Jason Arday and the Question of Merit: What Happens Before the CV?
The unfortunate passing of Professor Jason Arday has given the public conversation around his life and career a different weight. At Do it Now Now, our deepest condolences are with his family, friends, colleagues, students and all those who knew and loved him.
Much of the discussion surrounding his career has already crystallised around one word: merit. Who has it, how we recognise it, whether diversity compromises it and whether universities can confidently identify “the best person” without also considering race, class, disability, neurodivergence and the opportunities somebody had before arriving at the point of selection.
Professor Arday's passing does not resolve those questions, nor should his life be reduced to evidence for one side or another. But the questions remain, and they reach far beyond any one academic.
We asked Black academics and researchers to reflect on what the wider conversation about merit might be missing. Across their responses, one idea appeared repeatedly: if we want to have a serious conversation about merit, we have to look at what happened before the CV.
Merit does not begin at the interview
“We should just appoint the best person for the job” sounds entirely reasonable.
Universities should recruit excellent academics. Qualifications should matter. Research should be rigorous. People appointed to positions of responsibility should have the skills and experience required to do them well.
The problem is not the aspiration. It is the assumption that by the time candidates arrive at an interview, everything written on their CVs can be treated as a straightforward account of their relative ability.
One Black academic who contributed to this piece described academic merit as being assessed through familiar measures including research, teaching, subject expertise and leadership, but also through public engagement, institutional priorities and the ability to develop others. Beneath those criteria, however, sit more subjective questions: who is perceived as having potential, who is considered “leadership material”, whose experience is valued and whose achievements require further evidence? At senior levels, they pointed to the importance of networks, visibility, sponsorship and, crucially, who is willing to advocate for you when you are not in the room.
Those things rarely appear on a CV, but they help determine what eventually does.
Before somebody became a professor, who encouraged them to consider postgraduate study? Before they had an impressive research record, who gave them their first meaningful research opportunity? Before they were recognised as a leader, who first decided they had leadership potential?
Several contributors drew a distinction between mentorship and sponsorship. A mentor can offer advice and encouragement; a sponsor uses their own influence to create opportunities, recommend someone for leadership, put their name forward and advocate for them in rooms they have not yet been invited into.
One contributor added another question that we think deserves much more attention: who was given the opportunity to fail and try again?
Almost nobody becomes excellent without first being inexperienced. People are trusted with opportunities slightly beyond what they have already proved they can do, they make mistakes, receive feedback, develop judgement and try again. The permission to develop, and even occasionally to get something wrong while doing so, is itself an opportunity.
If some people are judged by their potential while others are expected to arrive with overwhelming proof of competence already accumulated, the same formal standard can produce very different careers.
When being good enough does not feel enough
One Black academic described a persistent pressure not simply to be qualified, but to be exceptionally qualified. At different stages of their career, that had meant continuing to acquire qualifications and certifications partly because they felt they needed additional evidence of competence in order to protect their credibility.
There is an uncomfortable contradiction here.
The phrase “diversity hire” suggests that a Black academic may have progressed despite having less evidence of merit. Yet some Black academics describe doing the opposite: accumulating more evidence because they anticipate that their merit will be questioned.
Another contributor described the representational pressure that can come with being one of relatively few Black academics in an institution. They spoke about feeling that their individual performance could reinforce assumptions about Black academics more broadly and, consequently, about the pressure to be highly prepared and leave little room for error.
This matters because merit is not only about having ability. It is also about having that ability recognised.
Academic careers increasingly reward visibility: speaking publicly, building networks, demonstrating impact, putting yourself forward and making your work known. If visibility carries a greater personal or professional cost for some people than for others, then eventually we may see very different professional profiles and interpret the difference as merit without asking what produced it.
What if ability was missed much earlier?
The question becomes even more complicated when we look further back, particularly at neurodivergence and education.
We asked ADHD Babes to contribute to this discussion because of their work with Black neurodivergent people. Their reflections challenged us to think about what is missing when we discuss merit without asking whether people had equal opportunities for their abilities to be recognised and developed in the first place.
ADHD Babes pointed to the multiple barriers Black people can carry through education, as well as the resilience often required to reach spaces in which their peers may have experienced fewer barriers. They also challenged the assumption that greater scrutiny necessarily produces greater fairness, asking instead what people need in order to exist, develop and succeed in these spaces while still being held appropriately accountable.
This matters because the educational record we later use as evidence of merit has a history.
If a child's neurodivergence is recognised and supported, they may receive adjustments, encouragement and opportunities to develop ways of working that allow their ability to emerge. If it is missed or misunderstood, the same child may accumulate a very different educational record.
Years later, it is easy to look at two different trajectories and assume they simply reflect differences in effort or ability.
Sometimes they also reflect differences in what the system was able to recognise.
One Black academic extended this beyond neurodivergence, pointing to disability, health, caring responsibilities and significant life changes as factors that can alter how and when potential is demonstrated. Their concern was that institutions risk confusing difference in how potential is demonstrated with absence of potential.
Another contributor described academia as their third career. The knowledge and experience accumulated before entering academia did not disappear once they became a researcher; it became part of what they brought to teaching, research and leadership.
None of this means an unconventional journey should automatically be treated as evidence of excellence, or that lived experience replaces academic expertise. It means that institutions need to be capable of recognising ability even when the route through which it developed is unfamiliar.
A Black academic in biomedical research who contributed to this work put it simply:
“Merit matters, but merit needs opportunity, recognition and support around it.”
Institutions are part of the process
There is one final part of this conversation that can disappear when merit is treated as something located entirely within an individual.
Institutions make judgements too.
Universities decide what counts as sufficient evidence for appointment. They assess applications, interview candidates, consider credentials, determine which experiences matter and decide who meets the required standard.
One contributor reminded us that institutional accountability therefore matters alongside individual accountability. An academic is responsible for their own conduct, but the institution also assessed, selected and appointed that person.
This is not about shifting responsibility from one place to another. It is about recognising that appointment is a process involving both the candidate and the institution.
If we want better decisions, we should be willing to examine both.
Taking merit seriously
The Black academics and researchers who contributed to this piece did not ask for standards to be lowered.
They asked us to look more carefully at the conditions underneath them.
Who was encouraged?
Who was developed?
Who was sponsored?
Who had someone advocate for them?
Who was allowed to make a mistake and try again?
Whose neurodivergence or disability was understood early enough for their ability to develop?
Who felt they needed one more qualification before anyone would believe they were competent?
And who had already demonstrated their ability but was still waiting to be recognised as someone with potential?
These are not alternatives to merit. They are part of understanding how merit becomes visible.
One contributor argued that genuine equality is therefore about much more than opening the door. It is about who is developed, mentored, sponsored, recognised, rewarded and ultimately trusted with leadership after they enter.
This is why positioning diversity and merit as natural opponents gets us nowhere.
It assumes that the systems we inherited were already perfectly capable of identifying the most talented people and that attempts to widen opportunity interfere with that process. But if opportunities, networks, recognition and sponsorship have never been distributed equally, then widening access to them may not undermine merit at all.
It may help us see merit that was previously overlooked.
The question is not whether merit matters. We know it does.
The harder question is whether our institutions have been equally good at recognising, developing and rewarding it wherever it appears.
If we really want “the best person for the job”, perhaps we need to spend a little less time assuming that the CV tells us everything we need to know and a little more time asking what happened before it reached the interview panel.
As the wider conversation surrounding Professor Jason Arday continues, we hope it can do so with both rigour and humanity, without asking one person's life to carry the weight of an argument much larger than themselves.
