Serious questions for Cambridge after professor at centre of plagiarism row resigns

Serious questions for Cambridge after professor at centre of plagiarism row resigns Cambridge is facing questions about whether it was defending its own reputation as much as an individual academic after the resignation of Professor Jason Arday amid a plagiarism controversy. Just a few weeks ago the university was briefing journalists that the matter constituted a campaign against a black academic, that its appointment strategy was rigorous and that it would be robustly defended. So why might Cambridge have had a blind spot that delayed an investigation that could have settled the issue? The institution has spent the past decade trying to correct the perception that it is simply a bastion of affluent white privilege. Roger Mosey, the former master of Selwyn College, said Arday’s world inheritance was "unconventional" for a Cambridge professor, but that his background as an autistic man who said he could not work until he was 18 was what had seemingly "made him a compelling candidate". Equality, diversity and inclusion are tenable goals for a leading university, Mosey wrote in the Times, but risk becoming contentious "when they are baked into inflexible policies and questionable appointment processes". Part of the explanation may also lie in how white academics feel within the wider university community as a small minority. In the past year, only 75 of Cambridge's 6,180 academics at every level were identified as black, according to the Higher Education Statistics Authority (HESA). Looking at professors across the UK, 270 are identified as black out of a total of more than 26,000, according to HESA definitions – roughly 1 %. The University and College Union has previously highlighted an ethnicity pay gap and called