A man who couldn’t read or write until he was 18 is set to become Cambridge University’s youngest-ever Black professor.
Professor Jason Arday, 37, was told by therapists and career advisers that he would spend his adult life in assisted living after being diagnosed with autism. But after studying at Liverpool John Moores University, he has now taken up one of the most prestigious professorship posts at Cambridge University and is the youngest Black person to do it.
He joins five other Black professors in the institution and will become one of just 155 Black university professors in the UK, out of a total of 23,000. Professor Arday was diagnosed with global developmental delay when he was a child, affecting his ability to learn how to talk and read.
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He remained without speech until he was 11 years old, but despite this, he had huge questions to ask the world. Professor Arday remembers thinking: "Why are some people homeless? Why is there war?
"I remember thinking if I don't make it as a football player or a professional snooker player, then I want to save the world."
He learnt to read and write in his teens and became a PE teacher after studying at the University of Surrey. He says this gave him first-hand insight into the systemic inequalities that youngsters belonging to ethnic minorities faced in education.
Professor Arday knew he wanted to study and learn more and more but had little training or guidance to do so. At age 27 he wrote on his bedroom wall at his parents' house: "One day I will work at Oxford or Cambridge."
He wrote papers and studied by night, learning texts verbatim and working as a PE by day. He went on to become an acclaimed professor with two master's degrees and a PhD in educational studies from Liverpool John Moores University.
Professor Arday went on to work at the University of Glasgow and the University of Durham.
He will now start at the University of Cambridge on March 6 as Professor of Sociology of Education in the Faculty of Education, hoping to inspire people from under-represented backgrounds into higher education.
He said: "My work focuses primarily on how we can open doors to more people from disadvantaged backgrounds and truly democratise higher education. Hopefully being in a place like Cambridge will provide me with the leverage to lead that agenda nationally and globally.
"Obviously unpicking a long history in which Cambridge has been, or seemed, very exclusive is difficult. There are now lots of pockets of good practice, but culturally this needs to extend throughout the entire university.”
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