Last December, the American online magazine, Compact, published an article that became one of the most widely discussed of the year. The author was a would-be scriptwriter hoping for a career in the TV industry, but his career was stillborn. He was the wrong colour and the wrong sex, that is to say, he was a white man, and in the age of ‘Diversity, Equality and Inclusion’ that can be career-wrecking.
The author, Jacob Savage, was 31 when his story begins in 2016. He had been trying his hand at scriptwriting in Los Angeles for a few years and finally seemed on the cusp of a breakthrough. A studio exec liked his latest script and was willing to employ him as a writer.
But in the end, he did not land his dream job. The exec in question privately told him the reason why: there were already too many white men in the writers’ room. They needed more diversity.
Savage wrote: “The doors seemed to close everywhere and all at once [on people like him]. In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were 48% of lower-level TV writers; by 2024, they accounted for just 11.9%. The Atlantic’s editorial staff [the Atlantic is a prestigious American magazine] went from 53% male and 89% white in 2013 to 36% male and 66% white in 2024. White men fell from 39% of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18% in 2023.”
You get the picture. Suddenly it was extremely hard for a young, white man to get a job in this line of work.
Scandal
Savage’s article is relevant because of a scandal that has just unfolded at Cambridge University. In 2023, Cambridge made an academic named Jason Arday the youngest, black professor in the university’s long history. Arday was made Professor of Sociology of Education in the Faculty of Education at the age of 37.
Overnight, he was a star, feted at Cambridge, feted in academia more broadly, a regular guest on media panels, and described by a Cambridge colleague as “an exceptional scholar of race, inequality and education”.
Arday also had a very unusual life story. He claimed that at age 3 he had been diagnosed with autism, global developmental delay, deafness and dyscalculia”
Arday was going to fight against racism wherever he saw it and promote the DEI agenda more broadly. He would be an inspiration to others from racial minorities, and Cambridge University, embarrassed by the sheer whiteness of its academic staff, was desperate for others to follow in his path.
Arday also had a very unusual life story. He claimed that at age 3 he had been diagnosed with autism, global developmental delay, deafness and dyscalculia. This meant, he says, that he could not speak until he was aged 11, and could not read or write until he was 18, which makes his rise to academic stardom all the more remarkable.
He also claims that during his first year at university he was diagnosed with dyslexia and at 18 was physically attacked and developed epilepsy as a result.
He says that in 2006, aged 21, he went on an aid mission to Brazil to install water pumps, and that in 2012 he ran 30 marathons in 35 days to raise money for charity.
Doubts have been cast on some of these claims, but more crucially, doubts were being entertained that his academic credentials were up to scratch.
Doubts
The most serious doubts emerged towards the end of July when the Daily Telegraph reported that an analysis of Prof. Arday’s PhD thesis “identified more than 100 passages that are identical or nearly identical to a 2009 PhD thesis by Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, a Brunel University student.”
In other words, he appeared to be guilty of plagiarism. In purely academic terms, this is probably the worst offence possible, because it passes off someone else’s work as your own. It is hard, if not impossible, to land a top job in a leading university today unless you have completed a PhD thesis showing your mastery over a given subject, and if you did not deserve your PhD, and the title of ‘doctor’, then that is obviously a very big problem.
A storm immediately broke over Cambridge University. Why hadn’t they vetted him properly, and above all, had they hired him in their desperation to prove they were an equal opportunities employer?
The whole thing puts a spotlight on whether DEI hiring practices are undermining standards”
At first, the university stood by him and essentially declared the attacks on Arday to be a witch hunt. Arday himself denies the allegation. He does admit to mistakes in his work, but insists that his autism and learning disabilities caused him to absorb and process information through mimicry, which he claims contributed to similarities between his work and that of others.
But the criticisms and evidence against him just kept mounting and last week he resigned from the university, while still protesting his innocence.
The university remains under huge pressure, however. It is still being asked how it ever came to employ him in the first place, and previous universities where he has worked are now examining his academic output and whether it was properly vetted.
The whole thing puts a spotlight on whether DEI hiring practices are undermining standards.
The ‘Diversity, Equality and Inclusion’ agenda comes from a good place in many ways. It is trying to address past historical wrongs that in the present time have led to the underrepresentation of certain minorities in certain jobs, especially middle-class professional ones.
Trouble
The trouble is that in attempting to address those wrongs it ends up creating ones in the present.
I mentioned the example of young white men now finding it almost impossible to be hired by Hollywood as writers. How is this fair on them?
The US Supreme Court in 2023 quashed the way Harvard University was admitting certain students. Essentially, it was favouring students from certain minorities, for example black students, but discriminating against white and Asian students who might have been more qualified academically.
In 2020, Californian voters voted down a proposal to allow discrimination in favour of racial minorities there.
Mary Mitchell O’Connor, announced that 45 additional professorships, mainly in the science subjects, were being created that only women could apply for”
In Ireland, DEI-hiring policies are now widespread, but none of these policies have ever been challenged in court or been properly scrutinised. It would be interesting to see if young, white men are being discriminated against here.
Indeed, we know it is happening. For example, in 2018, the then Minister for Higher Education, Mary Mitchell O’Connor, announced that 45 additional professorships, mainly in the science subjects, were being created that only women could apply for. Mitchell O’Connor denied the policy was discriminating against men, when clearly that was its very purpose.
DEI-hiring is now under the spotlight in Britain thanks to the Arday case. But it needs to come under the spotlight here as well. What would be uncovered?
Photo: iStock.
Does the ‘Diversity’ agenda discriminate against young, white males?
Last December, the American online magazine, Compact, published an article that became one of the most widely discussed of the year. The author was a would-be scriptwriter hoping for a career in the TV industry, but his career was stillborn. He was the wrong colour and the wrong sex, that is to say, he was a white man, and in the age of ‘Diversity, Equality and Inclusion’ that can be career-wrecking.
The author, Jacob Savage, was 31 when his story begins in 2016. He had been trying his hand at scriptwriting in Los Angeles for a few years and finally seemed on the cusp of a breakthrough. A studio exec liked his latest script and was willing to employ him as a writer.
But in the end, he did not land his dream job. The exec in question privately told him the reason why: there were already too many white men in the writers’ room. They needed more diversity.
Savage wrote: “The doors seemed to close everywhere and all at once [on people like him]. In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were 48% of lower-level TV writers; by 2024, they accounted for just 11.9%. The Atlantic’s editorial staff [the Atlantic is a prestigious American magazine] went from 53% male and 89% white in 2013 to 36% male and 66% white in 2024. White men fell from 39% of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18% in 2023.”
You get the picture. Suddenly it was extremely hard for a young, white man to get a job in this line of work.
Scandal
Savage’s article is relevant because of a scandal that has just unfolded at Cambridge University. In 2023, Cambridge made an academic named Jason Arday the youngest, black professor in the university’s long history. Arday was made Professor of Sociology of Education in the Faculty of Education at the age of 37.
Overnight, he was a star, feted at Cambridge, feted in academia more broadly, a regular guest on media panels, and described by a Cambridge colleague as “an exceptional scholar of race, inequality and education”.
Arday was going to fight against racism wherever he saw it and promote the DEI agenda more broadly. He would be an inspiration to others from racial minorities, and Cambridge University, embarrassed by the sheer whiteness of its academic staff, was desperate for others to follow in his path.
Arday also had a very unusual life story. He claimed that at age 3 he had been diagnosed with autism, global developmental delay, deafness and dyscalculia. This meant, he says, that he could not speak until he was aged 11, and could not read or write until he was 18, which makes his rise to academic stardom all the more remarkable.
He also claims that during his first year at university he was diagnosed with dyslexia and at 18 was physically attacked and developed epilepsy as a result.
He says that in 2006, aged 21, he went on an aid mission to Brazil to install water pumps, and that in 2012 he ran 30 marathons in 35 days to raise money for charity.
Doubts have been cast on some of these claims, but more crucially, doubts were being entertained that his academic credentials were up to scratch.
Doubts
The most serious doubts emerged towards the end of July when the Daily Telegraph reported that an analysis of Prof. Arday’s PhD thesis “identified more than 100 passages that are identical or nearly identical to a 2009 PhD thesis by Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, a Brunel University student.”
In other words, he appeared to be guilty of plagiarism. In purely academic terms, this is probably the worst offence possible, because it passes off someone else’s work as your own. It is hard, if not impossible, to land a top job in a leading university today unless you have completed a PhD thesis showing your mastery over a given subject, and if you did not deserve your PhD, and the title of ‘doctor’, then that is obviously a very big problem.
A storm immediately broke over Cambridge University. Why hadn’t they vetted him properly, and above all, had they hired him in their desperation to prove they were an equal opportunities employer?
At first, the university stood by him and essentially declared the attacks on Arday to be a witch hunt. Arday himself denies the allegation. He does admit to mistakes in his work, but insists that his autism and learning disabilities caused him to absorb and process information through mimicry, which he claims contributed to similarities between his work and that of others.
But the criticisms and evidence against him just kept mounting and last week he resigned from the university, while still protesting his innocence.
The university remains under huge pressure, however. It is still being asked how it ever came to employ him in the first place, and previous universities where he has worked are now examining his academic output and whether it was properly vetted.
The whole thing puts a spotlight on whether DEI hiring practices are undermining standards.
The ‘Diversity, Equality and Inclusion’ agenda comes from a good place in many ways. It is trying to address past historical wrongs that in the present time have led to the underrepresentation of certain minorities in certain jobs, especially middle-class professional ones.
Trouble
The trouble is that in attempting to address those wrongs it ends up creating ones in the present.
I mentioned the example of young white men now finding it almost impossible to be hired by Hollywood as writers. How is this fair on them?
The US Supreme Court in 2023 quashed the way Harvard University was admitting certain students. Essentially, it was favouring students from certain minorities, for example black students, but discriminating against white and Asian students who might have been more qualified academically.
In 2020, Californian voters voted down a proposal to allow discrimination in favour of racial minorities there.
In Ireland, DEI-hiring policies are now widespread, but none of these policies have ever been challenged in court or been properly scrutinised. It would be interesting to see if young, white men are being discriminated against here.
Indeed, we know it is happening. For example, in 2018, the then Minister for Higher Education, Mary Mitchell O’Connor, announced that 45 additional professorships, mainly in the science subjects, were being created that only women could apply for. Mitchell O’Connor denied the policy was discriminating against men, when clearly that was its very purpose.
DEI-hiring is now under the spotlight in Britain thanks to the Arday case. But it needs to come under the spotlight here as well. What would be uncovered?
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