The Myth of Meritocracy: Who Is Allowed to Succeed?
When Jason Arday was appointed Professor of Sociology of Education at the University of Cambridge in 2023, his success was presented as proof that extraordinary barriers could be overcome.
Diagnosed with autism and global developmental delay as a child, Arday said he did not speak until he was 11 and could not read or write until he was 18. He went on to become a university professor and, at 37, the youngest Black person ever appointed to a professorship at Cambridge.
It was an irresistible story. A working-class Black child who had once required extensive support had reached one of the most prestigious universities in the world.
Three years later, that story had been pulled apart.
Arday faced allegations of plagiarism, questions about his academic work and scrutiny of claims concerning his childhood, university affiliations, endurance running and charitable fundraising. He denied committing plagiarism, although he acknowledged making mistakes and accepted that he had sometimes failed to correct exaggerated accounts of his achievements.
Liverpool John Moores University, which awarded his doctorate, had previously investigated concerns about his thesis. Its panel did not uphold an allegation of academic misconduct, concluding that the citation problems were attributable to “honest and reasonable error”. Cambridge subsequently announced a new investigation after further questions were raised.
Arday resigned from Cambridge on 5 August 2026. In his resignation letter, he said the relentless accusations and public commentary had taken a profound toll on him and those he loved.
Nine days later, he was found dead at his home in London. Police described his death as unexpected but not suspicious. A file was prepared for the coroner.
These events should make any responsible writer cautious. The allegations should not be dismissed simply because some of those promoting them had questionable motives. Nor should allegations be converted into proven facts because they were repeated across newspapers and social media.
Academic integrity matters. Universities must investigate credible evidence of plagiarism, inaccurate credentials or defective research. Diversity cannot be used as a defence against legitimate scrutiny.
But scrutiny is not the only question raised by Jason Arday’s story.
We must also ask why his success became such a powerful symbol, why his alleged failings became a national spectacle and why one Black academic came to carry the weight of an argument about the legitimacy of diversity throughout British higher education.
Most importantly, we should ask a question hidden beneath all the others:
Who is allowed to succeed without their presence being treated as suspicious?
The meritocracy we imagine
Meritocracy is one of the most attractive ideas in modern society.
It promises that people will advance according to ability and effort rather than birth, wealth, race, gender or family connections. It allows inequality to appear fair because those who reach the top are assumed to have earned their place.
The problem is not the aspiration. The problem is the lie that everyone who aspires starts from the same place.
They simply do not.
A race cannot be called meritocratic merely because everyone is eventually told to run. Some competitors begin several metres ahead. Some have better equipment, professional coaching and families able to support them. Others begin exhausted, carrying responsibilities their competitors have never encountered.
We then judge the finishing order as though it measures talent alone.
Private education, inherited wealth, stable housing, family connections, unpaid internships, confidence around authority and familiarity with elite institutions all influence who progresses. These advantages are rarely described as preferential treatment. They are absorbed into the background and mistaken for the natural order.
A parent paying for private tuition is seen as helping their child fulfil their potential. A university trying to correct decades of underrepresentation is accused of compromising standards.
One intervention is treated as family responsibility. The other is treated as social engineering.
Neither tells us very much about pure merit because pure merit has never existed independently of opportunity.
When success requires an explanation
Jason Arday’s appointment was never treated as just another academic appointment.
Cambridge itself promoted its significance. His age, race, autism and personal history were central to the story. Arday also participated in that narrative. His life became part of his public identity and, eventually, the basis of a memoir.
That made reasonable scrutiny inevitable. When institutions use an individual’s biography to advertise progress, the accuracy of that biography becomes a legitimate matter of public interest.
But Arday was not solely responsible for creating the public figure who was later subjected to investigation. Cambridge, publishers and the media all helped construct and promote an exceptional story from which they gained reputational or commercial value.
Nor is presenting achievements in their most favourable light unusual. Individuals polish CVs and applications. Institutions carefully select the parts of their history they want others to see. When Leicester City was recently offered for sale, its promotional material emphasised trophies, promotions and future potential rather than dwelling upon its position in League One. The claims were not necessarily false. They were selected to create the strongest possible impression.
This is not equivalent to plagiarism, fabricating research or claiming qualifications someone does not possess. Those are serious matters requiring investigation. But how many successful people have embellished an achievement, accepted a flattering description or failed to correct an exaggerated story because it made them appear more impressive?
More importantly, how often does that become the starting point for a national investigation into the person’s entire identity?
When doubts emerged around Arday, much of the responsibility settled upon him alone. The same characteristics that had made his appointment newsworthy also made his fall useful. To supporters of greater representation, he had symbolised progress. To opponents of diversity initiatives, his alleged failings appeared to offer something much bigger: evidence that the entire project was fraudulent.
One man’s thesis became an argument against diversity.
His mistakes were no longer merely his own. They were used to question whether Black academics had reached senior positions through ability at all.
That is not how meritocracy is supposed to work. White academics who commit misconduct are generally treated as individuals who have committed misconduct. They are not routinely presented as evidence that white people have been promoted beyond their abilities.
Members of under-represented groups are more often made to represent the group itself. Their success is celebrated as collective progress, but their failure can also be used as a collective indictment.
Representation therefore creates a peculiar burden. You are invited into the room as proof that the room has changed, but any mistake may be used to argue that you never belonged there.
The man making the allegations
The identity of an accuser does not determine whether an allegation is true.
Nathan Cofnas, who publicised comparisons between Arday’s doctoral thesis and earlier work, could have held any political opinion and the textual evidence would still require examination. Academic work must be judged by the work itself.
But the wider purpose to which allegations are put also matters.
Cofnas had previously argued that, under what he described as a true meritocracy, Black people would “disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment”, while the number of Black professors at Harvard would approach zero.
Perhaps the most revealing part of Cofnas’s argument is the exception he allows.
If Black people would remain successful in sport and entertainment under his imagined “true meritocracy”, we should ask what distinguishes those fields from academia, politics and other elite professions.
Elite sport is not a perfect meritocracy. Access to facilities, coaching, money and opportunity still matters, and Black representation differs considerably between sports. But performance at the highest level is often unusually visible. A race is timed. A goal is scored. A contest is won. A player’s contribution can be watched, measured and compared repeatedly in public.
Running provides perhaps the clearest example. The clock does not know an athlete’s accent, school, family connections or ethnicity. In a race, reputation cannot make the stopwatch run more slowly, and an influential acquaintance cannot arrange for someone to cross the finishing line first. Black athletes have achieved extraordinary success in sprinting and distance running, but even the description “Black athletes” conceals important differences. Jamaican and American sprinters, and Kenyan and Ethiopian distance runners, emerge from distinct populations, environments, training systems and sporting cultures. Their success cannot responsibly be reduced to race. What running does demonstrate is that when achievement is directly measurable, exceptional talent becomes much harder to exclude, reinterpret or explain away.
Football clubs may contain prejudice, but they also have a powerful commercial incentive to select players who help them win. A talented player cannot easily be excluded in favour of a well-connected but demonstrably inferior alternative without results eventually exposing the decision.
Could this help explain why Black competitors have become so prominent in some sports? Not because race determines ability, but because performance is harder for traditional gatekeepers to reinterpret or ignore.
The contrast within English football is striking. Black players constitute a substantial proportion of those on the pitch, yet Black former players remain severely underrepresented among managers, coaches and senior executives. The further selection moves away from directly observable performance and towards interviews, personal judgements, professional networks and perceptions of leadership, the more Black representation falls.
That does not prove that every Black player deserves to become a manager, any more than every white player does. It does suggest that the supposed meritocracy becomes less diverse when success is determined behind closed doors.
Entertainment requires greater caution because artistic merit cannot be measured like a sprint or a football match. Casting, commissioning, promotion and ownership remain controlled by gatekeepers. Nevertheless, audiences can sometimes recognise and reward talent that established institutions previously overlooked.
Cofnas appears to treat Black success in sport and entertainment as evidence for his racial theory. It may point towards the opposite conclusion. Where talent is most visible and institutions have the strongest incentive to recognise it, Black people succeed in large numbers. Where advancement depends more heavily upon social networks, institutional familiarity and subjective assessments of who appears intelligent, authoritative or suitable, their representation declines.
That is not a neutral commitment to academic standards. It is an explicitly racial theory about who should occupy positions of status, and one that may be contradicted by the very exceptions its author identifies.
It does not make every concern he raised about Arday false. It does mean we should distinguish between investigating particular evidence and accepting the ideology attached to it.
Instead, public debate repeatedly collapsed two different questions into one:
Did Jason Arday’s academic work contain serious problems?
And:
Does his case prove that attempts to improve representation are incompatible with merit?
The first is a legitimate question for independent investigation. The second does not logically follow from any answer to the first.
Even if every allegation against Arday had been proven, it would tell us about Jason Arday and the institutions responsible for checking his work and appointing him. It would not prove that Black academics as a group are less capable, that discrimination no longer exists or that diversity initiatives inevitably lower standards.
We would never accept such reasoning in reverse. The exposure of a dishonest white professor would not prove that white academics had been appointed because of racial favouritism.
Accountability without dehumanisation
There were substantive questions about Arday’s work.
Reports identified passages in his doctorate resembling earlier academic writing, inconsistencies in the descriptions of research participants and repeated quotations that appeared to be attributed differently across publications. There were also questions about how some of his academic affiliations and charitable achievements had been presented.
These were not trivial matters. Universities depend upon trust, attribution and the integrity of research. Cambridge was entitled to investigate, and arguably should have examined the questions surrounding Arday more thoroughly before making his appointment such a public celebration.
But legitimate investigation is not the same as unlimited public pursuit.
An analysis reported by the Associated Press identified 289 articles about Arday in just 22 days. The coverage moved beyond his published work and professional credentials into his childhood, disability and the recollections of people who had known him decades earlier.
His personality and life story became public property.
I was educated at state schools and grew up on a council estate in Liverpool in the 1970s and 1980s. I did not come from a world in which influential contacts, elite institutions or inherited confidence made success seem inevitable. I had the ability to continue into higher education, but pressure to contribute an income to the household meant that I left school at 16. I know what it is like to look at society’s most prestigious positions and wonder whether they were ever intended for people from backgrounds like mine. I have also stood among people from more privileged backgrounds and been reminded, through a supposedly humorous warning to ‘watch out for your tyres’, that someone from Liverpool was still regarded as an outsider.
Perhaps that is why so much of the coverage of Arday made me uncomfortable.
Journalism is at its most valuable when it challenges power. But there is a difference between investigating the University of Cambridge and concentrating the resources of the national press upon one increasingly vulnerable individual.
Arday held a prestigious academic position, but he did not own a newspaper, run a university or control the institutions that had appointed and promoted him. By the time he resigned, he no longer held even that position. Yet the scrutiny continued, moving beyond his academic work and into his childhood, disability and personality.
It began to look less like speaking truth to power and more like punching down.
His background should not have protected him from legitimate questions. State-school pupils, working-class people, Black academics and disabled people are not helped by lower standards. Equality must include equal accountability.
But equal accountability also requires proportionality. It means asking whether people from more familiar backgrounds, protected by stronger institutions, would have been pursued with the same intensity. Arday was not running the country, controlling a major company or making decisions affecting millions of lives. Yet after his resignation, the investigation of his identity continued.
Boris Johnson provides an illuminating contrast. His Eton and Oxford education, command of language and classical references helped establish the assumption that he was highly intelligent. He is indeed a very clever man. Yet his career also contained repeated inaccuracies, broken promises and misleading statements. These damaged his personal reputation, but nobody suggested that his behaviour discredited privately educated white men as a group. His mistakes remained his own.
Johnson’s education also illustrates the support that can sit invisibly behind individual merit. At present-day prices, two years at Ashdown House followed by five years at Eton would have a headline value of roughly £370,000 before additional expenses. His King’s Scholarship may have reduced the amount paid by his family, although the precise financial arrangement is not publicly known, while his Oxford tuition was funded under the university system of the time.
None of this means Johnson lacked intelligence or did not earn his scholarship. It means his abilities were identified, cultivated and connected to elite institutions through an educational investment unavailable to almost every British child.
Arday’s alleged failings, by contrast, were rapidly recruited into a wider argument about whether diversity had enabled unsuitable Black academics to succeed. He was treated not merely as an individual whose work should be examined, but as a test of whether people like him belonged in such institutions at all.
Accountability should establish facts, protect standards and determine proportionate consequences. It should not become a public hunt in which allegations provide an opportunity for people to pursue a wider ideological grievance.
Online, however, allegations quickly harden into certainty and punishment becomes participatory. Thousands of strangers can join a case without examining the evidence, each contributing a joke, insult or declaration of guilt. No single comment appears decisive. Together, they can become overwhelming.
We saw a similar dynamic around Caroline Flack. The circumstances were very different, and the cases should not be treated as equivalent. But the pattern is recognisable: accusation, public humiliation, relentless commentary and, after a death, widespread insistence that everyone else had gone too far.
Our culture is becoming skilled at expressing regret after a person can no longer benefit from it.
That does not mean journalists should suppress legitimate stories because their subjects may experience distress. It means editors, institutions and individuals should continually consider relevance, proportionality and human consequence.
A person can be accountable and still be a person.
The luxury of being ordinary
There is another inequality hidden within meritocracy: some people are permitted to succeed without becoming symbols.
Their appointment does not have to represent the triumph of an entire race, class or social policy. If they make mistakes, those mistakes remain personal. Their whole community is not placed on trial beside them.
Jason Arday was denied that luxury.
His story was made exceptional at every stage. First, he was the inspirational Black autistic academic who had overcome impossible odds. Then he became the alleged diversity appointment whose fall supposedly exposed the corruption of modern universities.
Both stories risked reducing a complicated human being to something useful to other people.
Institutions wanted a symbol of inclusion. Publishers wanted an extraordinary story. Campaigners wanted proof of progress. Culture warriors wanted proof that progress was a fraud. Newspapers wanted a compelling rise and fall.
Amid all of this, Jason Arday became less visible as an ordinary and fallible person.
This does not absolve him of responsibility for claims he made or work published under his name. It asks why so many other people were invested in making him either extraordinary or fraudulent, with so little room between the two.
Perhaps that is one of the cruellest features of supposed meritocracy. Those who begin outside traditional networks may feel obliged to become exceptional simply to be admitted. Their stories must be more inspiring, their achievements more remarkable and their resilience apparently limitless.
Then, if the story begins to fracture, there is no ordinary life beneath it to catch them.
The people who define merit
If we are going to debate whether Jason Arday deserved to occupy a chair at Cambridge, we should apply the same curiosity to everyone else who reaches Britain’s most powerful institutions.
Who sits in the Cabinet? Who forms the opposition parties’ shadow cabinets? Who becomes a professor at an elite university? Where were they educated, what advantages accompanied them and how often are those advantages examined when their success is discussed?
The comparison is revealing.
Around 7 per cent of the British population attended private school. Among MPs elected in 2024, the figure was 23 per cent. That included 15 per cent of Labour MPs and 46 per cent of Conservative MPs.
The difference became even more pronounced at the top of the Conservative Party. According to the Sutton Trust, 52 per cent of Kemi Badenoch’s 2025 Shadow Cabinet had been privately educated and 56 per cent had attended Oxford or Cambridge. Only one member had not attended university.
Reform presents itself as an insurgency against an out-of-touch political establishment, but the educational backgrounds of its leadership deserve equal examination.
Nigel Farage attended Dulwich College. Richard Tice attended Uppingham. Robert Jenrick attended Wolverhampton Grammar School before Cambridge. Suella Braverman was educated partly at the independent Heathfield School before Cambridge. Zia Yusuf attended Hampton School before the London School of Economics. Danny Kruger attended Eton.
There are state-educated people within Reform, including Lee Anderson. Kemi Badenoch’s own educational route is also less conventionally privileged than those of many senior Conservatives.
The point is not that every politician in either party emerged from the same background. It is that parties claiming to challenge an elite can themselves be led by people educated through some of its most exclusive institutions.
Labour cannot be exempted from the same examination. Keir Starmer’s original Cabinet was unusually state-educated, but Andy Burnham’s Cabinet has moved back towards Britain’s familiar route to power. More than one-fifth of its members were mainly privately educated, while 54 per cent attended Oxford or Cambridge.
That figure matters because only around 1 per cent of the population attends Oxbridge.
The Liberal Democrats, Greens, SNP and other parties must be examined too. This should not become a convenient exercise in finding statistics that embarrass only the parties we already dislike. A genuine examination of meritocracy must apply the same standards across politics.
None of this means that attending a private school or Oxford or Cambridge disqualifies someone from public service. Many privately educated people are talented, conscientious and capable.
Nor does a state education automatically make someone representative of working-class experience. A selective grammar school, a prosperous family and a place at Oxford may provide advantages that a pupil at an underfunded comprehensive never receives.
School type is evidence of opportunity, not a verdict upon character.
My own experience offers another example of how misleading the language of merit can be.
I left school at 16, despite being capable of going to university. That decision was not a simple measure of my ability. It reflected the circumstances, expectations and opportunities available to me at the time.
Yet people who leave education early are often treated as though they lacked the ability or drive to progress, while those who continue through university are assumed to have demonstrated superior merit.
The distinction is rarely made between capacity and opportunity.
Someone can be capable of university and still never reach it. Someone else can reach university because the route was made visible, affordable and expected.
The myth lies in treating the final outcome as proof of the individual’s innate worth. The graduate is said to have earned success through merit; the person who left school at 16 is quietly filed under failure or limited potential. The circumstances that separated the two are then forgotten.
This exposes a striking inconsistency.
When privately educated politicians rise through institutions filled with people from similar backgrounds, their success is normally accepted as the outcome of ability. Their schooling may appear in a profile, but it seldom causes their right to occupy the position to be questioned.
When someone such as Jason Arday enters an elite institution through a less familiar route, the appointment itself becomes a debate about standards.
The same questions must be asked within universities. Elite academic institutions publish extensive information about race and gender, but social class is often the overlooked part of diversity.
The childhood circumstances and school backgrounds of lecturers and professors are not consistently recorded. Their academic qualifications are displayed proudly, while the advantages that helped them obtain those qualifications frequently disappear from view.
That absence of information is revealing.
We can count the number of Black professors more readily than the number who grew up in social housing, received free school meals or attended an ordinary comprehensive. Class advantage becomes difficult to measure because institutions have rarely considered it important enough to record.
This does not prove that elite academics are undeserving. It demonstrates that we investigate some routes to success more closely than others.
People from backgrounds like mine are frequently told that education provides a ladder to opportunity. But when we look at who occupies the highest positions, we repeatedly find the same schools, universities and social networks.
The people already at the top are described as meritorious. Those attempting to climb the ladder are asked whether it has been lowered especially for them. Those who never had the opportunity to climb it are often treated as though they lacked the ability to do so.
That is not meritocracy. It is advantage becoming so familiar that we no longer recognise it as advantage.
Merit is not the absence of assistance
The attack on diversity initiatives relies upon a convenient fiction: that everyone else reached their position without help.
They did not.
People succeed through combinations of ability, effort, education, encouragement, health, timing, money, contacts and luck. Some overcome enormous barriers. Others barely encounter them. Most lives contain a mixture of individual achievement and assistance from others.
Yet assistance is judged differently depending on who receives it.
A recommendation from an influential acquaintance is networking. A diversity programme is preferential treatment.
An inherited deposit is family support. Social housing is dependency.
An unpaid internship financed by parents demonstrates commitment. A candidate requiring financial support supposedly lacks experience.
A prestigious school’s confidence and connections are treated as personal qualities. Attempts to broaden access are portrayed as lowering the bar.
This is why the work of organisations such as The 93% Club matters. Privately educated people do not benefit only from better-resourced classrooms. They often carry lifelong networks into universities, professions and positions of influence.
When state-educated people try to build equivalent networks, they are not asking for standards to be lowered. They are trying to obtain access to forms of knowledge, confidence and connection that others have always possessed.
The myth is not that talent and hard work are irrelevant. Both matter enormously.
The myth is that we have created a system capable of isolating and rewarding them fairly.
We have not.
Who is allowed to succeed?
The Jason Arday case does not offer a comfortable hero or a simple villain.
There appear to have been genuine problems in his early academic work and legitimate questions about parts of his public biography. There were also institutional failures, a media frenzy and an eagerness among some commentators to use one Black man’s alleged shortcomings as a weapon against diversity itself.
Several things can be true at once.
Academic standards matter.
Racism exists.
Universities must investigate misconduct.
Media scrutiny can become disproportionate.
People are responsible for their actions.
Institutions are responsible for the people and narratives they promote.
Recognising one of these truths does not require us to deny the others.
A functioning meritocracy would apply rigorous standards consistently. It would examine inherited advantage as readily as corrective intervention. It would not assume that familiar success is natural while unfamiliar success must be explained.
It would neither protect someone from legitimate investigation because of their identity nor subject them to greater suspicion because of it.
Above all, it would allow people from every background to be individuals: capable, imperfect, accountable and human.
Jason Arday’s appointment was treated as evidence that the barriers had fallen. The reaction to the questions surrounding him suggests otherwise.
The real test of meritocracy is not whether one extraordinary person can force a path through an unequal system. It is whether people who have historically been excluded are allowed to enter, succeed, make mistakes and be judged by the same standards as everyone else.
Until then, meritocracy remains less a description of the society we have created than a story told by those who benefit from it.
The question is not simply who deserves to succeed.
It is whose success we are prepared to believe was deserved.
References
Sources and Notes: Who Is Allowed to Succeed?
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About the author
Paul Clark is the author of The GOOD Book: A Behavioural Operating System for Escaping Debt and Rebuilding Control and the creator of The GOOD Method. If you enjoyed this article, explore more of his writing in GOOD Thoughts, listen to The GOOD Conversation podcast, or join the GOOD Community to receive new articles, podcast episodes, resources and forthcoming videos by email. If there is a subject you would like Paul to investigate or write about, get in touch.