The Chancellor of the University of Cambridge has called for greater “kindness” on campus in the wake of the Jason Arday affair – a well-intentioned appeal, but one that raises questions about how such expectations sit alongside an academic culture in which scrutinising other people’s work necessarily means confronting matters that may prove uncomfortable, embarrassing or upsetting.
Writing in the Telegraph, Lord Smith of Finsbury said Cambridge must uphold the highest standards of academic integrity following Dr Arday’s death. “If there are credible accusations of plagiarism or suggestions of academic misconduct against any academic, however distinguished, they ought to be rigorously and openly investigated,” the former New Labour minister wrote. “Cambridge lives or dies as a centre of academic excellence; and protecting those standards of excellence should always be a priority for the university.”
Responding to questions over the scrutiny applied to Dr Arday’s appointment as Cambridge’s youngest-ever black professor, Lord Smith said he was “glad” that the university was investigating its recruitment processes. His own experience was that such appointments were conducted with the “utmost rigour”, he said, but added that “any appointment process for a professor in any department must happen in a way that tells the panel as much as possible about the reality of the candidate’s work and ability to teach and undertake research”.
Yet Lord Smith prefaced those remarks with a recollection from his own time at Cambridge. The former Senior Tutor at Pembroke College, he wrote, used to tell incoming students: “You’re not here to learn to be clever; you’re here to learn to be kind.” “We should all perhaps reflect on that message,” Lord Smith added, “in the aftermath of the tragedy of Jason Arday.”
Perhaps we should. It’s certainly true that both proposition – Cambridge must rigorously investigate credible allegations of misconduct, and people should reflect on the need to “be kind” – are perfectly defensible in themselves. But difficulties surely arise when the second begins to qualify the first, with “kindness” coming to mean that questions about appointment procedures, plagiarism, institutional failures or the treatment of those who raised concerns should now be asked less insistently, less publicly… or perhaps not at all.
The feminist writer Victoria Smith captures part of this difficulty in her book (Un)kind. However noble the impulse of the naïf who longs to devote their life to dispensing kindness, the problem is that, as she puts it, “someone is always having to decide who needs to be kinder to whom, and who is receiving quite enough kindness already”. Because not every dilemma can be solved “with a love-and-kindness badge”, the cult of kindness can become “a way of demanding one’s own views are prioritised by mischaracterising any other position as motivated by a lack of empathy”.
CAF has heard from several academics over the past week concerned about precisely this dynamic. At one university, an all-staff message signed by senior leaders condemned “hateful conduct” in commentary surrounding the Arday affair. At another, staff were told – again by senior leaders signing off with their institutional titles – that the episode required everyone to “do better” by “strengthen[ing]” their understanding of “race equity and neurodiversity”, and ensuring that “inclusion, wellbeing and belonging remain central to how we work and lead”.
Whatever the intentions behind such communications, it’s difficult not to hear in them a similar injunction: become kinder, more empathetic, proffer a pleasant smile when faced with difficult questions and, if a colleague is thinking of raising anything liable to disturb the emotional equilibrium of the room, issue a whispered reminder not to be “too mean”.
In this sense, kindness risks becoming an appeal for closure, whether retrospectively or prospectively. The time for asking awkward questions is not now – or, given how upsetting everything can sometimes become, perhaps ever. Events have taken a terrible turn – or might yet; who can say for sure? Decent people should move on – or be mindful of what might happen and protect us all by keeping quiet in the first place.
According to the academics we have spoken to, the effect of such all-staff circulars has been chilling, quietly shifting the question from “are these allegations true, what follows from them, and how do we maintain high academic standards?” to “is it really appropriate to continue talking about them?” Some academics who have raised questions publicly about academic standards have subsequently received abusive correspondence and found themselves under suspicion, not only from managers but from colleagues – almost as if the all-staff email had fired a starting gun. Others now feel unable to raise questions about the standards applied not only in Dr Arday’s case, but more generally in university procedures, appointments and peer-review processes.
If you have received institutional messages of this kind, CAF would be interested to see them. Even where no immediate intervention is appropriate, there is value in documenting how universities are responding to the Arday affair, particularly where communications from senior leaders may engage wider questions about institutional neutrality and the chilling of lawful academic speech.
You can email us at manager@afcomm.org.uk.