Jason Arday believes in destiny. The University of Cambridge’s youngest Black professor, he joined its faculty of education in March 2023, at 37. Before then, he had been a professor at Glasgow and Durham universities; published three books of academic work, mainly focusing on race and education; and, most importantly to him, raised more than £5m by doing charity work. All of this he has squeezed into a time period where he was learning to navigate the world with neurodivergence; Arday didn’t speak until he was 11 and couldn’t read or write until the age of 18.
It’s an unlikely story, he concedes, one that has made headlines and changed his life irrevocably. But he believes he was always going to do something great. “I knew I was destined to do something,” he says with a smile. “But I didn’t know it’d be this, admittedly.”
Arday’s story is one of grand heights, but also of profound lows. He has barely slept over the past 15 years, he says, working through most nights – often on his academic and charity work, but sometimes just to make ends meet. Until recent years, he struggled to find the balance he needed in the chronically underfunded academic sector, replete with zero-hours contracts. Alongside lecturing, as recently as 2016 he was employed by Sainsbury’s as a trading assistant. Prior to that, he was a late-night cleaner, mopping up vomit and scrubbing toilets. “I had a mantra I used to say to myself: ‘It won’t always be like this,’” he says.
Arday grew up on a council estate in Clapham in south London to Ghanaian parents. His mother, Gifty, was a mental health nurse; his father, Joseph, a chef. He is the second youngest of four brothers. His childhood was generally happy, but punctuated by some violence from the outside world. He has spoken about how many of the people he grew up with are “dead or in prison”.
Gifty was a keen anti-racist activist who went on protests with the community leader and activist Olive Morris. Arday remembers being on picket lines with his mother, attending marches in places such as Peckham and Brixton. He gestures around as he describes his house being rammed with books by bell hooks and other Black female educators and activists. “It’s not a coincidence I’ve ended up doing this for a living,” he says.
Of course, another major facet of his upbringing was the fact that he couldn’t speak, read or write for much of his childhood. Diagnosed with autism and global developmental delay when he was three, he was taught sign language when he was four. When he was 11, after “thousands of hours” of speech therapy and support from his mother, who used music and lyrics to help him understand how words flowed and fit together, something clicked one day.
“The experts made some pretty bleak diagnoses about how I would have to be in assisted living,” he says. “But on that fateful day, I said hello.” He stopped using sign language shortly after.
Reaching across the table, he grabs a book, flicking it so the edges of the pages fly through his fingertips. He is showing how his mind works: like a flipbook with moving figurines. For him, each page is like a still from his life’s montage. Since he was a child, before he was able to form language, he was able to retain these images. “I can go back to all these thousands of experiences,” he says. “When you’re cognitively impaired, you make sense of things in different ways.”
That doesn’t mean it has been easy. He has spent the whole of his academic life “masking”, he says – hiding or minimising aspects and traits of neurodivergence. “I don’t bring my neurodivergence into the workplace, because Black and ethnic-minority people are often judged from the premise of not having the same level of competence as their white counterparts,” he says. So it’s “for fear of having anything further weaponised against me”. He only started speaking publicly about being autistic in recent years; before then, it felt as though the stakes were too high.
With neatly twisted locs that trail down to his waist, dark-rimmed eyes and a shine to his skin that suggests he knows where the moisturiser is kept, Arday cuts a sleek, meek figure. He is dressed simply, but with purpose; he loves tailoring, he says, and will be fitted for a suit on Savile Row next week, as he is being awarded an honorary doctorate at Solent University in Southampton. Indulging in tailoring is one of the few things he does for himself.
Arday does not view himself as intellectual, necessarily, but as someone who has determination. In 2010, he ran 30 marathons in 35 days to raise money for charity. “If you have the will, it will always supersede skill,” he says, smiling. In that vein, the way Arday talks about his work is intentionally accessible: he threads in pop-culture references whenever he can (during our conversation, he manages to reference The Karate Kid, Rocky and School of Rock). Sometimes, he tries to insert all of the titles of songs from specific albums into his keynotes. “My friends always joke about this, saying: ‘You’re the most underwhelming person.’ Academics are, by and large, very selfish, very egotistical, very individualistic. And I guess the underwhelming part is that when people meet me, I don’t talk about theories – I tend to talk more about life.” As his dad once told him: “You can’t be buried with your books. So everything you do, think about the impact it has on the everyday person,” he explains.
Arday is humbled by the recent attention he has received in the press and from the public since his appointment, he says. He has had more than 200,000 emails from all over the world, many from well-wishers. “I’m very fortunate I have the temperament to be able to deal with that. It is a lot, especially when you’re being positioned by the diaspora as our next great hope,” he says. “This appointment meant a lot to people, because it represented another strand of Black excellence. It straddles that thing of race, class and neurodiversity, which isn’t rare, but might be quite unique, given where I started.”
I ask if he ever worries about his story being used as “inspiration porn” (the idea that neurotypical or able-bodied people will consume disability stories to make them feel good, or to reduce the stories of disabled people into specific narratives). “I guess it depends on what expectations you have for the story,” says Arday. “Because I don’t have any expectations, and then I don’t see myself how other people see me.”
So far, academic life at Cambridge (his official post is “professor of sociology of education”) has felt familiar. He commutes from south London, engages with the faculty and students and gives lots of talks and lectures in and outside his college, Jesus (which became the first Oxbridge college to have a Black master, Sonita Alleyne, in 2019). From September, he will be looking after his first batch of PhD students, teaching them about social justice and intersectional inequalities.
His sociology work to date has centred around similar themes. He has worked with the social enterprise the Black Curriculum; he is a trustee for the race equality thinktank the Runnymede Trust; and he has sat on the Universities UK advisory group on racial harassment in higher education. In his Cambridge appointment announcement, he said that he wanted to “democratise higher education”.
What is different, of course, is the amount of pressure he feels under from the outside world, now that he is working at such an elite institution. That, he says, has been a “baptism of fire”. The elitism of the space is not something Arday holds lightly, and he has taken it upon himself to think about ways in which he can work from the inside to dismantle it.
To explain his ideology, he leans on the fighting lessons of Rocky Balboa: “You’re going to be in a very archaic, hostile environment, to some extent, which will be predicated by people outside of that who may not want your existence in that place. But you’ve got to be willing to take the hits, because the greater mission is to achieve equality, and to achieve diversity, and to make that space as big as possible.”
“We’re talking about thousand-year-old white establishments. And anytime you’re a person of colour that penetrates those legacy spaces, it can be difficult for some people to digest or manage. Our mission, in some respects, is very simple. It goes back to what we’ve always tried to do, which is to democratise education information and redistribute resources as far and wide as possible to those most in need. And those two institutions have a lot of capital.”
Oxford and Cambridge have a staggering £21bn in wealth between them, according to a 2018 report from the Guardian. On a practical level, when it comes to redistributing resources and capital, Arday is engaging in as many schemes and interventions as he can to give education access to marginalised communities.
“A lot of it is about going into schools, across the gambit of intersectionality, not just focused on race, and really giving minoritised groups the opportunity to be in these spaces and not just to absorb these thousand-year-old buildings, but to express themselves,” he says. “It’s always hard to fathom the impact that having certain experiences can have on a young person. It leaves an indelible imprint on them for the rest of their life.”
One of the people who changed Arday’s life as a young person was a man named Sandro Sandri. Arday met Sandri after having been taken by his mum to a careers office where they were told that the best he could hope for was some volunteer work. She took him away, telling the worker that they would regret their actions, and instead reached out to Merton College in Morden, south London, which had a space on its BTec course in sport and development. Arday went to the college and met Sandri, a sports lecturer, who decided to take a chance on him and would stay late almost every night of the week working with Arday on his literacy skills, then take him home.
“Up until a year ago, he would text me every day and say: ‘You’re great. You’re going to do some great things.’ He really believed in repetition,” says Arday. “The only promise he ever made me make was that whatever he did for me, I’d do the same for someone else.”
Does he think he has achieved that? “I’ve tried to help as many people as possible. I’ve tried to bring as many people as possible with me. I’ve tried to create as much space as I could, for Black people, and Black women in particular.” He is certain that there will be another, younger Black professor at Oxbridge in the years to come, doing exceptional work.
In terms of his own destiny, Arday adds, he doesn’t think it will be his academia that will leave a lasting impression on the world. “The things that have always had meaning to me are the things I do that serve the greater good, the selfless acts,” he says. “With humility, faith, hope and love, anything is possible.”