The Arday Affair

The Two Professors and a ‘War on Ideas’

The different stories of the Cambridge academics Jason Arday and James Orr reveal the wider cultural and ideological forces at work around hierarchies and structural power. Hardeep Matharu reports

Senate House sits at the heart of Cambridge University. It’s the place you walk past most days as a student knowing that, when your time comes to put on the gown with the furry hood, it will be in this brilliant white bright building that becoming a graduate of the world-renowned institution will be marked.

Approaching it from King’s Parade in the last of the late summer sun, past the iconic King’s College Chapel, and tourists with ice creams sitting here and there on the walls lining the street, Senate House emerged behind its black gates. This time, flowers fresh and dead were taped onto the rails or left at their feet. People stopped to look at them, speaking and silent.

One woman explained to her young son who the flowers were for – a man who had “received some scrutiny that was justified but a lot that wasn’t”.

She told him: “We have to be really careful with our words. He was absolutely hounded and he didn’t deserve to be.”