The Problem With DEI Is White-Supremacist Perpetration and Perpetuation of Enforced Black Inferiority - Part 4

In all the hullabaloo that ricocheted and reverberated around the world, what does not seem to have been directly, constructively and progressively addressed is the fact that the Jason Arday Tragedy is far more about the admittedly critical problem of Academic Qualification and Competence than the mere or the sheer incidence of academic dishonesty. In other words, the question of whether, indeed, the late Ghanaian-descended former Professor of Britain’s Cambridge University, one of the two oldest and foremost tertiary academies in the entire erstwhile British Empire, presently strategically redesignated as The Commonwealth of Former British Colonies, Possessions and Protectorates - the Dear Reader may choose his or her pick - and the youngest Black Professor ever hired by the globally celebrated Oxbridge Conglomerate of the Most-Selective Elite Academies in the United Kingdom of Great Britain, produced academic work that was thoroughly riddled with “Plagiarized Material” from a significant number of more experienced and seasoned and far better and/or more competent scholars in the late Professor Arday’s disciplinary or subdisciplinary field of the Sociology of Education was, to be certain, only the surface and the most superficial aspect of the problem.

Rather, it clearly has to do with the perennial question of why, in spite of the surfeit of forensically ascertainable evidence globally indicating that, indeed, there abounds a remarkable pool of generously talented Black and African People in nearly every academic discipline in existence presently, the Academic Deans and Dons of Cambridge University still appear to be having an extremely difficult time hiring and/or recruiting the most scholastically and intellectually competent African-descended candidates for jobs such as that for which Mr. Arday had been hired at Cambridge.

The authentic question or conundrum here thus becomes the reason why when it comes to the hiring of Black and African faculty at such highly selective academies as Cambridge and/or Oxford, the spotlight so scandalously appears to be far more focused on the mere presence of Black faculty in the mix or among the mix on campus, than the more critical question of whether such Black or African faculty as do routinely get hired are actually competent and suitable for the job, as a visibly galled and frustrated Dr. Austin Tyler Harper, a former professor of Bates College, right here in the US State of Maine, recently had occasion to let on to a BBC interviewer in a palpable tone of anger in the wake of the tragic passing of the 41-year-old Cambridge University professor of the Sociology of Education.

Dr. Harper, who is presently a staff writer for The Atlantic magazine, noted with utter chagrin and categorical resentment that it was this apparently deliberate nosethumbing stacking up of the metaphorical deck with stereotypically mediocre Black and/or African-descended hires that so disgusted and disaffected him that was forced to quit his tenured or tenure-track professorial job at Bates College. Glancing at his picture on the internet, at least a couple of them, it was not definitively clear to Yours Truly the fact of whether Dr. Austin Tyler Harper was Black or White, though “Uncle AI,” self-assuredly, informs Yours Truly that, indeed, the former Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies is African American or is of a bona fide African descent.

The foregoing notwithstanding, what is singularly significant and discursively germane to pinpoint here is the fact that the aforementioned caustic critic of the statutory policy of Affirmative Action, currently redesignated as the more progressive policy of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), is the fact that Professor Austin Tyler Harper, among his peers, is more of the norm than the exception or aberration. Put in more simple terms, more intellectually astute, productive and competent Black and African-descended professors and former professors think and reason like him, when it comes to evaluating the process via which DEI programs are administered in the academy, almost invariably without any significant regard for the academic and the professional competence of candidates hired or recruited through the Affirmative Action or the DEI pipeline, as it were.

Even so, as Charles Moore, the former Editor of the UK’s Daily Telegraph, instructively points out, a cheap point-scoring Cambridge University Administration could have done far much better than to so jejunely and petulantly or provocatively and garishly showcased the late Professor Arday in the noisome manner in which rural Ghanaian concert exhibited Central African Pygmies or the Batwa or the Mbuti in roving advertising campaigns, in a bid to attracting huge audiences of paying spectators, an hour or two prior to a dramaturgical display of one of the stock repertoires of satirical revues and cantatas while Yours Truly was growing up in the Ghana of the late 1960s and the 1970s.

While these audience-baiting draws, they were called “campaigns,” where we had one or two Batwa or Mbuti comedy acts dancing and performing all sorts of antics on the empty carrier canopies of concert-party vans and vehicles, the main focus of the evening’s showcase often centered around the most current breaking-news and political events around the country or the local vicinity. In short, for Charles Moore, the former Editor of the Daily Telegraph, it is highly likely that the Cambridge Dons and Administrators who hired or recruited the late Professor Jason Arday may very well have recognized both the readily observable strengths and the weaknesses of their new hire or protege, and could therefore have done much better to calmly and “quietly… nurtured his talents and [meticulously] sorted out his problems, which were surely those of a young man out of his depth rather than [those of] an imposter” (See “The News Media Rejects Criticism of the Arday Story” - In “Jason Arday’s Death Sparks UK Debate Over Academic Rigor, Racism After Media ‘Frenzy’” Associated Press [AP] 8/19/26).

It goes without saying that the ancient virus of Anti-Black and African Racism played as major a part as the touchstone spark of the widely alleged professorially ruinous accusations and charges of plagiarism, as Cambridge Chancellor Lord Christopher Robert Smith was widely reported to have written in the UK’s Daily Telegraph in the wake of the alleged suicide-death of Professor Arday.

In Ghana, however, where the Jason Arday Tragedy has predictably provoked a groundswell of media protests and widespread criticism of Anti-Black and Anti-African Racism, nobody seems to have taken significant notice of the fact that of all ministerial and cabinet portfolios, there is a middle-age man by the name of Mr. Haruna Iddrisu, who also serves as a Member of Parliament for the Tamale-South Constituency, in Ghana’s Northern Region, who had his Master of Sociology Degree summarily revoked and withdrawn by the Academic Council of the University of Ghana, the country’s oldest and foremost flagship academy and a former institutional affiliate of the University of London, only to have the extant substantive President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana by the name of Professor John Evans Atta-Mills, late, promote Mr. Iddrisu from the portfolio of a junior cabinet appointee to that of a Senior Ministerial Cabinet Portfolio.

Now, we bring this most scandalous matter up, once again, and wonder how such abject lack of respect for academic and professional integrity may very well have had a significant and a sinister influence on the psyche of the late Ghanaian-descended Oxbridge Professor and, by all accounts, a fast-rising star at one of Britain’s most elite and most selective Ivory-Tower Academy at the time of his tragic death. It also equally significant to note that the late President John Evans Atta-Mills, himself a vintage product of both the University of Ghana and the latter’s academic and institutional matrix or cradle, the University of London, would spitefully promote Mr. Iddrisu from the post of a Deputy Minister to that of a substantive Senior Ministerial Cabinet Portfolio, in a deliberate and a cynical nosethumbing display of his thoroughgoing contempt for academic excellence and integrity that both shocked and horrified a significant portion of Ghana’s academic and professional community.

But that President Mills was himself a former Associate Professor of the Law Faculty at the University of Ghana, currently Americanized as the University of Ghana’s School/College of Law, ought to humble and sober up those among us who would rather have Britons or the Brits take all or most of the blame for the firestorm of negative media infamy that callously volleyed Professor Arday to an early and a putatively premature grave.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]