Too much has been written in recent weeks about the sad affair of Jason Arday, the University of Cambridge’s youngest ever black professor. Arday was accused of being a plagiarist, fabulist, and fabricator of data. Having resigned his professorship he then died shortly afterwards.
The whole episode has been febrile, with Arday’s critics denouncing his appointment as a scandal. In turn, Arday’s defenders have accused the critics of racism and harassment.
This essay does not directly revisit these controversial subjects. Others have debated amply what the episode says about diversity (DEI) policies and discrimination, academic freedom, and the limits of free speech. My concern here is more fundamental: to explore what Arday’s rise and fall tell us about how universities make and legitimate intellectual judgments.
The contemporary University seems to me to be increasingly reluctant to acknowledge that it must make such judgments. Its core business depends on discriminating about things all the time: about quality of evidence, plausibility of interpretations, significance of research, and ultimately who deserves admission, appointment, promotion, or authority within the ivory tower.
One of the things that has got Cambridge into such trouble is a suspicion that it makes judgments of merit that it is not willing to explicitly acknowledge still less to defend. The emphasis is all on process: on the procedure followed to reach the decision rather than how good is the decision made.
If universities are to recover their intellectual authority, they need not better substitutes for judgment but faculty who are more capable of exercising it and of discriminating intelligently between many competing claims.
The retreat from judgment
Process makes the world go round. We depend on it precisely because we cannot always rely on the wisdom, impartiality, or common sense of everyone whose path crosses our own. My argument starts with the observation that processes are mechanisms for constraining judgment within limits — in judicial review, legal limits. But process is no substitute for judgment on the merits.
This is not an argument to abandon constraints. Unconstrained judgment in a university setting is almost always vulnerable to abuse via patronage, prejudice, or the imposition of ideological tests. It lacks a pristine record, in academia as elsewhere.
Problems nevertheless arise when we mistake a means by which a judgment can be scrutinised for a basis on which that judgment deserves to be trusted. Judicial review, the legal procedure whereby judges look for a failure in the manner of deciding, rather than ask themselves whether they agree with the decision taken, may be the inspiration for how universities approach this.
Modern institutions are used to complying with a legal regime that distinguishes sharply between a decision’s merit and whether or not it has been properly made. Only in rare cases is a court prepared to label a decision perverse will it substitute its own judgment of the merits for that of the initial decision-maker.
Procedure leaves an auditable trail. We can use that to establish if rules were followed, conflicts declared, and criteria considered. Universities have found that establishing this procedural accountability is much easier than evaluating a decision’s actual quality. They have also discovered that it is far safer institutionally because demonstrable acts of compliance protect against legal challenge.
The same logic operates in intellectual life. To take an academic example: the humble footnote. It began as a device for making an author’s claims answerable to evidence. Yet somewhere along the way producing reams of references became a badge of scholarship itself.
Footnotes have not become bad or meaningless as a result of this transformation. They still impose a useful discipline on those of us who use them. But a thousand meticulous references tell us nothing about whether the argument they support is brilliant, tendentious, trivial, or misguided.
The impressiveness of the apparatus demonstrates command of scholarly procedure but gives no guarantees about command of subject.
Checking the boxes
Universities today are awash with similar institutional tools. We academics must contend with peer review, citation metrics, research assessments, appointment criteria, promotion frameworks, ethics procedures, and assessment rubrics. Most of these things exist for good reasons and all in different ways have attempted to make judgments consistent and transparent.
Yet none of them is a remotely effective proxy for sound judgment. A rubric can tell an assessor what to look for. It cannot tell us whether the assessor recognises it when it appears. Citation counts show scholarship that is noticed not why it has been noticed (this need not be because the work cited is a significant original contribution to knowledge). Appointment criteria give committees a shopping list. The difficult business begins when several candidates offer different combinations of what is on it.
The issue confronting academics has always been one of intellectual discrimination. A scholarly community must be able to distinguish the good from the bad. If no procedures can relieve us of the need to decide between competing claims, we need to be able to say what makes particular judgments about intellectual quality defensible.
Evidence can be part of the answer — but facts do not interpret themselves. Many interpretations can fit a given set of facts. Good judgment asks not only what evidence exists? but also how much should this particular piece of evidence count? It assesses whether a given interpretation explains evidence better than realistic alternatives. Those who exercise it need a sense of proportion and good intellectual habits to do this.
Seen in these terms, the Arday affair looks rather different from how it is usually presented. Controversy over Arday’s appointment revolves around judgment about ends: what was his appointment intended to achieve — and how were competing considerations of scholarly distinction, institutional representation, pedagogy and diversity to be balanced?
The allegations against Arday, by contrast, involve judgment about significance. Even where specific claims can be established empirically, the larger conclusions they warrant still need to be decided upon. Even establishing the truth of an allegation still requires a judgment about proportion. Failure may be real without being defining. Misconduct can be worth disciplining without destroying a career in the process.
The fried egg and the mountain
The harder problem about judgment is this: there is no objective test for determining where legitimate differences of interpretation end and errors of judgment begin. How do we recognise a perverse intellectual (as opposed to legal) decision?
The Cambridge historian Richard J. Evans once borrowed an attractively simple analogy from E.H. Carr to frame the problem. Evans envisaged a group of painters stationed at different points around a mountain. Each painter painted the mountain differently — yet all were constrained in their depictions by the fact that they were painting the same mountain.
Evans argued that we can accept a wide variety of legitimate representations without also having to accept reality as infinitely subjective and experiential.
In Evans’s view, if one painter had depicted not a mountain but a fried egg or a railway engine we would be entitled to say that their representation is wrong. The analogy appeals because it appears to reconcile two apparently incompatible propositions about judgment (interpretation is dependent on the observer’s position and reality constrains interpretation).
Yet Evans’s analogy cannot always pinpoint where legitimate interpretation ends and error begins. We may agree about the evidence’s authenticity — and even the accuracy of a particular claim about it — yet still disagree profoundly about that claim’s significance.
Disagreements of this nature happen all the time with historical interpretation (differing perspectives on the German Reformation or the French Revolution are good examples). But they are still more common, and more problematic, when they concern (to sustain Evans’s analogy) not what the painter has done but what we understand them to have been trying to do.
A fried egg is obviously a false representation of a mountain if the object is to reproduce its physical appearance. But if the painter claims to be representing not this but the mountain’s conceptual essence? A yolk for a summit, a white for the surrounding plain. Is that not a picture that captures just the kind of relationship which a conventional landscape obscures?
Novelty and its discontents
Part of my reason for writing is my observation that the need for good judgment has, if anything, grown as universities have become less comfortable exercising it. The contemporary academy places an extraordinary premium on the original. To command attention today’s scholars must be more than just accurate, learned, and useful: we must be novel — and, of course, novelty is itself an unusually difficult quality to judge.
Is it enough simply to discover new information? The assessment criteria of most funding bodies in Australia as well as Britain would say no. What is needed is a broader contribution to a method, a conceptual framework, or some other means by which the information is understood.
We might note that this novelty premium is itself historically contingent. In the period of European History I study (early modernity), imitation of other authors was a mark of intellectual accomplishment rather than its opposite. Learned types demonstrated their erudition through their very familiarity with and redeployment of others’ words and ideas.
Modern academic culture has travelled very much in the opposite direction. It rewards people for producing — to extend Evans’s metaphor — new styles of representing the mountain. Yet this very premium on innovation exacerbates the underlying judgment problem because originality creates a claim to attention without guaranteeing added value.
Recurrent controversies surrounding awards such as art’s Turner Prize — too much originality, not enough mastery of craft — illustrate this difficulty. The Arday controversy arguably does too: an appointment widely celebrated as trailblazing was certainly novel — and its symbolic significance was plainly part of its public meaning. Yet nothing in Cambridge’s decision to make Arday a professor settled the question of whether Arday really deserved his position.
The difficulty lies not in working out whether something is new. It lies in judging if the invention is valuable or simply a departure from the current norm.
Who guards the guards themselves?
Much of the wider argument over Arday has revolved around the specific disagreement just described. But who is to be the umpire who decides which side is right? Ultimately, the University — unless the matter is taken out of its hands — has no choice but to let those people on whom it has conferred authority judge it (these are usually, but not always, internally or externally appointed academics). What I first presented as a problem of judgment is therefore, at length, a question about judges. The institutional reckoning over Arday currently in progress underlines this point rather neatly.
Not only Cambridge but also Durham and Glasgow universities are now revisiting their own previous decisions to appoint Arday. Liverpool John Moores University has also faced demands to reexamine his doctoral thesis. Reviews will presumably recommend changes to process and procedure. Some suggestions may well be sensible. But procedures can only ever be as good as the judgments of those who devise and apply them.
There is no escape from the circularity. Recognising who is most suitable to judge — at first instance and later, if the decision of the initial judges is challenged outside the legal system — when challenged is itself an exercise in judgment. No further procedure can resolve that difficulty. Judgment is cultivated through disciplinary formation, experience, criticism, and disagreement. And no institution can guarantee its own survival or prevent its own slide into conformity, prejudice, or exclusion without the possibility of continued criticism and disagreement to keep that slide in check.
Another way of putting the issue is this: universities are gatekeeping institutions. They cannot read their distinctive intellectual success straightforwardly from a balance sheet or a bottom line. Their reputation depends above all else on whether experts and the public trust them to distinguish between good and bad scholarship (and pedagogy) when they see it. That means recognising genuine expertise and discerning who should be admitted to those positions from which they will judge others in turn.
The quality of the gatekeepers is therefore central, not incidental, to the academy’s ongoing authority. Robust procedures remain essential, not because such procedures can themselves substitute for judgment but because they help ensure that those who do judge remain answerable for their exercise.
Arday’s career matters, then, not simply because some universities have judged badly — it is that public confidence in the quality of those who judge has been badly shaken and there is no quick and easy way of winning it back.
First published on ABC Religion & Ethics, 1 September 2026.