Simon and Schuster Is Right to Publish Arday’s Memoir

There are individual cases that reveal the state of, and fissures in, a society, and perhaps even of an entire civilization. Such a case is that of Jason Arday, the young black man who was chosen by Cambridge University on almost purely demographic grounds as a professor of the sociology of education, and who died shortly after his resignation from the post once the university announced an official enquiry into his appointment. His is a kind of Dreyfus case in reverse, a mirror image of the affair that convulsed French society for more than a decade; no doubt it will…