The South African connections of Cambridge University’s youngest black professor
Ahead of World Autism Day on 2 April, Zain speaks to Cambridge University’s Youngest black professor, Jason Arday. He was diagnosed with autism as a child and didn’t read or write until he was 18.
Cambridge professor Jason Arday won Most Inspirational Person of the Year Award Photo: MBCC Awards/Facebook
From struggling with autism in his youth to becoming Cambridge University’s Youngest black professor, Jason Arday is a testament to the human spirit.
As a child, Arday's parents were told he will never live a normal life.
He first started to talk at age 11 and couldn’t read or write until he was 18.
But he overcame this debilitating medical condition and helped forge his own path in the academic world.
At age 38, he's now a professor of sociology and his research focuses on improving education for autistic black people.
Ahead of World Autism Day on Tuesday 2 April, Arday spoke to Zain Johnson about his struggle with speaking as a child.
"It was part autism but also partly a condition called global development delay, which is a cognitive delay that affects motor skills and cognitive development."
-Jason Arday, Cambridge University professor
Arday says this development delay led to a tough journey to learn to read and write.
"I had thousands of hours of speech therapy and classes for reading and writing. But I think its more aligned to faith. My mum tirelessly worked with me to support me. Once it started making sense, it became harder because I had a lot of catching up to do. I had to make sense of how literacy works. It's not an easy thing to learn when you're 18 because these are things you learn in the development cycle from 3 years old."
-Jason Arday, Cambridge University professor
He has worked in higher education for 11 years and the nexus of his work focuses on racial inequality in education through intersections of gender, class and religion.
The academic was keen to understand how education inequality impact the lives of black, indigenous ethnic minorities.
"It's about how we get a better distribution of resources and how do we democratise the economic advantages and other forms of social capital so all individuals can get better outcomes in the UK and broadly."
-Jason Arday, Cambridge University professor
Arday's critical area of study led him to do work for Nelson Mandela University's research unit - Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation (CriSHET)
His niche focusses on the resources in South Africa and how it's distributed to disadvantaged communities post-apartheid.
"It's been an important body of work over the last five years which builds on the legacy of the democratisation of education resources and the redistribution of those resources to those in need."
-Jason Arday, Cambridge University professor
The young academic has a special connection to South Africa.
His mother was a fervent anti-apartheid campaigner in the UK during the early 1990's.
While Arday was very young, he says his mother's activism conscientised him.
"One of the seminal things I remember is the 1995 Rugby World Cup and the signficance in the context of Rainbow Nation and how symbolic Madiba's lifting of the trophy was for creating a bridge for the country. Those things stay with you because its able to provide a reference point for my mum's activism and so many other people who were anti apartheid and putting pressure on the UK government to engage in disrupting apartheid."
-Jason Arday, Cambridge University professor
Scroll up to listen to the interview.