Jason Arday Was Not a “DEI Hire” Because There Is No Such Thing.

Jason Arday was found dead at a home in Battersea on August 14. He was 41, a father of two, and nine days earlier he had resigned from the University of Cambridge, where in 2023 he became the youngest Black professor in that institution’s nearly thousand-year history. His family says he spent three years under a sustained campaign of abuse and misinformation. His cause of death has not been established. The sequence has.

Within hours of the news, the people who ran that campaign had the lesson prepared: this is what happens when you hire for diversity instead of merit.

That lesson requires diversity, equity, and inclusion to be something it has never been, and the people making the argument are counting on you not knowing the difference. So here is the difference.

Affirmative action is law. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, passed in 1964, made employment discrimination illegal. Executive Order 11246, signed by Lyndon Johnson in 1965, required federal contractors to take affirmative steps toward equal employment opportunity, and it carried reporting requirements, penalties, and an enforcement agency. Trump revoked that executive order in January 2025, which ended those obligations for contractors and shut down enforcement. It did not touch Title VII, and it could not. Ending anti-discrimination law in American workplaces would take the Supreme Court, the way ending affirmative action in college admissions took the Supreme Court in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. That decision has not come.

Notice what the law actually required. Not that you hire anyone. That you look. That you recruit past your usual circles. That you be able to account for your numbers when someone asks.

I wrote about my mother in Qualified. She applied for a job at Children’s Hospital in Milwaukee before any of this existed. The white woman interviewing her balled up the application at the end of the interview and threw it in the garbage while my mother sat there watching. After affirmative action, that woman would have waited until my mother left the room. People treat that as a small distinction. It is the whole distinction.

Then there is the quota mythology, which will not die. The set-aside model, where an employer or a school reserved a specific number of seats, was struck down in 1978 in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. That was an admissions case, but its reasoning set the anti-quota frame that governs employment too, carried there by Weber in 1979 and Wygant in 1986. The rule has been settled for nearly fifty years. There is no quota. There has not been a quota in the lifetime of most people making the accusation.

And here is the part nobody says out loud. White women have benefited from affirmative action more than any other group in America. A Labor Department review in 1995 found that affirmative action had moved roughly six million women and five million members of minority groups up in the workplace. Yet no one has ever built a slur around it. No one looks at a white woman in a senior role and wonders how she got there. There is no assumption of wholesale incompetence attached to a group that gained the most.

Now, diversity, equity, and inclusion. It is not law. It has never been law. There is no statute, no executive order, no enforcement agency, and no penalty. It is a philosophy, which means it is a set of questions an organization agrees to ask itself. If we sit in a community that is fifteen percent Black and our management is one percent Black, what produced that? Where are we recruiting? Who sits on the hiring panel? What equivalencies will we accept, and why do we require a graduate degree for a role our white employees hold with a bachelor’s? Who gets promoted here, and who does not, and what is the actual mechanism?

You cannot outlaw a question. And a question cannot hire anybody, which is why the phrase “DEI hire” describes nothing. There is no instrument that produces one.

What those questions do produce, reliably, is a look at the door people come through. And that is where the real system is.

The Real Race Based Hiring System

There is a race-based hiring system operating in this country in plain sight, and it has never been investigated. It is referral hiring. Depending on the industry, my research puts it at somewhere between eleven and fifty percent of hires. It is the legacy admission, moved into the labor market and left completely alone.

A referral frequently skips the AI bulwark or gets flagged through. A referral arrives with an assumption of quality already attached. A referral does not have to first get past a panel of fifteen people, does not get scored right off the bat, they get assumed and known. And because white Americans have held senior positions in disproportionate numbers for the entire history of American employment, referral networks reproduce both the people and the thinking of the people already inside. Nobody is twirling a mustache. The system is doing what it was built to do.

The fix is not more Black people in the room, either. Referrals from Black employees do not carry the weight that referrals from white employees carry. The channel itself is the problem, and it is a direct inheritance from a period when Thomas Jefferson could write a letter recommending a young man for an apprenticeship and the letter was the entire hiring process.

So there is a formal front door with a machine, a panel, and a rubric, and there is an informal back door with a phone call. Black applicants overwhelmingly arrive at the front. Then the resulting numbers get offered as evidence that the talent was not there. Ask Abercrombie & Fitch, which paid roughly forty million dollars in 2004 to settle claims that it hired Black, Latino, and Asian workers and then put them in the stockroom and on the overnight shift while white employees worked the floor.

This is the oldest move in the American repertoire. Under slavery it was illegal across much of the South to teach an enslaved person to read, which is a strange law to pass about people you believe cannot learn. Under Jim Crow, the etiquette codes went past the water fountain and the back of the bus; they forbade Black people from displaying intelligence equal or superior to a white person’s, publicly or privately. You are barred from demonstrating the capacity, and then the missing demonstration is entered as proof you never had it. It is a five-year-old making up the rules mid-game, except the five-year-old runs the labor market.

Which brings us back to Cambridge. Whatever is eventually established about Jason Arday’s record, and Liverpool John Moores had already dismissed the plagiarism allegations before this summer’s coverage began, none of it is a story about diversity hiring. It is a story about an institution that wanted a unicorn instead of a faculty, that spent three years holding up one man as proof of its own virtue and then found it had no appetite for defending him. It is a story about a level of scrutiny no white academic in Britain has ever been asked to survive, aimed at one person, continuously, for years.

The pipeline is not empty and it is not broken. The pipeline is blocked, and the people doing the blocking built an entire vocabulary to describe what comes out the other end as a shortage of talent.

They are not asking us to stop giving Black people special treatment. They are asking us to stop noticing theirs.