Media & Culture

The University of Cambridge. Photo: llee_wu / ICC BY-ND 2.0 Last month Index ran a story about a filmmaker and activist from Pakistan. His name was Roshaan Khattak and he was exploring human rights violations in Balochistan. Cambridge University had accepted him on a research pathway, with the understanding that completing this successfully would lead to him being accepted on the PhD programme. But then Khattak received a death threat and there was an unidentified explosion outside his college which scared him. He expected Cambridge to protect him but instead, as Khattak told Index, he was first locked out of his college then, despite achieving a distinction for his work, was told that he could not progress to doing a PhD and his enrolment was terminated. He saw this, and his supervisors agreed with him, as the university caving in to transnational repression. There has been little national newspaper coverage of his case. On the contrary, there was excessive and sometimes unjustifiable coverage of the allegations of plagiarism made against Professor Jason Arday. He was once hailed by Cambridge as their newest Black recruit and at 37, the youngest professor at the university. As Stephen Bush in the FT observes the question of race then became the focus of the media’s coverage, rather than Arday’s academic integrity. As the university came under increasing pressure, it announced an investigation into Arday. Since Arday’s death, there have been calls to impose curbs on the media. As you might expect, Index strongly opposes any regulation as an impingement of the right – indeed the duty – of the press to report on matters of genuine public interest. What purpose would regulation have served here? It might have shut down legitimate questions about Cambridge and its reputation for academic excellence; about the appointment of academics at the university; and about plagiarism, itself a growing issue across academia. Indeed, public focus on the role of the media in the events of the last few weeks has allowed Cambridge, arguably a more powerful institution than the press today, to evade scrutiny of its role in elevating Arday. Cambridge is supposed to be a world leader in research and teaching, yet when Arday was appointed three years ago, according to the BBC, there were only five other Black professors at Cambridge out of a total of more than 970. The numbers nationally are appalling too: 270 Black university professors in the whole of the country. There are so few Black professors today in British academia that they fear that they too will become the targets of impossible levels of public scrutiny – into their research, into their lives, into their very right to occupy a place in the public sphere on the basis of what they do for a living: in short that their freedom of expression will be curtailed. Also, research at Cambridge seems to be concentrated around subjects that are politically and financially advantageous to the institution – as opposed to research that has clear merit, but is less relevant with respect to commercial interests and priorities. Research income from China topped £23 million in 2024/25. The Judge Business School has formed a partnership with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s defence ministry. I started with Khattak, a scholar from Pakistan whom Cambridge first welcomed and then cast aside. I end with the tragedy of Arday, who became the focus of arguments that extended far beyond the question of the rigour of his academic practice. The link between the two is that Cambridge adopted both as instruments that served its own purposes; then abandoned them when that purpose no longer suited them. Both cases have implications, direct and indirect, for the right to free expression in universities. READ MORE

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Media & Culture

Media & Culture explores how journalism, entertainment, and creative industries influence—and are influenced by—free speech. From press freedom to artistic expression, this category highlights the cultural impact of censorship and the ongoing struggle for open dialogue.

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