Keith Melville

Woke institutions, such as Whakatāne District Council, must have something to learn from a scandal rocking one of the world’s leading education centres, Cambridge University.

The university has found itself at the centre of world attention in the past five or six weeks for hiring and protecting someone more on the basis of doctrine and unproven claims than on genuine merit and achievement.

That doctrine, Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI), conceived to protect and promote minorities throughout the employment process has been adopted world-wide by many corporates and institutions including our own council.

The black professor in Cambridge University’s education department, Jason Arday claimed to have achieved top-level academic qualifications but killed himself after being exposed as a fraud, a plagiarist, and a fantasist. He claimed to have been autistic earlier in his life, and learned to speak only when he was 11, and to read when he was 18 before going on to gain a doctorate and becoming a university professor.

Being black and from a minority ethnic group, he had been hired because his identity characteristics were a perfect fit for the university’s DEI programme according to a former Cambridge biology professor Nathan Colnas, who exposed Arday. That led to a media-generated outrage against Arday, and against the university for its stupidity in hiring Arday, and its attempted cover-up.

Arday’s suicide prompted a vigil attended by thousands in London’s Trafalgar Square, and a backlash against those who had questioned Arday’s claims.

Treating all people with respect is responsible behaviour in my view but venerating some of them on a pedestal because they represent a disadvantaged minority, is a recipe for ignominy.

The Arday case is studied in strident and embarrassing detail by Katharine Birbalsingh in her YouTube commentary - White Guilt Politics Hung Jason Arday Out To Dry.

A few months ago, our government passed the Public Service Amendment Act to remove DEI initiatives imposed in law by the previous government, from the public sector. Other institutions such as local government are excluded from the law change.