Cambridge University: Can it be in safe hands with Chris Smith?

A guest post by David Keighley

Who, exactly, was racist towards Jason Arday? Lord Chris Smith of Finsbury, the recently installed Chancellor of Cambridge University and formerly a government minister under Tony Blair, should be required to answer that question.

He claimed in a BBC interview earlier in the week that the extraordinary scrutiny of the late professor as a ‘racist feeding frenzy‘. He has now gone further in an op-ed the Daily Telegraph saying that much of the criticism and abuse Arday suffered ‘undoubtedly had more than a whiff of racism about it’; that it happened not simply because there were concerns about his work but ‘because he was black’, and that he doubts a white professor would have attracted comparable press attention.