Tony Allwright

STATEMENT: The Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF) was troubled to see academics smeared from the stage at last night’s vigil for Jason Arday in Trafalgar Square. As reported by several national media outlets, Diane Abbott MP claimed that “other professors” had waged a three-year “vicious campaign” against Arday because they “just didn’t believe that a black man should be a Cambridge professor”. That is a serious, categorical imputation of racist motive, and those familiar with the controversy could reasonably have understood Abbott’s remarks as referring to a small, identifiable group of academics known to have raised concerns about Arday’s work. Unfortunate though it is to revisit those events at such a desperately sad moment, we feel obliged to restate what the factual record — much of it established publicly long before Abbott’s remarks — shows about one of those academics whom CAF is supporting. David Harris, Professor Emeritus at Plymouth Marjon University, first raised concerns about Arday’s doctoral thesis and subsequent peer-reviewed publications in May 2023. A sociologist with a longstanding interest in how ideas from the critical theory tradition are used in empirical educational research, Harris encountered Arday’s work amid the publicity surrounding his appointment as Professor of Sociology of Education at Cambridge two months earlier. Harris privately raised concerns with Arday about what he called “puzzling similarities” in reported data, repeated passages and possible failures of attribution. His covering email concluded simply: “I would welcome any response.” This was not, in other words, a “vicious campaign”, but an emeritus professor engaging closely with another scholar’s published work, identifying apparent problems and asking that they be examined. Several of Harris’s concerns subsequently resulted in corrections to Arday’s published work. When it emerged last month that Arday had reported Harris to the police for harassment, CAF warned of the chilling effect of invoking the law against awkward scholarly criticism, exposing academics who test published claims or raise questions about research integrity to allegations of criminal wrongdoing and prolonged police investigation. That same chilling effect arises when Harris’s scholarly scrutiny is retrospectively recast by a senior parliamentarian as racial animus before a large public gathering and amplified through the media. The scholarly community has traditionally governed its own standards, and its ability to continue doing so depends upon academics being free to ask difficult questions about one another’s work, even where those questions may prove embarrassing or reputationally damaging. Without that freedom, the processes through which scholarship corrects itself and academic standards are maintained cannot properly function. In those circumstances, CAF will be writing to Ms Abbott asking her to withdraw or correct her remarks and making clear the seriousness with which we regard them. Should those remarks cause him serious professional or reputational harm, including any loss of academic title, status or institutional privileges, we will ensure that he receives appropriate specialist advice on any legal remedies that may be available to him.