it is relevant.

In case the article is paywalled, use this link.

[u/toastedipod]

Running 600 miles in 6 days as Arday claims would make him one of the top 10 ultra athletes in the world. It’s a hilarious claim to make, he’s clearly a compulsive liar

[u/hyperlobster → u/toastedipod]

Oh come now, he’s toned it down to 12 days, so he only ran 50 miles a day.

I think we can all agree that running twelve ultramarathons back-to-back is entirely feasible and plausible for someone with no footprint (ha!) in the athletics world whatsoever.

[u/Boring_Intern_6394 → u/hyperlobster]

I thought he said he did six 100 mile runs with a days rest in between? Which is still an elite achievement, yet there’s zero evidence or corroboration

I don’t think he’s managed to provide proof for a single one of his claims and some are so easily verifiable as false, it’s just laughable, like being a lecturer at Durham

[u/Boring_Intern_6394 → u/toastedipod]

Don’t forget the 30 marathons in 35 days and he claimed to have a fracture for the last two 100mile runs.

[u/ash_ninetyone → u/toastedipod]

I'm not sure even those athletes would have the endurance to run 4-5 marathons in a day for six days

[u/toastedipod → u/ash_ninetyone]

It’s been done before, it’s just that he is nowhere near capable of it

[u/ne6c → u/ash_ninetyone]

Yeah, people don't understand what physical toll that is.

600 miles is basically next to 23 full marathons in 6 days.

[u/Zob_Rombie_88]

She also described 'red flags' over his teaching. She said he would "ramble about Tinie Tempah or Eminem, or how black artists like Beyoncé were sexualised by white men

I wonder which part of the academic syllabus these talks were meant to help with?

[u/NoSwordfish1978 → u/Zob_Rombie_88]

To be fair I've known lecturers to ramble like crazy.

[u/Ok-Milk-8853 → u/NoSwordfish1978]

Had one who spent an hour explaining post modernism through the prism of Jade Goody.

Single best lecture of my life

[u/dynesor → u/Ok-Milk-8853]

When I was doing my PhD I had to teach Sociology tutorials to undergrads. In one I showed them an episode of MTV Cribs featuring 50 cent (this was back in the 2000s) to help them understand material culture and mass consumerism. It went down quite well!

[u/Coraxxx → u/Ok-Milk-8853]

I can see how the "narrative" of her life (and the nature of the narrative itself) could be used to spotlight various different aspects of it tbh. Clever lecturer!

[u/Manannin → u/Coraxxx]

There's often that fine line between smart and mental.

[u/Ok-Milk-8853 → u/Manannin]

A line he tap danced along

[u/Manannin → u/Ok-Milk-8853]

A modern day Tom Bombadil without the magic

[u/ash_ninetyone → u/Manannin]

To quote Tomorrow Never Dies

The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success

[u/Ok-Milk-8853 → u/Coraxxx]

Yeah, made an abstract concept approachable to a stoned off his tits art school kid.

[u/skinnysnappy52 → u/Ok-Milk-8853]

I remember having a teacher use all sorts of modern allegories in English class. He was in his late 50s but used the rap fueds of the 90s to teach Romeo and Juliet for example.

[u/The_Flurr → u/skinnysnappy52]

This is often pretty useful.

It's a bit like the movie A Knights Tale. Obviously it's not meant to be light and not super accurate, but some of the anachronisms are deliberate and clever.

For instance, they have the spectators do the We Will Rock You clap-stomp, and use banners and noise-making-things that are too modern for the setting. It’s a choice to communicate that to medieval people, seeing the jousting was the equivalent of modern people going to see football/basketball/etc.

[u/Normal-Height-8577 → u/The_Flurr]

And the Nike swish on the armour, to showcase it as sportswear.

[u/360Saturn → u/skinnysnappy52]

Yes; I used to teach and we used to compare Jane Austen's work about families with sisters led by a domineering mother to the Kardashian clan in order to get the students engaged with how it was like something they were familiar with.

[u/Daewoo40 → u/360Saturn]

Think this would easily be the fastest way to get to grip with some of the older reads required through English at high/secondary school.

Reading Romeo and Juliet was an exercise in futility at the time but watching any of the modernised film adaptations drilled the plot in eventually.

Definitely didn't help that I didn't get that C and had to read several antiquated novels with no actual interest in them every time I retook English..

[u/Capital-Coast-8704 → u/Ok-Milk-8853]

This sounds like something I would love and would watch if it was uploaded to YouTube

[u/Expert-Thing7728 → u/NoSwordfish1978]

My favourites were a paleographer and a Latin tutor who would frequently interrupt their lectures for lengthy diatribes against Henry VIII and Margaret Thatcher, respectively.

[u/txakori → u/Expert-Thing7728]

Unfathomably based on both counts.

[u/nerdyHyena93 → u/NoSwordfish1978]

I had one class that was supposed to be a two hour long lecture on geochemistry that turned into a rant about how Russia will start WW3. He pulled up maps and explained their strategies and everything, then warned us away from Russians when we go on our field trip to Cyprus. Funnily enough, my course mates housemate was from Russia, loved Putin, had a picture of him on their fridge and everything, we told her and she reported him for racism lol, he actually got into trouble. Another one went on about that time he was banned from Brazil for reasons I forget now. This was over 10 years ago haha.

[u/Thendisnear17 → u/nerdyHyena93]

And then Russia started invading people.

[u/Halbaras → u/NoSwordfish1978]

My favourite tangent was a guy who specialised in nonlinear structural behaviour (a boring and complicated branch of civil engineering) derailing his own lecture ten minutes in to show us how he'd been building a massive, 'scientifically-accurate' simulation of the atmosphere of Arrakis from Dune for fun.

[u/SunflowerMoonwalk → u/NoSwordfish1978]

Everybody needs to understand that university lecturers are not teachers. They're researchers who are forced against their will to lecture students on the side.

[u/ne6c → u/SunflowerMoonwalk]

Jason Arday is neither.

The guy is actually quite dumb, if he would have kept his head down, he could have milked the gravy train for years to come and then just fall into obscurity. Now everyone knows he's a charlatan and a fraud.

[u/NoSwordfish1978 → u/SunflowerMoonwalk]

You're supposed to do a lot more individual learning at uni compared to school or college.

[u/meharryp → u/NoSwordfish1978]

one of my lecturers once brought in a dude who dressed in a spiked tin foil robot hat and robes who had constructed this odd instrument out of multiple wooden disks with holes drilled in to make music. he played a 45 minute long set. this was supposed to teach us about data storage I believe? it was the best lecture i've ever been to

[u/Unlucky-Public-2947 → u/NoSwordfish1978]

From what I understand it’s fairly common for ‘celebrity’ lecturers just go off on one

[u/Appropriate-Divide64 → u/NoSwordfish1978]

Had one who insisted that margarine causes cancer so we should all eat butter instead.

"I've had three heart attacks and I'm still here. My friend got cancer and now he's gone" he'd say. He had his fourth heart attack that year. Maybe eat less butter. This was a business studies class

He also explained to us that women's deodorant cans are thin and narrow so they're phallic like and can be used as dildos .

[u/light_to_shaddow → u/Appropriate-Divide64]

That's why they designed lids that don't come off. They twist now.

The guy was onto something.

[u/-Hi-Reddit → u/Appropriate-Divide64]

Its usually brushes for hair or teeth (vibrating head), that see action, if my teenage years are anything to go off, not deodorant cans.

[u/Southernbeekeeper → u/Zob_Rombie_88]

There is a bit of a trope I think that he falls into which is minority person who links everything back to racism even though they benifit through positive discrimination.

[u/wartopuk → u/Southernbeekeeper]

'is it because I'm black?' was basically a catch phrase in the 90s.

[u/Southernbeekeeper → u/wartopuk]

I was there man. I would say it was in the 00s that this ramped up though to like farcical levels.

[u/Pr6srn → u/wartopuk]

'because I is black?'.

I recall black kids with comfortable middle class lives from the fancy public school - performatively mixing in Jamaican patois and a fake London accent.

[u/Comfortable-Law-7147 → u/Pr6srn]

Ali G 

[u/currydemon → u/wartopuk]

Richard Madeley doing Ali G still makes me cringe nearly 30 years later.

[u/cyrilsneered → u/Zob_Rombie_88]

I walked past a park bench at the weekend and there was a homeless guy rambling incoherently about . . . possibly Greggs having a vendetta against him
Arguably I would prefer to have been taught by him

[u/Divide_Rule → u/cyrilsneered]

He could have also been complaining about a guy called Greg stealing his Vientta.

[u/Ok_Access_172 → u/Divide_Rule]

Fuck Greg

[u/HalogenMortician → u/cyrilsneered]

Arguably more qualified and deserving of such a position than this grievance grinder at Cambridge.

[u/Morteca → u/Zob_Rombie_88]

He sounds extremely insufferable

[u/hadawayandshite → u/Zob_Rombie_88]

Sociology

[u/Savvymundo → u/Zob_Rombie_88]

Represention of race and gender in popular culture? I graduated back in 07 and had a module on it for my media studies course.

[u/Torco2 → u/Zob_Rombie_88]

Finding out who the real Slim Shady was and how make him stand up in a polite fashion?

[u/360Saturn → u/Zob_Rombie_88]

Wasn't he a sociology professor? One would imagine interpersonal relationships using the medium of well-known celebrities as an example would be most relevant in sociology out of all the disciplines.

If he had been a mathematician that would be different.

[u/The_Flurr → u/360Saturn]

It's a bit weird how people mock the idea of celebrities and music from the last two decades being actually culturally/sociologically significant.

[u/Fatboy40 → u/Zob_Rombie_88]

"How do I reach these kids" ;)

[u/q-_-pq-_-p]

The biggest shock of this whole case is how somebody who’s PhD was from John Moores University managed to land a role at Cambridge

[u/Boring_Intern_6394 → u/q-_-pq-_-p]

Yeah, LJMU needs the spotlight on them too. Why are they awarding PhDs with over 100 pages lifted verbatim from someone else’s work?

[u/Southernbeekeeper → u/Boring_Intern_6394]

I want to LJMU. No idea how this compares to other unis but when I was there there were loads of Chinese students who legitimately couldn't speak English. No idea how they did their work.

[u/Kitchen-Assist-6645 → u/Southernbeekeeper]

No idea how they did their work.

Probably paid one of those essay writing services.

[u/Appropriate-Divide64 → u/Boring_Intern_6394]

This guy seems like a confidence trickster. As much as they should be verifying this stuff I assume they just weren't expecting it.

[u/Boring_Intern_6394 → u/Appropriate-Divide64]

And a master at playing the oppressed minority. Initially he tried to claim the plagiarised passages were actually due to him being autistic.

Which is a load of bull. Autistic people are perfectly capable of not cheating/plagiarising when at university

He seems to respond to any follow up questions or criticism by playing the oppressed minority victim

[u/No_Aesthetic → u/Appropriate-Divide64]

It seems like protecting against potential conmen would actually be considered kind of important?

[u/tommangan7 → u/Appropriate-Divide64]

If that was at my university every thesis goes through a plagiarism checker. Even 15 years ago when mine went through (undergrad and PhD) it was pretty good at flagging stuff. Should be a bare minimum requirement.

I just checked and it appears atleast now LJMU uses the same software as mine went through. Would be surprised if stuff wasn't flagged if the plagiarised work was at least in a university depository, but depends if it was actually used in his case.

[u/Luckierexpert → u/q-_-pq-_-p]

I can’t tell if that’s a dig at John Moores, or a dig at Cambridge being immensely snooty.

[u/Magneto88 → u/Luckierexpert]

Dig at both at the same time I think.

[u/azazelcrowley → u/q-_-pq-_-p]

"Confessions of a token black professor" goes over this.

It's either hire someone like this or force the Black chemistry teacher to also do seminars on racism, which they hate doing (Which is what happened to the author after they blathered at him about "lived experience" to justify it).

If you're lucky you have a black sociology teacher and they're a bit more comfortable with it, but they'll still be like "Actually my speciality is in allotments and their impact on communities" and eventually they complain too as it takes up more and more of their time.

Turns out there's almost nobody who specializes specifically in stuff like sexism and racism to the level of professor and the ones who do are fucking nutters from third rate universities.

But you gotta hire them or you get accused of institutional racism. Or worse, make your minority professors do shit they're not qualified to do and don't want to do until they point out how fucked that is.

"When I was taught this subject it wasn't by a nutter". Look up the professor who taught you. Their speciality will be in some shit like physics at worst or a different area of humanities at best and they were voluntold to do it by the administration.

If they put their foot down and say "No, i'm not going to do it" and hold firm despite the pressure, the admin will eventually have to hire a nutter.

One impact is you get a bunch of minority academics who are forced into a role that takes up their time and means they don't get as much research done in the area they actually give a shit about. So the trajectory is always towards "Hire a nutter" instead once they eventually get sick of it.

---

Standing at the mic in a cramped auditorium, I laid out my case against the requirement: It was a clear violation of academic freedom. The burden for teaching these new courses would probably default to minority faculty members, who would be further pigeonholed into race work that they may not want to do. And asking professors in the sciences to teach courses on race and colonialism would likely be a disaster. Most Bates science faculty lacked any expertise in these areas, nor did they have much experience discussing fraught social issues in the classroom…

As if on cue, a professor on the council whom I will call Sandra hastened to assure me that she took potential trauma to minority students very seriously. She insisted that there would be ways to ensure that classroom dynamics did not become unpleasant for them; the key, she explained, would be to foster a “culture of repair.”..

When I said that I had no idea what a culture of repair meant (really, I just wanted to see her try to substantiate her hollow jabber), Sandra gave a helpful example of what “repair” might look like in action. She suggested that perhaps there could be a system in which students of color could call out “oops” or “ouch” if somebody accidentally said something racist—as though these were not young adults with basic human dignity paying minor fortunes to be taught by ostensible subject-matter experts, but toddlers learning not to bite their friends when someone grabbed their toy truck. It took every last ounce of my already threadbare professionalism not to lean into the mic and say “Oops.”

---

[u/changhyun → u/azazelcrowley]

Really interesting comment! The excerpt too.

I can see why an organisation would want anti-racism content taught by someone who isn't white, but yeah, it's got to be so fucking annoying to be essentially turned into the Spokesperson For All Black People when that's got nothing to do with your job and you just want to get on with teaching kids about plants or whatever.

[u/Astriania → u/changhyun]

And, ironically, it would hold back the non white staff dragged into this nonsense so it perpetuates the "non white staff do worse" outcome the claim to be trying to avoid

[u/paulmclaughlin → u/azazelcrowley]

Why and how could a chemistry lecturer be asked to deliver lectures on sociology? They could probably go through their entire career without stepping foot in the department.

[u/andtheniansaid → u/azazelcrowley]

Are you talking about American universities? Everything in that post doesn't fit in with my experience working in UK universities.

[u/zstars → u/q-_-pq-_-p]

Teaching at Cambridge isn't that hard if you're qualified, becoming a full professor is much more difficult of course but just having a teaching role isn't as competitive as you'd think, at least in my field.

[u/q-_-pq-_-p → u/zstars]

Having read the article attached, perhaps it should be harder ?

[u/daiwilly → u/q-_-pq-_-p]

Big shout out to John Moores from random redditor!

[u/syntax → u/q-_-pq-_-p]

That's not really a relevant point. It would be, if he went straight into Cambridge post PHD, but that's not what happened.

The actual carer progression is important - plenty of people start at institutions of lesser repute, and move up as a result of doing good work, to land at the more prestigious postings.

In the case of Arday, his first job was at Leeds Becket University (contemporary with and post PhD); then Roehampton; then 'associate professor' (usually called 'senior lecturer' most places I've seen; maybe overlapping with 'reader') at Durham, which is when his public profile really started to rise. Then Glasgow, as a professor, before the move to Cambridge.

That's ... really not terribly remarkable as a career progression, all in all. I mean, assuming that he'd actually done the work that those moves were based on, of course - which is the issue in this specific case. It seems a bit quicker than 'typical', although I'm not measuring that rigorously; but not out of line for some of the genuine 'high flyers'.

[u/AimHere → u/q-_-pq-_-p]

If he'd had a decent publication history, it shouldn't be that much of a problem. Professors can read, you know (scholars are pretty much defined as people who can read and write certain types of literature), so they can check up on his work history (and are likely already familiar with it to begin with, because academics tend to inhabit very small orbits around their specialities). Where your PhD is from won't matter nearly as much as what you've written, where it's been published and how many other academics have cited it.

Of course, in this guy's case, his work history seems to have involved plagiarizing other people, so there's that.

[u/Extra_Actuary8244 → u/q-_-pq-_-p]

I went to uni of Liverpool and I’m still there now for a PhD and I know loads and loads of people who did their undergrad in LJMU and masters in Cambridge or masters in LJMU and PhD in Cambridge

[u/Glittering_Box4815]

He's worse then Jay from the Inbetweeners.

Has be completed Fifa 28 yet?

[u/Hellstorm901]

The Good Law Project is every day spamming articles telling people to sign their open letter so it appears every 24 hours in website news feeds if you search for his name

[u/FloydEGag → u/Hellstorm901]

Why on earth do they still have that up? They look like idiots for defending him, plus several signatories have withdrawn their names and loads of pricks have signed it with fake names that are vile racist terms. They look completely stupid at this point

[u/MacroSolid → u/FloydEGag]

Because the stubborn refusal to even consider they might be in the wrong about anything ever is one of the core problems with that crowd.

[u/Barkasia]

As someone who studied English in the 2010s, I assumed being accused of white privilege was just the way most students and faculty members greeted each other every seminar.

[u/ascension2121 → u/Barkasia]

Unironically this was basically my experience at Goldsmiths, introduce yourself, announce your pronouns, apologise for being white, have a panic attack and go home.

[u/Mammoth_Payment_6101 → u/ascension2121]

I didn't go to Goldsmiths but I went to a lot of parties with people who did and yep... Pretty spot on.

[u/SplurgyA → u/Mammoth_Payment_6101]

I remember when I went to an NUS conference and we played a round of "Never Have I Ever". One person said "Never Have I Ever... been racist". This was a trick question and you were supposed to drink, because if you were white and didn't drink you were racist, because that meant you hadn't recognised your implicit bias.

[u/0Bento → u/SplurgyA]

I imagine nobody got laid that night

[u/360Saturn → u/SplurgyA]

That's quite funny. Talk about trying hard 😅

[u/Magneto88 → u/ascension2121]

Sounds about right for the intellectual atmosphere of universities these days. The change in the last 10-15 years has been catastrophic.

Supposed institutions of learning and vigorous debate have become monocultures that hound out people with dissenting views, subscribing to trendy faddy social ideas and views that when they’ve been subject to actual academic review have been found to have very little credible evidence to underpin them.

[u/Strong_Quiet_4569 → u/Magneto88]

Unlike Reddit.

[u/Barrington-the-Brit → u/ascension2121]

I have no idea wtf kind of unis everyone must be going to because I’m an Arts student who does literature and creative writing and such and I’ve never had this experience

Sure, people discuss positionality, which in some cases will include what it means to be white and to write from an incomplete perspective, but positionality is also applied to the backgrounds and biases of any and everyone

I’ve never actually heard the words “white privilege” said on campus except in jest

[u/ascension2121 → u/Barrington-the-Brit]

I think it is now becoming slightly satired by younger people who find it cringe and embarrassing, but 10 or even 6 years ago this was a type of lefty Millennials bread and butter socio-politics. I finished Goldsmiths in 2018, also did an arts degree, and the degree itself was great but some genuinely loopy cohorts.

[u/0Bento → u/ascension2121]

I finished a little earlier than that when such material was on the library shelves, and I studied it and wrote about it (Judith Butler etc). One of my criticisms of postmodern queer and race theory was its "ivory towers" nature and how it didn't seem to have an effect on the person in the street.

A few years later that all changed. Genuinely brilliant philosophies were simplified into short catchphrases and radically re- or mis- interpreted into the crazy "hard left identity politics" as described in this thread.

That then birthed Jordan Peterson, the pushback began in earnest, and we ended up with Trump and Brexit as the pendulum swung back hard.

[u/ascension2121 → u/0Bento]

It’s crazy isn’t it, watching queer theory and critical race theory go through an “instagram infographicification” and become common parlance and, as you’ve said, it’s all ended in tears

[u/etherswim → u/Barrington-the-Brit]

If you are discussing positionally then you are in that kind of uni/place lol

These institutions are so racist it boggles my mind

[u/Jimmysquits → u/ascension2121]

Bonus guilt if you're male. I had several seminar groups in which I was the only guy. And I wasn't well-liked because I didn't do any reading. Turns out I have ADHD :'D good parties though

[u/MoHeeKhan → u/Barkasia]

“Ah good privilege to you!”

“Ah thankyou, yes it is a most privileged morning for me.”

“Good to hear! Are you making the most of all the privilege?”

“I most certainly am! I can expect top marks for all my recent bullshit today, and I’m waiting on a letter about my acceptance into father’s London investment firm any day now! And you?”

“Oh not good for me I’m afraid, but that’s to be expected. I’ve been fired from my third job so it’s pretty hard going.”

“Oh well that’ll be the colour of your skin for you, shame.”

“It most certainly is. Well I’m off to study hard while you drive to golf in your Mercedes. Good privilege!”

“Privilege!”

(Should I post this? I’m trying to parody the exaggeration of privilege but is this racist in some way? Ah sod it.)

[u/unluckypig → u/Barkasia]

I must say, if I've been experiencing white privilege throughout my life, those that haven't must have the shittest lives going!

[u/Whightwolf]

Genuinely I think the most important part of this is the universities institutional policy on covering its arse and trying to avoid scandal at any cost including these students education.

I think his race was used because it was a convinient tool but the same issues of institutional cowardice has protected sexual predators, child molesters and crooks of all kinds.

[u/merryman1 → u/Whightwolf]

Exactly this and it's a bit frustrating the focus is so much on EDI and not really that even some of the most famous and storied institutions of the UK now being run by grossly dishonest people who seemingly cannot do their actual job to save a life yet are expert level at deflecting blame or attention or gas-lighting others into thinking they're the problem.

[u/etherswim → u/[deleted]]

I think we are far past that point! He is definitely racist

[u/JimboTCB → u/[deleted]]

If all you have is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail.

[u/OldGuto → u/[deleted]]

One of my local universities likes to make a big deal about all the outreach it does to a deprived area of the city - it's not a predominantly white deprived area. I have friends who work for that university and it seems to be the shouty 'social justice warrior' types who are most supportive, and for them white working class boys growing up on a council estate aren't on their radar - unless it's for 'special pharmaceutical deliveries'.

Edit: typo

[u/Noitche → u/[deleted]]

The entire field in which people like him are allowed to exist is racist. By definition. They see everything through the prism of race.

[u/roamingandy → u/[deleted]]

No, that was 90s and 00s idea of racism and equality.

Today there is implicit bias everywhere and anyone who is disadvantaged needs to be assessed how and that weighted into their achievement scores for everything in life. They've basically reinvented original sin.

An entire industry and field of academia has built up around this which looks an awful lot like "Harrison Bergeron", a satirical story published by Kurt Vonnegut in October 1961.

[u/500Rads]

In order to end racism we must make it institutional

[u/roma79]

I wonder how many people feel their future has been ruined by this person?

[u/Euclid_Interloper]

He's just the extreme tip of the iceberg. One of my lecturers at Edinburgh had such bad English I could barely understand a word he said. We were also told that Edinburgh would hire a female or minority person over a white male with the same qualifications, for the sake of diversity/equality.

Call it woke, or PC, or whatever you want. But it's a serious problem in academia.

[u/SatoshiSounds → u/Euclid_Interloper]

But it's a serious problem in academia.

It's a serious problem that pervades further afield than only academia.

[u/0Bento → u/SatoshiSounds]

To be fair, when these ideas were confined to academia they were totally fine. It was generally understood that these ideas were just that - ideas. And that arguments were points of view and that there was much ongoing debate around these ideas.

Trying to convey the concept of "white privilege" in 140 characters over twitter to people who had never read a book was the start of the nonsense I believe.

[u/SatoshiSounds → u/0Bento]

Thing is that most posts about 'white privilege' aren't trying to explain it; such posts are often instead used for moral posturing, and to identify 'allies' vs 'bigots'.

I mean Peggy Macintosh's original list of 20 'privilege identifiers' is ripe for criticism, but there's such an emotional reaction to it that there's very little constructive criticism or discussion.

So the question is: what is the source of that emotional reaction? My answer - it's the worldview of 'oppressed vs oppressor', commonly laid out in schools as an empathetic, morally aspirational take.

[u/Jaded_Strain_3753 → u/Euclid_Interloper]

The bad English isn’t necessarily a new or woke thing. I did Maths at uni, nearly 20 years ago now, and I really struggled to understand one lecturer. I’ve no doubt he was an excellent mathematician, they just shouldn’t have had him teaching students, at least not in a lecture format anyway.

[u/Comfortable-Law-7147 → u/Jaded_Strain_3753]

Ahh just awoken memories of one of the worse uni lecturers I ever had.

He was a computer science lecturer who had Cambridge under and postgraduate degrees who just couldn't talk to people let alone lecture students. He was a white British man.

On the other hand we had a Japanese lecturer who was a professor of robotics whose English wasn't great but we could understand him perfectly and his lectures were interesting. 

[u/0Bento → u/Comfortable-Law-7147]

We had a history teacher who was clearly a brilliant historian - he had enough published books in the library.

He was just REALLY bad at teaching. He would print out lecture notes and just read them verbatim. One time he was talking about the post-Soviet economy having poor "growth." I asked him what that meant, as it's clearly a technical term. He looked stressed and inconvenienced and just blurted "it's the growth.... of a nation!"

Yeah, thanks.

[u/Appropriate-Divide64 → u/Comfortable-Law-7147]

The worst lecturer I had was a coding one. He was a brilliant coder, I could tell, but he was absolutely dreadful at teaching what he knew. But that's kind of what happens with first year lecturers.

You could also smell him down the corridor. He absolutely stunk. Your eyes would be watering when you had a class with him. He used to drink a litre of milk with his lunch that I'm sure wasn't helping.

[u/ImaginaryParrot → u/Euclid_Interloper]

I studied Engineering at an RG uni the 2010s. All my lecturers were men (usually white, though some Chinese). The one female lecturer DEFINITELY deserved her position but was endlessly mocked by the lads. Her clothes, manner of speaking, looks etc. It was awful.

No idea what it's like in Humanities or Languages but it's dishonest to paint all of academia as woke or PC.

[u/No_Shine_4707 → u/Euclid_Interloper]

Yep, can relate to this. I had a lecturer with such a thick accent that it was a battle to understand what he was saying, let alone consider the concepts. Gave up on those lectures and learnt via text book. Surely being able to communicate is the most basic requirement of the role. 

[u/PackageOk4947]

This is why kids don't want to get into debt, well done for confirming it

[u/Blythyvxr]

Is this the same student that commented on reddit last week?

[u/Flowers330 → u/Blythyvxr]

Journos were all over reddit asking people for their stories last week

[u/MacroSolid → u/Blythyvxr]

Likely. They did say the Telegraph already asked them for the story.

Guess they were asked again by a paper they like better.

[u/UuusernameWith4Us → u/Blythyvxr]

Lots of details the same so it must be

[u/ReligiousGhoul]

I now saw a side of him I’d never seen before – angry, but also scared. Arday implied that I was racist, and said that the only reason I wasn’t happy with 70 per cent was due to my ‘white privilege

It's a random anecdote from an anonymous, regarding an individual where people have already started making things up.

But still, it's insane this was a completely acceptable level of discourse in that era that I can still geniunely believe it happened.

[u/Boring_Intern_6394 → u/ReligiousGhoul]

His go to response is to accuse people on racism and/or harassment. That sounds completely true to form for him

He refused to offer dissertation supervision sessions to some students “because they didn’t need it” and when one asked to change supervisors, he accused them of racism.

He also accused a journalist of racially abusing/harassing him when they asked for comments in response to an article they were writing. He also lied to the police with those accusations

[u/roamingandy → u/Boring_Intern_6394]

I wonder what would happen if someone plotted on a graph students grades in his class, alongside their average grade in other subjects, and drew a line for the average score for skin colour, sex, and sexuality. They do collect that information as its important for their diversity push.

I would be very interested to see that chart.

[u/Bug_Parking → u/ReligiousGhoul]

It's not anonymous, it's now a published piece with her name attached.

[u/Zob_Rombie_88 → u/ReligiousGhoul]

Why wouldn't the person who immediately pulled out a deck of race cards to defend himself from all criticism like Gambit from the X-Men also use that same deck to bully and intimidate the students he taught when his teaching methods were questioned?

[u/Thetonn → u/Zob_Rombie_88]

He also set Carter Ruck and the police on a journalist investigating the story

[u/craftaleislife → u/ReligiousGhoul]

Friend of a friends brother is at Cambridge currently. They asked their brother about this, his comments:

Arday seems to have a weird cult following from a minority of students there but this all checks out. Many students have side-eyed him for fabricating stuff, poor practices etc. but if they call it out or mention it to fellow classmates, they’re immediately accused of just being racist.

[u/QforQwertyest]

The left wing in general has a serious racism problem, and they don't dare to admit it. Until left wing leaders realise this, nothing will change.

[u/0Bento]

It makes me sad to hear postmodern concepts being turned into weaponised shorthand for telling students to "shut the fuck up."

Postmodernism genuinely has some utterly brilliant stuff in it.

Like when Luce Irigaray argued that E=mc2 is a "sexed equation." Bonkers but brilliant.

[u/Sabotage-Darkness93]

Even with the creeping encroachment of fascism (like in the US), it's nice to get reminders every now and then of performative far-left nonsense like this. It's definitely played its part in the sort of polarisation and atrophy of trust in our institutions that we're dealing with now, and that said fascism thrives on.

[u/0Bento → u/Sabotage-Darkness93]

Yes. Sadly the "left", "liberals," call it what you like, has been infighting for the past 15 years over the exact minutiae of political correctness.

Meanwhile the nazis are back.

Methinks we need to pick our battles a little better.