Tobias Rustat and his monument in Jesus College, Cambridge (Daily Telegraph)
The plagiarism and fantasies of the late Jason Arday, briefly Professor of the Sociology of Education in Cambridge, which appear to have led to his death, and which have been reported around the world, have also lifted the lid on the distorted values of the University of Cambridge which prized the racial identity of a member of its academic staff above ability and honesty.
But Cambridge’s moral and intellectual failings go deeper than Arday’s deception and Cambridge’s self-deception. The whole sorry business occurred because Cambridge has turned its back on truth, especially where the subjects of race and slavery are concerned. A university which doesn’t stand for truth has lost its reason-for-being and is a danger to staff and students alike.
In recent years, Cambridge has distorted its history in order to try to prove that it was complicit in slavery.
In a fit of confected guilt and an assault on its history, Cambridge has wanted to be responsible for any number of sins connected with slavery. There is no evidence for any of this, though all attempts to correct the university’s flawed research have been ignored. Cambridge’s contortions demonstrate the academic corruption eating it from inside.
Readers of History Reclaimed will have encountered many of these episodes in articles we’ve published about Cambridge in recent years. Let me string them together and briefly take you through this story of intellectual and moral decline.
In 2019 the then Vice-Chancellor, Stephen Toope, set up a ‘legacies of slavery’ investigation, The committee found that no college or university institution ever owned or traded in slaves. That should have been the end of it, therefore. Cambridge is not implicated in any direct way in slavery.
However, in today’s academic world, people want to prove things despite the evidence. The committee moved to ‘guilt by association’, listing family relations of past Cambridge students who had some connection to slavery, and even criticising Cambridge-educated poets and writers who used ‘colonial imagery’.
The committee latched onto a royal courtier and benefactor of Cambridge in the late seventeenth century, Tobias Rustat, and his monuments in Jesus College and the Old Schools (the university’s administrative centre) became the object of campaigns for removal, led by the Master of Jesus College, Sonita Alleyne.
A century before there was an organised anti-slavery movement in Britain, when slavery was legal, Rustat did the bidding of his king, Charles II, and served as a Director of the Royal African Company, which traded in slaves. A three-day hearing in 2022 in a Consistory (Church) Court held in Jesus College, where the historical and aesthetic issues were argued before a judge, saved Rustat’s great monument which, at his death, had been placed in the college’s chapel. I was one of the college’s alumni who won the case. We wanted to preserve a famous monument. We also opposed judging the past by our standards. https://spectator.com/article/has-jesus-college-learned-anything-from-its-rustat-defeat/
Then the Cambridge campaign turned to university investments. The Dean of Trinity College, Cambridge, the Rev. Michael Banner, often heard on Radio 4’s Thought for the Day, published a book, Britain’s Slave Debt. Reparations Now!, which set the national bill for slavery at £200 billion, to be paid to African and Caribbean nations.
Forgive Us Our Trespasses, All of Them: Oxbridge colleges, slavery, and their other sins
But the research behind it, as far as Cambridge is concerned, was based on a confusion of South Sea Securities and South Sea Annuities.
Amazing Grace and the Amazing Sums of the Dean of Trinity College, Cambridge
The former were shares in the South Sea Company which had traded in slaves in the early eighteenth century. But South Sea Annuities were government bonds – ‘gilts’ we would call them – merely marketed by the South Sea Company. To purchase a South Sea Annuity was to lend money, as today, to the government and receive interest on the loan. It had nothing to do with slavery. Banner blamed his college and Cambridge for investments in slavery through purchase or receipt of South Sea Annuities, but they were entirely innocent.
This error was then compounded by the Fitzwilliam Museum which holds Cambridge’s greatest collections. The catalogue of an exhibition there, entitled ‘Rise Up. Resistance, Revolution, Abolition’, also confused Annuities with Securities and accused Cambridge and some of its most notable eighteenth-century figures of hypocrisy.
If ‘wokeness’ is over, can someone tell the Fitzwilliam Museum?
A group of Cambridge-educated historians wrote to the Director of the Fitzwilliam, Dr Luke Syson, to explain the factual mistake. It is exactly the same mistake now being made by the Church of England over its plan, Project Spire, to pay £100 million in reparations for its non-existent role in slavery.
A critical commentary on Church Commissioners’ historic links to African chattel enslavement
Dr Syson replied that this matter of straight fact was, in his view, a matter of opinion.
At least he replied. Letters to two Vice-Chancellors, Professor Toope and now Professor Deborah Prentice, went unanswered.
Meanwhile at the university’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology the plans of its Director, Professor Nicholas Thomas, to return its collection of Benin Bronzes to the Oba – ruler – of Benin, reached their conclusion early this year when 116 of these remarkable objects were ‘restituted’. They had been taken from a slave-holding and human-sacrificing society in 1897 after a peaceful British delegation to Benin was attacked and murdered. Over subsequent years, many of these objects have been stolen from museums and illegally traded or gifted. Yet Cambridge was so eager to send them back that no assurances about their security were obtained. According to Dr. Thomas, ‘We take no view of where they go afterwards’ (The Observer, 7 February 2026)
The distorting effects of this behaviour on students can be imagined. If the university and its lecturers ignore evidence, why shouldn’t they? The case of Dr. Jenny Bulstrode demonstrates where this leads.
Dr Bulstrode on Black Metallurgists and the Industrial Revolution
A Cambridge doctoral student and the recipient of a prestigious Junior Research Fellowship at Jesus College, Cambridge, her argument in a published academic paper which attracted much media attention, that eighteenth-century slaves in Jamaica were the inventors of a new process in the making of steel that was crucial to the Industrial Revolution was shown to be another fantasy. Unlike Professor Arday, who plagiarised, Dr Bulstrode should be seen as a victim of the moral failings of British academic life.
What makes all this so much worse is that Cambridge has a noble history of leading the campaign for anti-slavery. It is the university that educated William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, leaders of the anti-slavery movement. Peter Peckard was the abolitionist Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. The famous Clapham Sect of evangelical Christians who banded together to end slavery were largely educated at Cambridge. The present Master and Fellows of Jesus College should recall (one hopes they know) that Coleridge, the great poet and alumnus of the college, won a university medal in 1792 for his ‘Ode Against the Slave Trade’.
History Reclaimed has reported on all of these episodes. Together, they provide evidence of a university that is in denial – denial of the truth, that is. They also provide a context for understanding the Jason Arday affair. It is easy to see how such errors could have been made in Cambridge – errors that led to his death – when the university as a whole is in thrall to ideology and identity politics, and, though constantly reminded of it, ignores the truth. What is the point of a university that does that?
Professor Lawrence Goldman was an undergraduate at Jesus College, Cambridge and a postgraduate and Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is an emeritus fellow of St. Peter’s College, Oxford.
