What concerns me is how little space remains for a genuinely progressive critique of institutional diversity practices – one capable of scrutinising how for many organisations and corporations symbolic representation has been a substitute for deeper reform, leaving it vulnerable to just this kind of backlash. It has also meant that the right has enjoyed a near monopoly on criticism of DEI, leaving it to frame it entirely on its own terms.
Let’s take a look back at the coverage of Arday’s appointment [snipped for length]
...what happens when an academic’s story is sold through him being the “youngest black ever” (sitting alongside familiar monikers such as “the first black” or “black excellence”) and asterisked by a tale of hardship? You are not encouraged or invited to engage with the substance of their scholarship; instead, you are invited to clap. Instead of his appointment conjuring the question “what new opportunities for research will this lead to?”, it was “doesn’t this make you feel good?”
What this means is that Arday was treated not as a scholar but as a mascot, one who was particularly expedient for an institution that had been regularly embarrassed by its historic record on race: too few black students (in my cohort at Cambridge matriculating in 2015 there were only 15 black males out of 3,449 students); single-figure black academics (which is still the case); allegations of institutional racism. Independent of the merits or pitfalls of his own scholarship, what success looked like for Arday in this role was limited; what accountability could look like if misconduct occurred was constrained by him being a vehicle for Cambridge to signal its institutional progress.
These are not arguments that progressives should shy away from. Instead, they should own them. There is a real risk of this case being used to undermine black academics and others in positions of seniority. For all the talk of preferential treatment for black people in academia, it remains true that there are documented, systemic barriers for black students, including in their access to funding to advance their studies.
As for how it's been playing out, the nauseating piece I mentioned on the other thread by Kathleen Stock was trying to claim on the back of it that everyone with any ND condition didn't belong in scholarly life and shouldn't receive any sort of accomodation!!!!
I shudder to think how it's playing out in terms of racism.
From an autistic point of view, I was getting very heavy 'inspiration porn' vibes off the whole thing which made me wonder how much ablist attitudes were at work here too.
My view on this is that Oxbridge have traditionally followed their own rules that did not seem to apply to the rest of British academia in terms of appointments and to be consistent they should have said that they had no obligation to the Spectator to explain appointments. If they wanted to appoint a taxi driver or a nursery nurse to a Professorship, then they do it.
Second I think there have been a whole load of allegations, some of which seems to have been impossible for the media to verify. Which given the magnitude of the claims seems like it ought not to have been so hard.
Third, there appears to be a breakdown in the systems of academic rigour. Which I do not think is particularly unusual, this is just very visible partly because the accusations have come from problematic sources. The one guy who made some particularly unpleasant comments about the general intelligence of Black academics was removed from his Cambridge position and now does his teaching in Belgium.
I am not sure how to provide links to "own voices" on this topic given that many seem to be from the far right and from small white men who work in lower mid-rank English universities with a grievance that a Black person has the audacity to work at a role in Oxbridge that was rightfully theirs.
There are Black journalists/writers commenting on it like Lanre Bakare who co wrote the piece Caissa linked to and Jason Okundaye who I've linked so there definitely is own voice comment. I've seen quite a few Black journalists/commentators post about it.
I'm deliberately not linking to Stock because her hateful piece would break the guidelines but if Caissa wants to see that kind of thing for research/ info, The Spectator as mentioned, would be a good bet, Stock was spewing her stuff about Prof Arday on Unherd and there would probably be some fairly nasty stuff in the Daily Telegraph as well.
@Basketactortale Good question re own voice. That one comes up enough that I'm going to make sure it's clarified somewhere. Own voice applies to voices from marginalized groups but not to racists, ableists, majority/ privileged groups. Linking to racist etc. material generally breaks the guidelines, and if someone in the news is significantly privileged then their point of view is already relatively easy to find.
He has been accused of plagiarising his PhD, lying about his academic appointments at other universities (the universities concerned deny he was a Visiting Professor there), and having claimed to have written and published a book that does not exist. When a journalist approached him about this, he reported them to the police. If he had not resigned, I would have expected him to have been dismissed following disciplinary proceedings for poor academic conduct and bringing the university into disrepute.
I am a disabled working class academic and I fought hard to get to this position (I have bipolar disorder and never went to college, I achieved my doctorate as a mature student). I am expected to work to high academic standards and quite rightly; academic integrity is necessary for good teaching and research and we can’t expect it from students if we do not apply it to ourselves. Disability, or any other disadvantage, is not an excuse for deception or cheating.
What the university should be doing is opening up opportunities for those from marginalised groups to achieve their potential through outreach, access and learning support (my own doctorate is in providing proactive motivational support for online students with mental health challenges) and providing supportive pathways in academia.
I am a university EDI champion (a voluntary role which I do unpaid) and I expect this episode to be a key point of discussion at our next meeting.
It's hard to avoid the impression that the original appointment was a result of someone's secretary desperately googling Black British academics and a panicking senior management offering a job to whichever one sounded good and was available to avoid scrutiny of *waves vaguely at whatever failures mean Cambridge is still overwhelmingly white, upper middle class, abled, and disproportionately privately educated*.
What confused me about this, is that he was a professor. Which in the UK is not just a name for a university academic, it is fairly senior, and I dimly recalled it was supposed to be related to acclaim from one’s peers. Which I would have thought meant the appointment would have been fairly widely canvassed.
What confused me about this, is that he was a professor. Which in the UK is not just a name for a university academic, it is fairly senior, and I dimly recalled it was supposed to be related to acclaim from one’s peers. Which I would have thought meant the appointment would have been fairly widely canvassed.
The short answer to that is "it depends" and the long answer is "it depends".
There are also some confusing use of words in the media which do not reflect my experience; for example the idea that an Oxbridge Professor is the most senior academic position in a field has never been true in my experience, I do not know any subject where this is true.
I am not sure what else to say. The idea of any Professor at any top British university producing irregular sub-par work is strange to me. In every situation I know of, Professorships mean PhD students and being PIs on grants which lead to published papers.
It's really weird. Makes you wonder how valid all the other appointments in that department are, tbh. Is it a problem unique to the education department? I can't imagine computer science or mathematics appointing someone with so little (verifiably) published work to a professorship.
Just a comment on plagiarism in a PhD. Unless software has improved significantly since I submitted mine, over a decade ago,putting a already passed PhD through a Plagiarism checker will get you a poor score. Amongst other things it is being checked against itself.
I know because I had to be informed of this when I resubmitted mine.
Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU), which awarded Arday's PhD, has said it investigated the allegations of plagiarism last year and dismissed them, saying they were likely the result of "honest and reasonable error".
It told the BBC on Friday that its position remains unchanged in light of recent events and that his PhD "still stands".
It is not a given that these allegations are proven.
The standard of explanation/ training offered to PhD students on issues such as referencing and plagiarism can be very varied. I have little doubt I would have fallen foul of such rules if I were a student now. I'm still not sure how one is supposed to compare two positions whilst keeping to the rules without creating a tennis match which would be utterly cumbersome and unreadable. There's little point in writing a thesis which follows the rules but doesn't communicate anything meaningful to another human being.
He has been accused of plagiarising his PhD, lying about his academic appointments at other universities (the universities concerned deny he was a Visiting Professor there), and having claimed to have written and published a book that does not exist. When a journalist approached him about this, he reported them to the police.
Those things are questions of fact. Saying that you have published a book that is not, in fact, published or does not exist is ridiculous.
I would assume that anyone being considered for a faculty job anywhere understands that there's a difference between being a visiting professor somewhere, and just hanging out in that institution with guest rights.
I'm in general less troubled about accusations of plagiarism in a PhD thesis: there's generally a lot of water to pass under the bridge between a PhD and a tenured job.
It is the specificity of the claims that baffles me. If I was to say that I like running and I enter ten marathons a year, it is unlikely that this is something that can realistically be checked. Even if I never actually run a single race there are so many of them in a year that it would be a massive task to look through all the entry lists.
But if I was to say that I've done something that's technically possible for the human body but would put me into the class of elite athlete, then that's something that is much more likely to be noticed and remembered.
What confused me about this, is that he was a professor. Which in the UK is not just a name for a university academic, it is fairly senior, and I dimly recalled it was supposed to be related to acclaim from one’s peers. Which I would have thought meant the appointment would have been fairly widely canvassed.
When the North East Man became a Professor he had to submit references from six other Professors, three from the U.K. and three international. His area is fairly small, though, he says there is no way that this could happen in his academic area, because they all know who is publishing, who is giving keynote addresses, who is running sections of conferences etc.
He has been accused of plagiarising his PhD, lying about his academic appointments at other universities (the universities concerned deny he was a Visiting Professor there), and having claimed to have written and published a book that does not exist. When a journalist approached him about this, he reported them to the police.
Those things are questions of fact. Saying that you have published a book that is not, in fact, published or does not exist is ridiculous.
I would assume that anyone being considered for a faculty job anywhere understands that there's a difference between being a visiting professor somewhere, and just hanging out in that institution with guest rights.
I'm in general less troubled about accusations of plagiarism in a PhD thesis: there's generally a lot of water to pass under the bridge between a PhD and a tenured job.
I'm surprised that you think plagiarism is a trivial issue. It may be in the world outside, but in academia it is one of the things that can get you sent down (if a student) or sacked (if an academic). Bluntly, it is theft of another person's work. Having said that, it is not easy to tell whether a piece of work has been deliberately plagiarised or whether the author is (consciously or unconsciously) using it without citing the original author. Automated tools are no help here: you need the judgement of an actual human being, ideally a subject expert. I say ideally, because sometimes the PhD candidate *is* the expert on their chosen subject.
I'm surprised that you think plagiarism is a trivial issue.
I think it depends a lot on context. If the plagiarism is some similar wording in a background chapter or something, I'm less bothered by it. If you're ripping off the meat of someone else's scholarship, that's a big deal.
I think there’s a real question about whether these spaces are safe for us and whether we just have to start doing this outside universities,” says Kehinde Andrews, who was the first Black Studies professor in the UK but was recently made redundant from Birmingham City University.
I've seen similar from women academics of colour facing misogynoir and sexual harassment.
I wonder if given the current mess of UK universities caused by cuts, consultants mismanagement and ingrained institutional -isms, if it might be no bad thing for there to be alternatives. Though how you get the money and what better alternatives would look like I dont know.* ( see below)
I've seen enough jaw-dropping stuff about Jason Arday's claims that I'm inclined to go with Prof Priyamavada Gopal that
"An independent investigation must scrutinise how such an early-career appointment to a very senior and prestigious professorial chair was made and what both the faculty of education and university management may have got very badly wrong.”
She added: “Whatever the results of any investigation, the university bears no little responsibility for the grotesque racism which this whole business has unleashed, and for the harm done both to the individual in the line of fire, to Black academics as a group, and the broader field of critical race studies.
“This requires accountability now from those responsible, not a cover-up.”
...
Gopal said Cambridge had been too tempted to “cut corners on the hard work of fostering equality and inclusion” by opting for a media-friendly appointment
* (Mind you I'm an independent scholar when not doing my day time job - and intend to publish more if I can take my pensions and redundancy. I missed out on an academic career and came back into publishing academically because colleagues inside the system valued my work and reached out to me. I increasingly see people with excellent PhDs and beyond driven out as there are no jobs and wonder how they can be supported outside universities to keep researching and publishing.
Current structures seem to mostly assume everyone is at a uni and dont really seem to support independent scholarship very well.)
Oh my, so many thoughts. Many fields of academic study are being effectively defunded by institutions which appear to me to be universities in name only. I'm not sure whether this tendency is affecting Cambridge, but I see no reason to believe it is immune. As an institution, it certainly seems to be prone to believe itself above the considerations which affect the common herd. If it is forced into doing the same kind of due diligence as every other institution, it may just decide that many things are beyond its capacity.
At that point, intellectual discovery becomes even more the province, and even the preserve, of independent academics than it was previously. The building of networks and other structures to support such independent endeavour seems to me to be an urgent priority for intellectual discovery as a whole, even if it is hard/impossible to build in practice. After all,, this is how universities came about in the first place, in part at least.
...The idea of any Professor at any top British university producing irregular sub-par work is strange to me. In every situation I know of, Professorships mean PhD students and being PIs on grants which lead to published papers.
That's the 'normal' route in the higher-functioning pockets of adequacy which exist in the lower-ranking UK HE institution where I work. But there are other routes - becoming a 'celebrity' prof for example (the 'Public Understanding of Science' champions who are promoted because universities seem to think they need the title to have clout in the media - this does not only apply to that bloke off the telly) or (in my departmentschooldirectorate whatever-we-have-been-reorganised-into-lately) championing an 'issue' (one which springs to mind is 'women-in-STEM').
The latter are hard to discuss without sounding like a 'small white man with a grudge', to paraphrase someone upthread. And at my lower-ranking institution, no-one really cares. I guess those grudges really get shone-up and polished when the status of the appointment is that much higher, as in this case.
I feel quite cross about the management in the Cambridge case (but I would say that, because it's my default state after working in HE for more that 30 years). They were vain; they could have widened-participation via any number of serious black scholars, but if they were going to appoint a black guy, they wanted him to be the most shiny, amazing, high-achieving, adversity-laden-backstory-defying, best-in-the-world-at-what-you-do black guy imaginable. And he obliged them. Kind of.
...The idea of any Professor at any top British university producing irregular sub-par work is strange to me. In every situation I know of, Professorships mean PhD students and being PIs on grants which lead to published papers.
That's the 'normal' route in the higher-functioning pockets of adequacy which exist in the lower-ranking UK HE institution where I work. But there are other routes - becoming a 'celebrity' prof for example (the 'Public Understanding of Science' champions who are promoted because universities seem to think they need the title to have clout in the media - this does not only apply to that bloke off the telly) or (in my departmentschooldirectorate whatever-we-have-been-reorganised-into-lately) championing an 'issue' (one which springs to mind is 'women-in-STEM').
The latter are hard to discuss without sounding like a 'small white man with a grudge', to paraphrase someone upthread. And at my lower-ranking institution, no-one really cares. I guess those grudges really get shone-up and polished when the status of the appointment is that much higher, as in this case.
I feel quite cross about the management in the Cambridge case (but I would say that, because it's my default state after working in HE for more that 30 years). They were vain; they could have widened-participation via any number of serious black scholars, but if they were going to appoint a black guy, they wanted him to be the most shiny, amazing, high-achieving, adversity-laden-backstory-defying, best-in-the-world-at-what-you-do black guy imaginable. And he obliged them. Kind of.
It is not clear to me that the academic in question here was appointed to a "Public Understanding of.." Professorship. I could be wrong.
I have met a few people who had these titles at Oxbridge and beyond, and they have all been excellent academics.
It is not clear to me that the academic in question here was appointed to a "Public Understanding of.." Professorship. I could be wrong.
I have met a few people who had these titles at Oxbridge and beyond, and they have all been excellent academics.
Jason Arday received his PhD in Education in 2015, aged 30. His first job post-PhD was in physical education at Leeds Beckett University. Three years later, he holds a senior lecturer post at the University of Roehampton, which is an unusually fast career acceleration, certainly for someone with an almost nonexistent publication record at that time. During that time, he has taught himself sociology via self-study, and shortly later is appointed to a faculty post in sociology.
Everything about his career trajectory is deeply unusual. I'm not remotely qualified to judge whether a sociologist is competent or not, but it's clear just from looking at his career path that he is an unusual case, and not representative of anything except for Jason Arday.
(I think I may have confused my post by referring obliquely to Brian Cox as 'that bloke off the telly'. 'TV's Brian Cox' would have been succinct and might have avoided confusion. I was tangentially involved in the 'public understanding' end of HE via the EPSRC quite a long time ago; back then some of the personalities had a conventional publication / PhD student / research income kind of profile - by which I suppose I mean they were recognisably reader-cum-prof level academics - and some, with the title, didn't. Hence my comment above.)
(I think I may have confused my post by referring obliquely to Brian Cox as 'that bloke off the telly'. 'TV's Brian Cox' would have been succinct and might have avoided confusion. I was tangentially involved in the 'public understanding' end of HE via the EPSRC quite a long time ago; back then some of the personalities had a conventional publication / PhD student / research income kind of profile - by which I suppose I mean they were recognisably reader-cum-prof level academics - and some, with the title, didn't. Hence my comment above.)
Seems to me that Brian Cox clearly has a high profile and rises the public knowledge of physics in general and the University of Manchester in particular. If Jason Arday had a similarly high profile this probably would not have been an issue - as far as I can see there's little evidence that he was appointed for his celebrity status. Maybe he was but proved not to have enduring celebrity status.
Professor as an honorific rather than a job title is a strange thing, often leading to confusion. For example people sometimes are appointed to positions which have Professor attached even though this appears to have little in common with working senior academics. One trivial example is Gresham college where the Professorship involves giving a certain number of public lectures a year.
Mostly the lecturers are also well known academics but some only have the honorific Professor because of the position.
The problem is that the general public assume 'Professor' means the same thing when that's not necessarily the case. In the American scientific media nobody is given a title. When one reads Scientific American it is therefore impossible to tell from their name whether the researcher quoted is a masters student or a Professor near retirement.
And there are degrees of professorship. A Professor of Practice or Associate Professor might bring specialised experience in industry or government that is more valuable to a University than an academic PhD.
Yes part of this problem is because the system in the UK is changing so some institutions/universities continue with the old system and some are using the new.
The old system was that there were Lecturers/Senior Lecturers/Readers. A "good" academic would be expected to retire at Reader level. Some exceptional academics were promoted to be Professor associated with what was called a Chair, which often meant being "Head of Department". Usually there was one Professor per department.
The modern system is that staff are initially appointed to be an Assistant Professor, are promoted to Associate Professor and if they continue in the role for enough time become (full) Professor. Only the latter has the honorific Professor but the few dozen "top" British Universities will have a dozen or more staff at Professor level per department.
This has traditionally been connected to Teaching/Research contracts, rarely to Research only contracts. Today some British universities have career pathways for teaching staff up to Professor grade although this rarely happens.
I am boring myself here, but to finish the thought, some senior non-academic staff in some of these universities have been pushing to have higher status in the system. For example some research technicians clearly have a lot of responsibility and experience, so some of these universities now have grade which are equivalent to Professor for them. Sometimes this is even called a 'Professor in Practice'.
The irony being that for quite a long time there were in the past staff who were not academics who worked in administration who were essentially given Professor titles. So the thing has partly gone full circle.
Point is that Professor is a slippery term in British universities and can mean several distinct things.
The old system was that there were Lecturers/Senior Lecturers/Readers. A "good" academic would be expected to retire at Reader level. Some exceptional academics were promoted to be Professor associated with what was called a Chair, which often meant being "Head of Department". Usually there was one Professor per department.
Also further complicated by the titles used (inherited) by the post-1992 universities (formerly Polytechnics or Colleges of Higher Education). There the bottom grade is Lecturer/Senior Lecturer (with more or less automatic progression up the salary scale), with the first properly promoted grade being Principal Lecturer.
Comments
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/aug/06/jason-arday-dei-race-issues-university-of-cambridge
As for how it's been playing out, the nauseating piece I mentioned on the other thread by Kathleen Stock was trying to claim on the back of it that everyone with any ND condition didn't belong in scholarly life and shouldn't receive any sort of accomodation!!!!
I shudder to think how it's playing out in terms of racism.
From an autistic point of view, I was getting very heavy 'inspiration porn' vibes off the whole thing which made me wonder how much ablist attitudes were at work here too.
Second I think there have been a whole load of allegations, some of which seems to have been impossible for the media to verify. Which given the magnitude of the claims seems like it ought not to have been so hard.
Third, there appears to be a breakdown in the systems of academic rigour. Which I do not think is particularly unusual, this is just very visible partly because the accusations have come from problematic sources. The one guy who made some particularly unpleasant comments about the general intelligence of Black academics was removed from his Cambridge position and now does his teaching in Belgium.
I am not sure how to provide links to "own voices" on this topic given that many seem to be from the far right and from small white men who work in lower mid-rank English universities with a grievance that a Black person has the audacity to work at a role in Oxbridge that was rightfully theirs.
I'm deliberately not linking to Stock because her hateful piece would break the guidelines but if Caissa wants to see that kind of thing for research/ info, The Spectator as mentioned, would be a good bet, Stock was spewing her stuff about Prof Arday on Unherd and there would probably be some fairly nasty stuff in the Daily Telegraph as well.
I am a disabled working class academic and I fought hard to get to this position (I have bipolar disorder and never went to college, I achieved my doctorate as a mature student). I am expected to work to high academic standards and quite rightly; academic integrity is necessary for good teaching and research and we can’t expect it from students if we do not apply it to ourselves. Disability, or any other disadvantage, is not an excuse for deception or cheating.
What the university should be doing is opening up opportunities for those from marginalised groups to achieve their potential through outreach, access and learning support (my own doctorate is in providing proactive motivational support for online students with mental health challenges) and providing supportive pathways in academia.
I am a university EDI champion (a voluntary role which I do unpaid) and I expect this episode to be a key point of discussion at our next meeting.
The short answer to that is "it depends" and the long answer is "it depends".
There are also some confusing use of words in the media which do not reflect my experience; for example the idea that an Oxbridge Professor is the most senior academic position in a field has never been true in my experience, I do not know any subject where this is true.
I am not sure what else to say. The idea of any Professor at any top British university producing irregular sub-par work is strange to me. In every situation I know of, Professorships mean PhD students and being PIs on grants which lead to published papers.
I know because I had to be informed of this when I resubmitted mine.
It is not a given that these allegations are proven.
Those things are questions of fact. Saying that you have published a book that is not, in fact, published or does not exist is ridiculous.
I would assume that anyone being considered for a faculty job anywhere understands that there's a difference between being a visiting professor somewhere, and just hanging out in that institution with guest rights.
I'm in general less troubled about accusations of plagiarism in a PhD thesis: there's generally a lot of water to pass under the bridge between a PhD and a tenured job.
But if I was to say that I've done something that's technically possible for the human body but would put me into the class of elite athlete, then that's something that is much more likely to be noticed and remembered.
When the North East Man became a Professor he had to submit references from six other Professors, three from the U.K. and three international. His area is fairly small, though, he says there is no way that this could happen in his academic area, because they all know who is publishing, who is giving keynote addresses, who is running sections of conferences etc.
I'm surprised that you think plagiarism is a trivial issue. It may be in the world outside, but in academia it is one of the things that can get you sent down (if a student) or sacked (if an academic). Bluntly, it is theft of another person's work. Having said that, it is not easy to tell whether a piece of work has been deliberately plagiarised or whether the author is (consciously or unconsciously) using it without citing the original author. Automated tools are no help here: you need the judgement of an actual human being, ideally a subject expert. I say ideally, because sometimes the PhD candidate *is* the expert on their chosen subject.
I think it depends a lot on context. If the plagiarism is some similar wording in a background chapter or something, I'm less bothered by it. If you're ripping off the meat of someone else's scholarship, that's a big deal.
I can't speak to this specific case, though.
Old racist wine in a new bottle’: Black academics respond to Jason Arday affair
I was interested by this response
I've seen similar from women academics of colour facing misogynoir and sexual harassment.
I wonder if given the current mess of UK universities caused by cuts, consultants mismanagement and ingrained institutional -isms, if it might be no bad thing for there to be alternatives. Though how you get the money and what better alternatives would look like I dont know.* ( see below)
I've seen enough jaw-dropping stuff about Jason Arday's claims that I'm inclined to go with Prof Priyamavada Gopal that
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/aug/06/jason-arday-cambridge-dons-demand-accountability-grotesque-racism
* (Mind you I'm an independent scholar when not doing my day time job - and intend to publish more if I can take my pensions and redundancy. I missed out on an academic career and came back into publishing academically because colleagues inside the system valued my work and reached out to me. I increasingly see people with excellent PhDs and beyond driven out as there are no jobs and wonder how they can be supported outside universities to keep researching and publishing.
Current structures seem to mostly assume everyone is at a uni and dont really seem to support independent scholarship very well.)
At that point, intellectual discovery becomes even more the province, and even the preserve, of independent academics than it was previously. The building of networks and other structures to support such independent endeavour seems to me to be an urgent priority for intellectual discovery as a whole, even if it is hard/impossible to build in practice. After all,, this is how universities came about in the first place, in part at least.
That's the 'normal' route in the higher-functioning pockets of adequacy which exist in the lower-ranking UK HE institution where I work. But there are other routes - becoming a 'celebrity' prof for example (the 'Public Understanding of Science' champions who are promoted because universities seem to think they need the title to have clout in the media - this does not only apply to that bloke off the telly) or (in my department school directorate whatever-we-have-been-reorganised-into-lately) championing an 'issue' (one which springs to mind is 'women-in-STEM').
The latter are hard to discuss without sounding like a 'small white man with a grudge', to paraphrase someone upthread. And at my lower-ranking institution, no-one really cares. I guess those grudges really get shone-up and polished when the status of the appointment is that much higher, as in this case.
I feel quite cross about the management in the Cambridge case (but I would say that, because it's my default state after working in HE for more that 30 years). They were vain; they could have widened-participation via any number of serious black scholars, but if they were going to appoint a black guy, they wanted him to be the most shiny, amazing, high-achieving, adversity-laden-backstory-defying, best-in-the-world-at-what-you-do black guy imaginable. And he obliged them. Kind of.
It is not clear to me that the academic in question here was appointed to a "Public Understanding of.." Professorship. I could be wrong.
I have met a few people who had these titles at Oxbridge and beyond, and they have all been excellent academics.
Jason Arday received his PhD in Education in 2015, aged 30. His first job post-PhD was in physical education at Leeds Beckett University. Three years later, he holds a senior lecturer post at the University of Roehampton, which is an unusually fast career acceleration, certainly for someone with an almost nonexistent publication record at that time. During that time, he has taught himself sociology via self-study, and shortly later is appointed to a faculty post in sociology.
Everything about his career trajectory is deeply unusual. I'm not remotely qualified to judge whether a sociologist is competent or not, but it's clear just from looking at his career path that he is an unusual case, and not representative of anything except for Jason Arday.
Seems to me that Brian Cox clearly has a high profile and rises the public knowledge of physics in general and the University of Manchester in particular. If Jason Arday had a similarly high profile this probably would not have been an issue - as far as I can see there's little evidence that he was appointed for his celebrity status. Maybe he was but proved not to have enduring celebrity status.
Professor as an honorific rather than a job title is a strange thing, often leading to confusion. For example people sometimes are appointed to positions which have Professor attached even though this appears to have little in common with working senior academics. One trivial example is Gresham college where the Professorship involves giving a certain number of public lectures a year.
Mostly the lecturers are also well known academics but some only have the honorific Professor because of the position.
The problem is that the general public assume 'Professor' means the same thing when that's not necessarily the case. In the American scientific media nobody is given a title. When one reads Scientific American it is therefore impossible to tell from their name whether the researcher quoted is a masters student or a Professor near retirement.
The old system was that there were Lecturers/Senior Lecturers/Readers. A "good" academic would be expected to retire at Reader level. Some exceptional academics were promoted to be Professor associated with what was called a Chair, which often meant being "Head of Department". Usually there was one Professor per department.
The modern system is that staff are initially appointed to be an Assistant Professor, are promoted to Associate Professor and if they continue in the role for enough time become (full) Professor. Only the latter has the honorific Professor but the few dozen "top" British Universities will have a dozen or more staff at Professor level per department.
This has traditionally been connected to Teaching/Research contracts, rarely to Research only contracts. Today some British universities have career pathways for teaching staff up to Professor grade although this rarely happens.
I am boring myself here, but to finish the thought, some senior non-academic staff in some of these universities have been pushing to have higher status in the system. For example some research technicians clearly have a lot of responsibility and experience, so some of these universities now have grade which are equivalent to Professor for them. Sometimes this is even called a 'Professor in Practice'.
The irony being that for quite a long time there were in the past staff who were not academics who worked in administration who were essentially given Professor titles. So the thing has partly gone full circle.
Point is that Professor is a slippery term in British universities and can mean several distinct things.
Also further complicated by the titles used (inherited) by the post-1992 universities (formerly Polytechnics or Colleges of Higher Education). There the bottom grade is Lecturer/Senior Lecturer (with more or less automatic progression up the salary scale), with the first properly promoted grade being Principal Lecturer.