The death of Cambridge University professor Jason Alday was quickly seized upon by two opposing narratives.
One narrative holds that he was a typical product of DEI policies undermining academic standards: the university, in order to produce a symbolically significant Black professor, ignored the credentials, papers, and personal record that ought to have been rigorously scrutinized. The other narrative holds that he was a victim of a racist public manhunt: a Black scholar with autism who, because of a few mistakes, was subjected to humiliation and persecution far beyond the bounds of ordinary academic dispute.
I think these two narratives need not be mutually exclusive.
A scholar’s papers can very well contain serious problems, and at the same time, the public judgment he suffers can also far exceed the reasonable limits of academic inquiry. Alday cannot be exempt from scrutiny simply because he is Black and autistic, nor can he, merely because he is suspected of academic misconduct, be made the scapegoat for an entire Black community or for all equality policies.
However, that does not mean we can stop at the safe conclusion that “both sides have problems.” The Alday affair does indeed expose a systemic issue worth asking about: when a person’s identity can bring enormous moral prestige to an institution, will the institution still scrutinize him in the ordinary and rigorous way?
Cambridge’s 2023 appointment announcement did not merely declare that it had hired a professor of the sociology of education. The announcement prominently emphasized that the 37-year-old Alday would become the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s history; it also recounted in detail that he had been diagnosed with autism as a child, could not speak before the age of 11, and could not read or write before the age of 18, directly linking his appointment to increasing minority representation and building an inclusive university. Identity and an inspirational story were plainly not incidental information about this appointment; they were an important part of Cambridge’s explanation to the public of what it meant.
The controversies that followed did not arise suddenly overnight either. Public reporting shows that as early as 2023, scholars had already raised questions to him and to Cambridge about textual overlap in Alday’s papers, research methods, and problems with interview quotations. By 2026, Cambridge was still describing him as the victim of an effort to damage his reputation maliciously, and cited earlier no-misconduct findings from other institutions; but after more materials emerged, Cambridge again launched an investigation into his academic credentials, the appointment process, and the related complaints.
Therefore, the Alday case is not only a question of whether one person plagiarized; it is also a stress test of the logical structure of DEI.
What, exactly, must DEI respect: persons or groups?
In principle, I support the three ideals represented by DEI: diversity, equity, and inclusion.
I believe difference is beautiful. Human beings should not pursue becoming exactly the same; rather, while maintaining the necessary degree of consensus, we should preserve diversity amid unity. The diversity worth protecting also goes far beyond skin color and gender; it includes ideas, culture, religion, ways of life, and the freedom people have to choose, transform, or resist various technologies.
But why should different people deserve inclusion? This cannot be because “difference itself is sacred,” nor because every group possesses a collective personality that is beyond criticism. The fundamental reason DEI is valid remains this:
All people are born equal.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion should first and foremost refer to concrete human beings, not to reified cultural, religious, or ethnic entities endowed with personality.
Society should equally protect the basic rights of Christians, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and atheists. That does not mean that the doctrines of various religions must all be regarded as fully equivalent in truth and moral value, nor does it mean that anything within religious traditions can be shielded from criticism simply because of “cultural difference.”
People from a given cultural background should receive equal respect, but “culture” itself is not a person with dignity who can feel insulted. If a certain culture upholds slavery, racial hierarchy, or systematic discrimination against women, then it can and should be resisted. What we respect are the people living within a culture, not every institution and proposition contained in that culture, unconditionally.
Likewise, society should protect the basic right of people who believe in a flat earth to express their views, but it has no obligation to place flat-earth doctrine on the same epistemic footing as modern astronomy. A flat-earther, an anti-evolutionist, and a scientist all possess equal personhood as human beings; but the theories they put forward plainly do not have equal evidential quality.
Here there is a distinction that must be firmly kept in mind:
People possess equal dignity; opinions do not possess equal correctness.
To include a person does not mean to agree with everything he says; to protect a person’s right to speak does not mean guaranteeing that his speech will be respected, published, accepted, or highly rated. Inclusion provides an opportunity to enter public discussion, not immunity from scrutiny over the outcome of that discussion.
Will “everyone is equal” suppress pluralism?
Insisting that “everyone is equal” sounds, at first glance, close to some kind of universalism: as if there exists in the world a set of absolute values applicable to everyone, to which all cultures must submit.
But I do not understand myself as a universalist in that sense. I would rather call my position pluralism and relativism.
The relativism I mean here does not claim that all views are equally correct, nor does it deny that there are hierarchies among scientific theories. Rather, it acknowledges that each person is situated in a finite historical, cultural, and cognitive location. No one can, simply by virtue of their identity, declare that they naturally stand on the side of absolute truth.
Precisely because no one possesses this privilege, everyone should have an equal opportunity to speak, to question, and to correct.
Therefore, equality among all people is not some weighty doctrine standing outside pluralism; it is the minimum rule that allows pluralism to endure. It does not prescribe what each person should believe or how one should live; it only denies that anyone acquires, by virtue of bloodline, religion, gender, or class, any a priori qualification to dominate others.
Pluralism does not mean that everything is equally right; it means that no person’s error may be preemptively assumed solely on the basis of identity, and no person’s views may be exempt from criticism solely on the basis of identity.
What, exactly, is the relation between equality and equity?
When the discussion enters DEI policy, another pair of concepts often appears: equality and equity.
In contemporary English usage, the E in DEI is usually equity, not equality. The former is usually translated as “equity” or “fairness,” emphasizing the provision of corresponding conditions according to different circumstances; the latter is usually translated as “equality,” emphasizing equal status, rights, and opportunities. Many DEI frameworks also interpret equity as promoting fair treatment and full participation for all, while paying attention to the real obstacles different people face.
So a common question arises: if I insist on equality for all, does that mean I can only support equality and must oppose equity?
Not at all.
I support both equality and equity, because they address different levels of the problem.
Equality answers this question: does a person possess equal personhood, basic rights, and civic standing?
Equity answers this question: when faced with different real-world situations, how should one make judgments proportionate to the concrete circumstances?
Equality is the foundation of equity; equity is the concrete application of the principle of equality once it enters a complex reality. Once equity is detached from equality for all, it can easily become identity allocation; if equality completely refuses to examine real differences, it can also degenerate into emptiness.
“All people are born equal” has never meant that people are, in an experiential sense, exactly the same at birth. Some are healthy, others disabled; some are rich, others poor; some are young, others old; some achieve outstanding accomplishments, others do not. People are equal in personhood and basic rights, but that does not mean society must treat everyone in exactly the same way in every context.
Society builds ramps for wheelchair users, provides subsidies to poor families, gives the elderly priority seating, and grants certain forms of deference to the families of martyrs, veterans, or outstanding athletes; all of these are differential treatments.
What should these differential treatments be called, exactly?
I see no need to repackage them as “everyone is treated in exactly the same way.” They are preferential treatments, and preferential treatment is not inherently shameful.
Preferential treatment can be reasonable precisely because it acknowledges that people are not equal along some specific dimension: the elderly may be physically weaker, disabled people may face environmental barriers, the poor may have fewer resources, and outstanding athletes may be accorded special regard because of their achievements.
This inequality is not a hierarchy of personhood, but a difference in circumstance, need, contribution, or social role. Equity does not require pretending these differences do not exist; it requires us to explain: why does one kind of difference justify one kind of differential treatment?
Compensatory preferential treatment is not equality
It is precisely in this sense that I still hold firmly to a simple judgment:
Compensatory preferential treatment is not equality.
This sentence is easily misunderstood as saying that people who suffer injustice do not need compensation. But what it truly criticizes is not compensation, but identity-based preferential treatment dispensed in the name of compensation.
Real compensation has a clear structure: who carried out the injury, who suffered the loss, what causal relation exists between the injury and the loss, and how restitution ought to be made. If someone is unlawfully dismissed because of racial discrimination, he can of course demand compensation. If a clear policy of discrimination once excluded a group of identifiable people, those people can also receive redress collectively. Here the object of compensation is not just one person, but the reason they are grouped together is that they share a common and provable fact of victimization, not because they share a skin color that can be traced infinitely back through their ancestors. Compensation is the correction of unreasonable differential treatment. Preferential treatment is different. Giving up one’s seat to an elderly person is not because young people caused the elderly to grow old; helping the poor is not necessarily because taxpayers personally caused their poverty. These arrangements arise from a civilized society’s care for the vulnerable, not from a form of restitution in which creditor and debtor can be precisely identified. Preferential treatment is the recognition of some form of reasonable differential treatment. What is called “compensatory preferential treatment” is precisely the conflation of these two relations. It cannot clearly specify which person harmed which person today, yet it turns injustices that happened in history into an entitlement to benefits that some present-day identity can inherit, while also turning another identity into an inheritable debt. This is not compensation, but preferential treatment dressed up in the language of compensation. I do not oppose compensation, nor do I oppose preferential treatment. What I oppose is obscuring the nature of preferential treatment under the name of compensation, and then presenting that preferential treatment as an inevitable requirement of “equality for all.” If a person is poor in real life, then poverty is a condition that can be observed and assessed, and society can provide help on that basis. If a person has a disability, then the specific barrier can also serve as the basis for reasonable accommodation. But if, merely because a person is Black, we preemptively assume that he is poor, vulnerable, lacking educational resources, or in need of lower competitive standards, then that is precisely substituting ethnic stereotypes for individual judgment. A policy cannot on the one hand declare that skin color cannot determine a person’s ability, responsibility, or condition; and on the other hand, when allocating opportunities and benefits, treat skin color as sufficient grounds for presuming that person’s condition. To think that Black people should be mistreated and to think that Black people should be treated preferentially certainly have different historical backgrounds and real-world consequences. But they share one point in their logical structure: both first reduce concrete persons to members of an ethnic group, and then infer from that group identity what they ought to receive. ## Why statistical gaps cannot directly generate policy answers Supporting ethnic statistics does not mean supporting the direct distribution of benefits according to ethnicity. We can of course statistically compare the income, education, promotion, health, and judicial outcomes of different ethnic groups. Significant disparities may indicate institutional discrimination, but they may also arise from class, region, family structure, migration history, educational resources, or other indirect factors. Statistical gaps should be the starting point for investigation, but they cannot directly become a compensation formula. This problem can be explained with a simple statistical thought experiment. Suppose we discover that the longer the shorts worn by NBA players are, the higher their average scoring is. Even if this correlation were extremely stable, we still could not demand that a short player put on longer shorts in order to improve his performance in the game. The real intervening variable may be height: the taller a person is, the longer the shorts he usually wears; height may in turn be related to scoring ability in certain positions. Forcing shorts to be longer will not make a person taller; on the contrary, it may hinder athletic movement. Ethnic representation can also involve the same kind of causal confusion. The higher the proportion of Black professors at a university, the more inclusive the campus culture may seem. But that cannot directly prove that merely increasing the number of Black professors by artificial means will necessarily create inclusiveness. A more reasonable causal direction may be this: a system truly reduces discrimination, improves educational opportunities and hiring procedures, and as a result people of different ethnic groups find it easier to enter the university on the basis of their own abilities, with the proportion of Black professors rising accordingly. In such a case, representation is first and foremost the result of institutional fairness, not a substitute for institutional fairness. Of course, representation may in turn affect student trust, research topics, and campus relations. But whoever argues for improving institutions by adjusting ethnic composition has the responsibility to explain the specific causal mechanism involved, and cannot simply take correlation as proof of policy effectiveness. ## If group averages are equal, is it fairer for individuals? Let us look at a minimal numerical model. Suppose a society has three Black people, with resources of 1, 4, and 7; and seven White people, with resources of 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, and 10. The average resource level among Black people is 4, and among White people is 5. From the perspective of group means alone, Black people as a whole are at a disadvantage. Now implement a policy that allocates according to skin color: each Black person gains 0.7, and each White person loses 0.3. After the adjustment, the average resource level for both Black and White people becomes 4.7, and the group statistics achieve complete equality. Has the policy therefore achieved a brilliant success? The poorest four people were the Black person with resources of 1 and the three White people with resources of 1, 2, and 3. Their total resources originally amounted to 7, but after the policy they become 6.8. The richest three people were the Black person with resources of 7 and the two White people with resources of 8 and 10. Their total resources originally amounted to 25, but after the policy they instead become 25.1. The group averages have become equal, but the lower ranks as a whole are poorer, while the rich as a whole are richer. A wealthy Black person gains benefits merely because of his skin color, while a poor White person bears a cost merely because of his skin color. Equality in ethnic statistics, at the level of individuals and social strata, instead creates new inequality. This example does not prove that every policy that takes race into account will produce the same result, but it is enough to prove that:Moreover, everyone belongs to many groups at the same time. Apart from skin color, one can also be classified by gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, mother tongue, disability status, and regional background. If every group disparity automatically generates a set of welfare claims and debts, society will ultimately become a system that keeps calculating identity points. Groups can serve as statistical units for describing social phenomena, but they cannot, merely on the basis of statistical disparity, automatically become moral units for assigning guilt and benefit. ## Must equality for all be applied to every private choice? At this point, another question may arise: if we oppose differential treatment based on identity, does that mean mate selection, friendship, private cooperation, and indeed all social choices must adopt a completely neutral and uniform standard? Of course not. In matchmaking, I may judge by appearance; in friendship, I may favor people with compatible temperaments; in choosing a private assistant or a partner, I may also trust a familiar cultural background more. Love, friendship, and private trust cannot be distributed according to public quotas. “All human beings are born equal” is a basic principle, not a mechanical dogma requiring that emotions and opportunities be evenly allocated in every relationship. What really needs to be distinguished is private choice and public power. When the state uses law to force citizens to obey some hierarchy of identity, and when a person chooses in private life the people he likes, these are obviously not the same thing. The stronger public power is, the stricter the demand for equality becomes; the more purely private the sphere is, the greater the room for discretionary choice. Private universities, then, stand between the two. They are not state agencies, but neither are they wholly equivalent to a private dinner party. They may enjoy public research funding, tax benefits, and degree accreditation, and they also wield enormous power over individual careers and social reputation; at the same time, they need to preserve their own educational traditions, academic directions, and freedom in personnel selection. Therefore, from the standpoint of educational freedom, private universities may possess fairly broad discretion in hiring. Within the bounds permitted by law, a faculty team can even choose a candidate because he is especially compatible with the team, has similar research interests, or simply “looks right.” Academic judgment can never be completely reduced to an objective scorecard. Private schools may also openly favor the children of alumni, the children of donors, or certain people closely connected to the school’s traditions. I do not advocate that all such preferences must be prohibited by the state. But these preferences must be honestly called preferences, and cannot be renamed as equality for all. If a school openly declares, “We will look after the children of alumni,” then it is implementing an explicit educational policy. Students may like it more because of that, or may reject it because of that, but they cannot say that it is secretly betraying a neutral commitment it never made in the first place. The real question is not whether all standards of choice must be made public, but rather:Equal averages between two groups cannot serve as sufficient evidence that society has become fairer.
A school may retain private discretion, but it cannot on the one hand declare that admissions and hiring completely do not consider identity, while on the other hand secretly making certain identities a plus point; it may acknowledge that it gives preferential treatment to the children of alumni, but it cannot promote that preferential treatment as the outcome of universal equality.Once an institution publicly proclaims a certain principle, its actual behavior must be self-consistent with that principle.
It can even openly say that it wants to choose a certain ethnic group, but if, in the name of “academic freedom,” one allows a school to give priority to choosing Black people, then logically it is also hard to explain why the very same freedom absolutely does not allow another school to give priority to choosing white people. Either the law must uniformly prohibit making choices on the basis of race, or academic freedom must be logically symmetrical.
I do not think good universities should recruit according to race. But the key here is: one cannot dress up a form of identity preference that opens only in one direction as a neutral and universal principle of equality.
What should academic hiring evaluate
University hiring can of course take a person’s life experience into account.
Suppose a certain job requires long-term work with Black communities; then a candidate’s ability to build trust with that community, fieldwork experience, language ability, and actual interpersonal experience may all be relevant to the position.
But these concrete abilities cannot be automatically inferred from skin color.
A Black person may have no close ties to Black communities; a white person may also very well live, work, and conduct research within Black communities for a long time. In certain situations, in fact, having a white scholar publicly speak about Black experiences may, because of the identity contrast, produce a particular kind of persuasive force.
Therefore, a university may say:
We chose him because he has long studied this community and has built rich and credible connections with the relevant students.
But it should not say:
We chose him because he is Black, so he naturally understands Black students better.
The latter statement has the same inferential structure as “women are naturally more suited to caring for children” or “Asians are naturally better at math”: all of them substitute group stereotypes for judgment of the individual.
If “because he is white, so hire him first” would be regarded as discrimination, then “because he is Black, so hire him first” should not automatically become a correct and respectable hiring reason.
Skin color can be one component of a person’s life experience, but it cannot become proof of his ability.
Academic standards cannot change because of identity
University hiring can include discretion, but whether citations in a paper are proper, whether the data are real, and whether the research method is reliable cannot be judged by “whether it looks pleasing to the eye.”
What academic evaluation should assess is the paper, not the author’s personal background. In principle, peer review should, as far as possible, exclude irrelevant information such as name, ethnicity, gender, age, and academic status from interfering with judgment.
This does not mean that academic institutions cannot provide reasonable accommodations for disabled or neurodivergent people. A student with autism can receive more explicit citation training, more time for study, tutoring better suited to their cognitive style, and writing support.
But reasonable accommodation adjusts the process of participation, not the standard for the ownership of the result.
Aldai denied intentionally committing academic misconduct, and at one point linked some textual problems to autism and to a tendency to learn through imitation.
Even if this explanation were completely true in a psychological sense, it still could not automatically change the rules governing authorship in academic writing. Autism can explain why a person is more likely to make a certain kind of mistake, and it can also affect our judgment of his subjective responsibility, but it cannot thereby make other people’s words into his original achievement.
Explanation is not exoneration, and support is not lowering standards.
A truly equal academic system should help different people reach the same standards, rather than setting different standards of truthfulness and citation for different people on the basis of identity.
The investigation is not over; can one question DEI?
Regarding the Aldai事件, one might raise a reasonable counterquestion: Cambridge’s investigation has not yet been completed, so on what grounds do we believe that DEI policy played a negative role in it?
Admittedly, at present there is not sufficient evidence to prove that Cambridge hired Aldai because of his Black identity. The university’s final investigation may also attribute the problem to credential screening, paper checking, division of responsibility, or the negligence of specific individuals.
But the discussion of institutional causes, from the outset, does not have to wait for the parties involved to confess in person.
If an institution benefits from a certain ideology and reputational narrative, it will rarely announce bluntly in an internal report: “The problem lies in the ideas we follow.” It is more likely to break the failure down into procedural loopholes, communication errors, and individual dereliction of duty.
Of course, commentators in civil society cannot pass suspicion off as a conclusion, but they can make probabilistic judgments based on the public facts. We can examine: what symbolic benefits did the institution gain from a particular appointment; whether it prominently publicized the candidate’s identity value; when confronted with concrete questions, did it first verify the facts, or first suspect the critic’s motives; and if the candidate did not have the same symbolic significance of identity, whether the institution would still have taken the same attitude.
In the Aldai事件, although we still cannot prove that Cambridge hired him because of DEI, there are sufficient reasons to suspect that Aldai’s symbolic value as the “youngest Black professor,” an autistic inspirational figure, and a scholar of higher-education equity made the institutional cost of acknowledging his problems especially high.
Once a person is fashioned by an institution into a moral symbol, fact-checking him can easily be interpreted as an attack on the entire equal-rights cause; and when the institution has already wagered its own reputation on that symbol, it becomes even harder to correct errors in time while they are still small.
This may create a dangerous cycle:
The institution rapidly manufactures a star on the basis of identity narratives;
identity symbolism suppresses normal scrutiny;
problems accumulate and suddenly erupt in external public opinion;
an investigation that should have been confined to a paper and a résumé ultimately turns into a hunt across a person’s entire character and life experience.
Shortly after Aldai resigned, he was found dead. Police stated that his death was unexpected, but did not believe there were suspicious circumstances. The existing public evidence cannot support the assertion that DEI, the media, or any specific individual directly caused his death.
Therefore, the “tragedy” I speak of first refers to the institutional process of symbolization, protection, delayed correction, and eventual collapse that came before, rather than making any unverified medical or psychological causal judgment about his death.
In this sense, I am still willing to make a sharp judgment:
DEI is not yet the already-convicted chief culprit in the Aldai事件, but it is at least a major suspect with motive and opportunity, and it has left institutional fingerprints.
The Aldai case is not a verdict convicting DEI, but it is enough to serve as an indictment for an investigation into identity-representation policies.
What, fundamentally, may be wrong with DEI
What DEI originally tried to oppose was the unjust pre-judgment of a person because of identity.
But when DEI takes ethnic groups as the basic units for allocating resources and honors, it may reproduce the very same structure: a person is still not evaluated because of what he specifically did, what he experienced, or what he can do; rather, because he is classified into a certain group, he is assigned benefits, responsibilities, or moral standing in advance.
Such a policy may look like it is opposing discrimination, but in fact it may preserve the most fundamental way of thinking behind discrimination.
On the way up, Aldai was treated as a symbol of Blackness, of autism, and of the university’s achievement in diversity; on the way down, he was again treated by others as a symbol of a Black scholar and of DEI’s failure.
Both sides, though they may seem opposed, actually committed the same mistake: they did not first treat him as a concrete person.
A Black scholar’s achievements cannot prove that the entire Black community is superior; a Black scholar’s academic problems cannot prove that Black scholars as a whole are untrustworthy. One cannot be lenient toward Aldai’s paper because he is Black, nor can one use the problems in his paper as an opportunity to attack all Black scholars.
A critic may harbor racist motives, but that cannot prove the textual overlap he points out does not exist; Aldai’s paper may indeed have had serious problems, but that also cannot prove that racists’ prejudices about the abilities of ethnic groups are correct.
To focus on the matter and not the person means, on the one hand, not suppressing criticism because of identity, and on the other, not expanding criticism of an individual into a conviction of an ethnic group.
Let DEI once again point toward every individual
The DEI I support should not be a system that settles historical debts by ethnic group, but one that points once again toward the individual.
Diversity means protecting everyone’s freedom to become a different person, rather than predefining how many seats each ethnic group must occupy.
Equality means that each person possesses the same personhood and basic rights, and that one’s guilt, abilities, and due status cannot be determined solely by ancestry.
Fairness means making judgments according to the concrete harm, needs, obstacles, and contributions each individual has encountered, rather than inferring an individual’s situation from group averages.
Inclusion means giving everyone the opportunity to enter public life, participate in competition, and express opinions, rather than guaranteeing that their opinions will be approved of, or that they will be spared criticism and elimination.
Compensation must correspond to demonstrable harm; preferential treatment must correspond to needs, contributions, or relationships tied to a specific situation; statistical disparities may prompt investigation, but they cannot directly generate identity quotas; culture may be criticized, but the people within a culture should receive equal civic protection.
True DEI should protect differences among people, while refusing to let anyone’s identity come before his actions, circumstances, contributions, and responsibilities in deciding what he ought to receive.
Equality among all people is not a constraint external to DEI, nor is it some obsolete formalism. It is the common foundation on which diversity, equity, and inclusion can stand.
Once it is severed from this foundation, DEI can easily mutate from a principle for protecting diversity into a system of identity rationing; from an ideal of opposing discrimination into a hierarchical order in which some people are treated more leniently because of their identity, while others bear costs because of theirs.
At that point, Orwell’s satire will once again become reality:
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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