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Today is Sunday, 16th August 2026. I have just returned from a walk in Richmond Park with my wife and sat down to dictate some thoughts prompted by the recent and deeply sad death of Professor Jason Arday. His death has made me reflect on something much broader than the circumstances surrounding one academic. It has made me think about what universities fundamentally believe about human potential.

These thoughts are personal. They come from more than 25 years of working with students and researchers from many parts of the world, from my own journey through several educational cultures, and from the complicated colonial history of the country in which I was born.

The fundamental optimism of education

I believe a university should be founded on a simple but powerful idea that the intellectual capacity of human beings can be transformed through education.

Students and researchers arrive with different levels of knowledge, different skills, different childhoods and very different opportunities. Through education, training, intellectual debate, reflection, mentorship and exposure to people who think differently from themselves, they can become people they could not have imagined becoming.

This belief should stand taller than any assumptions about intellectual potential based on ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation or other group identities.

This does not mean that everybody is identical. Nor does it require us to claim that genetics has no influence on human characteristics. It means something much more practical for an educator: we should never presume that a person's membership of a population tells us the limits of what that individual can become.

Perhaps my strongest reason for believing in education comes from my own life. I was born in Sri Lanka. I received my early education there and studied engineering at the University of Moratuwa. I then went to Japan for my Master's and PhD. Japan changed me.

I subsequently went to the United States and encountered still other intellectual cultures through Johns Hopkins, Harvard and MIT. Eventually, I came to Britain, where I became a professor.

So, what made me?

Certainly, I carry something from Sri Lanka: my childhood, family, culture and early education. But I also carry something from Japan, something from America and something from Britain. Teachers, supervisors, colleagues, students and friends from many countries have contributed to my knowledge, confidence, skills and attitudes.

It would therefore seem strange for me to explain what I have become primarily through my genetic ancestry. Instead, we are also products of what other human beings invest in us.

 The photo taken by my diving instructor Rohan De Silva at Scuba Safaris Trincomalee a couple of weeks ago this summer shows that we can acquire new skills at any time in life. I had never done scuba diving before, but a theory course and 3 days of practical diving first in a pool and then in the sea transformed what I believe I can do in diving.

In fact this is in the essence of the book I recently wrote - that we are pliable systems tuning and exchanging information in an interconnected web.

What my students have taught me

In the roughly 25 years since completing my PhD, 

I have trained 20 PhD students and more than five postdoctoral researchers. They have come from British, American, Australian, Spanish, Iraqi Kurdish, Thai, Russian, Ecuadorian, Chinese, Irish, Lithuanian, Sri Lankan, Iranian, Italian and French backgrounds, among others.

They all arrived with something: knowledge, skills, curiosity and experiences. But I also remember their struggles during their first months in the lab: finding the right research question, learning new analytical and experimental methods, developing writing and presentation skills, dealing with experiments that failed, responding to criticism, and finding confidence in their own ideas.

Sometimes their first papers were rejected. Then I watched them change.

Three or four years later, the person writing the final papers of a PhD could be remarkably different from the person who first entered the laboratory. Some of those later papers are among the pieces of work of which I am most proud.

For me, this is everyday evidence of the transformative power of education.

There is a fundamental commitment between educator and student: I do not yet know what you can become. Let us find out.

Human potential is not a zero-sum resource

Human intellectual capacity should not be treated with the old instincts of a land-based society, in which wealth and power were largely determined by the ownership of finite resources. Intellectual capacity is different: it is something we can cultivate and expand for the good of all on this planet.

The more people we enable to develop their capabilities, the greater the pool of knowledge, creativity and productive capacity available to everybody.

An educated person can discover something that did not previously exist. A researcher can develop a technology. An entrepreneur can create an industry. A doctor can develop a treatment. An artist can change how millions of people understand an experience. A teacher can educate hundreds of people who subsequently educate thousands more.

³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ, the place where I work now

There is an interesting historical connection between this idea and the place where I now work as a professor.

³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ's history is intertwined with the development of South Kensington as a centre for science, technology and education following the Great Exhibition of 1851. The Exhibition, championed by Prince Albert, took place in Victorian Britain during a period of enormous industrial development and imperial expansion.

Its financial surplus helped acquire land in South Kensington that subsequently became home to an extraordinary collection of institutions.

Today, within a short walk, we find ³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ, the Science Museum, Natural History Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, Royal College of Art, Royal College of Music and Royal Albert Hall.

Collectively, this small part of London embodies an idea I find remarkable: science and engineering are enriched by interaction with art, design, music, culture, nature and history.

The underlying hypothesis, at least as I see it, is that the transformation of a community is best done through a holistic exposure to different and sometimes competing ways of understanding nature, technology and humanity. It is through the tensions between these different viewpoints, and the reflection they provoke, that new ways of thinking can emerge.

This is something I experience every day at ³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ. I encounter colleagues and students from across the world. We have different accents, cultures, educational histories and ways of thinking. We challenge one another, support one another and learn from one another.

That diversity is not an obstacle to intellectual excellence. It is part of the environment that creates it.

Yet, why do we still see resistance to greater diversity of backgrounds across the hierarchies of industry and academia? And why does some of that resistance come from those who believe in ideas such as “ethnic realism”, biological hierarchies between groups, or other forms of supremacist thinking?

What the tensions in the social transformation during the colonial history of Sri Lanka taught me

Colonial histories differ enormously across Africa, Asia and the Americas, and based on who colonised who. I can speak more personally about Sri Lanka.

Since 1505, Sri Lanka experienced successive periods of Portuguese, Dutch and British colonial rule, although their geographical reach and influence differed considerably. Portuguese and Dutch rule was concentrated mainly in the coastal regions, where communities absorbed new vocabulary, crafts, legal traditions, religious influences and cultural practices into the existing social fabric.

The British eventually brought the entire island under colonial rule in 1815 and consequently had a broader influence on administration, education and ways of life. Each colonial period therefore left complicated legacies in language, religion, architecture, commerce, law and culture. These encounters also contributed to the emergence of distinct communities, including the Burghers, with mixed European and Sri Lankan ancestry and cultural heritage. My hometown, Galle, still carries a striking physical reminder of this layered history in the magnificent fortifications that dominate its old town.

The British colonial period brought its own exploitation and inequalities, but it also contributed to the expansion of modern schooling and institutions of higher education. This interacted with existing indigenous educational traditions and gradually opened new routes for social mobility.

My own school, , grew from the Methodist missionary educational tradition. My experience there exposed me simultaneously to Sri Lankan and Western traditions. We played cricket and encountered Western music while learning within our own language, history and culture.

Education did not have to erase one identity and replace it with another. It could enlarge the intellectual world available to us. At Richmond College, I experienced an education in which traditional Sri Lankan cultural values could coexist with intellectual traditions inherited from the West. It was this interaction - not simply the replacement of one culture by another - that contributed significantly to the rise of a confident and increasingly powerful professional middle class in Sri Lanka.

When education disrupts social hierarchy

The Sri Lankan writer Martin Wickramasinghe captured aspects of the enormous social transformation that occurred as traditional village hierarchies encountered education, commerce, professional employment and modernity.

His famous trilogy - Gamperaliya, Kaliyugaya, and Yuganthaya - portrays a society in transition. Gamperaliya portrays the weakening of old social structures in early twentieth-century Sri Lanka and the emergence of a new middle class, enabled partly by the expansion of education under British colonial rule. It also captures the apprehension this social mobility created among sections of the traditional elite, as education, commerce and professional advancement began to challenge inherited status and established hierarchies of power. Kaliyugaya continues a story around a love affair between a young doctor from a former low class family and a girl from a village chief family.  Yuganthaya extends the story of social transformation further into industrial capitalism, English educated professionals and class conflict. 

This points to something important: Education does not transform society without creating friction with established notions of entitlement.

Wickramasinghe shows how British form of open school education and new economic opportunities allowed people outside traditional elites to acquire professional and social status, challenging inherited hierarchies. Elsewhere in other publications about post colonial conflicts discuss how perceived disproportionate distribution of educational and economic opportunities across Sinhalese and Tamil communities became politically contentious.

Sri Lanka's later ethnic conflicts had many causes and cannot reasonably be reduced to education or colonialism alone. But its history demonstrates how profoundly opportunity, education, language, political power and social mobility can interact across generations.

Why the Jason Arday controversy troubles me

This brings me back to the event that prompted these reflections.

Nathan Cofnas has publicly advanced controversial arguments concerning race, genetics, intelligence and meritocracy. Earlier, I reflected on Martin Wickramasinghe's portrayal of a Sri Lankan society in which education and social mobility disrupted established hierarchies, creating tensions between emerging groups and those accustomed to an older distribution of status and power. I wonder whether there is a broader parallel worth considering today.

Universities and industries across the Western world have changed remarkably within a few generations. People whose ethnicity, gender or social background might once have effectively excluded them from positions of academic authority now occupy them. Such rapid changes in who holds intellectual status and institutional power can generate tensions, just as social transformation did in the Sri Lankan colonial and post colonial society Wickramasinghe portrayed.

I cannot know whether such tensions explain Nathan Cofnas's own thinking, nor do I need to speculate about his personal motivations. His arguments concerning race, genetics, intelligence and meritocracy should instead be examined rigorously on their scientific evidence, assumptions and reasoning, just as controversial arguments on any other subject should be.

However, I found this dimension particularly troubling in Cofnas's discussion of Arday. , Cofnas appeared to place the investigation of Arday within his much broader intellectual and political project concerning race, meritocracy and academia, even discussing how the episode might contribute to what he described as a “revolution”. If I have understood his remarks correctly, this is precisely where I think we should be cautious: the investigation of one person's academic conduct should not become a vehicle for establishing claims about the intellectual worth of an entire population.

Jason Arday subsequently became the subject of intense scrutiny concerning plagiarism in his doctoral thesis and other work.

I want to separate two issues that can easily become entangled.

If there is evidence of plagiarism, it should be investigated. Academic integrity matters enormously. Plagiarism should not be excused because somebody belongs to a minority, has overcome adversity or is neurodivergent.

But an allegation of misconduct should trigger a fair and proportionate academic process, as has been undertaken by Jason Arday’s PhD-awarding university and the University of Cambridge.

A fair investigation would address questions such as: What was copied? How extensive was it? Did it significantly affect the intellectual contribution or principal conclusions of the work? What was the context? What explanation does the accused person provide? What consequence is proportionate to the evidence?

However, social media and even parts of the mainstream media appeared to take judgment into their own hands, turning Jason Arday into a symbol through which a much larger ideological argument about the intellectual capacity of an ethnic group was being fought.

The danger of public punishment

Social media complicates this enormously.

An academic investigation has procedures, evidence, opportunities to respond and some possibility of proportionality. Social media is weak in these constraints. A legitimate question about a particular passage in a thesis can rapidly become a judgement about an entire career, then about a person's character, and eventually about the social group that person supposedly represents.

I am particularly concerned about what happens when the individual belongs to a minority group. There is a temptation on social media to take the shortcomings of one individual and use them to paint an entire community with the same broad brush. This puts pressure on under-represented communities of scholars and professionals to carry a disproportionate burden that members of a majority group rarely have to carry: their slightest failure can be recruited as evidence for a much larger argument about the capabilities of people who share their ethnicity. 

There is an unsettling historical echo here: individuals from marginalised groups being publicly singled out and made to carry the alleged failings of an entire group. In its most horrific historical forms, racial dehumanisation and collective attribution helped legitimise persecution and lynching of Black people.

Equality includes the equality of the freedom to be imperfect

There is another aspect of equality that receives less attention.

Academics make mistakes. Papers are rejected. Hypotheses turn out to be wrong. Experiments fail. We sometimes exercise poor judgement. We learn, correct ourselves and continue.

Serious misconduct is different and should have consequences. But we should be particularly careful when the mistake of an individual from a minority becomes evidence in a wider argument about the legitimacy or competence of the group to which that person belongs.

What should a university believe?

For me, this ultimately comes down to a choice about what kind of institution a university wants to be.

After 25 years of watching young researchers develop, after being educated across several countries myself, and after reflecting on the history of the country where I was born and the university where I now work, I know which question I would rather spend my life trying to answer.

That, to me, is the fundamental optimism and responsibility of education, innovation and value creation.

In that sense, I am proud of the more than 25 researchers who have passed through my lab and now hold productive positions in different parts of the world. I am equally proud of the two spinout companies that emerged from our work and, even at their early stages, together employ nearly 30 people, and of the publications we have contributed to the continuing process of intellectual debate.

These are not simply outputs of a laboratory. They are examples of what can happen when people invest knowledge, time, trust and opportunity in one another.

The greatest value a university creates may ultimately be not what it discovers, but what the people passing through it become, and what they, in turn, enable others to become.

Note on using AI: I dictated these reflections in a series of sections to ChatGPT and asked it to organise them into a coherent structure. I also asked it to critique my narrative and challenge parts of my reasoning. I then reviewed, edited and refined the article before publishing it. I would not have been able to organise my thoughts and write this piece in a single Sunday without the support of AI. So, I thank the pioneers of generative AI for creating tools that can help us write - and, importantly, think self-critically about our own writing - faster than before.