Dazzling piece by Kathleen Stock on the embarrassing debacle surrounding Jason Arday, a man "wandering like a modern-day Forrest Gump through various prestigious institutions, treated like a sage for every strange or incomprehensible thing he says".

I almost feel sorry for Arday, who's obviously a fabulist and comically unsuited to a professorship at Cambridge. The true villains of the piece, though, are the prestigious universities that have abandoned every standard they exist to uphold.

As Stock says, "the real reason for his elevation was that they saw the symbolic benefit of his protected characteristics for themselves... Arday is already being treated by Cambridge and other places as — quite literally — a useful idiot."

This is the most detestable thing about identity politics on the left – the way it treats people like Arday as puppets for its own moral vanity. When it goes disastrously wrong, as it has here, it tarnishes those minority academics who actually meet the intellectual criteria – and it's a gift to bigoted morons, who jump on this story as evidence that Arday's case is the norm.

Progressive racism is the worst kind because it congratulates itself for being the opposite while pointing the finger at everyone else.

The article has a paywall, but I'll share the link in the replies anyway in case it lets you through.