A man who couldn’t read or write until the age of 18 is on his way to become Cambridge University’s youngest-ever black professor.
After being diagnosed with autism and being mute until the age of 11, Professor Jason Arday was informed he would most certainly spend his adult life in assisted living.
When he initially began writing academically, the 37-year-old from Clapham, London, was “violently rejected” for years.
He is now a well-known lecturer who will take up one of the world’s most prestigious professorships as professor of sociology of education at Cambridge.
He will be one of just five black professors at the university and one of 155 black university professors in the UK out of a total of 23,000 in the country.
“My work focuses primarily on how we can open doors to more people from disadvantaged backgrounds and truly democratise higher education,”he has said.
“Hopefully being in a place like Cambridge will provide me with the leverage to lead that agenda nationally and globally.”
He says he remembers thinking “Why are some people homeless? Why is there war?’”as a youngster.
“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 added.
He became a Gym teacher after learning to read and write as a teenager, which gave him insight into the systematic disparities that children can experience in education.
He knew he wanted to learn more, but he was at a loss as to how to forge his own path.
At the age of 27, he scribbled on his parents’ bedroom wall, “One day I will work at Oxford or Cambridge.”
“I think you can do this – I think we can take on the world and win,” he recalls his college adviser, Sandro Sandi, telling him.
This was the first time he “really believed in himself,” and he became “motivated and focused” as a result of the conversation.
Still working as a PE teacher during the day, he wrote papers and studied by night.
“When I started writing academic papers, I had no idea what I was doing”, he said.
“I did not have a mentor and no one ever showed me how to write. Everything I submitted got violently rejected.
“The peer review process was so cruel, it was almost funny, but I treated it as a learning experience and, perversely, began to enjoy it.”
Professor Arday has two master’s degrees and a PhD in educational studies after years of hard effort.
He has held positions at the Universities of Glasgow and Durham, and he is an adjunct professor at Nelson Mandela University.
On March 6, he will begin as Professor of Sociology of Education in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge.