Toyin Falola
A PANEL DISCUSSION ON JASON ARDAY AND RACE IN THE ACADEMY
(This is the third and final report on a panel on Jason Arday and Race in the Academy, September 6, 2026. For the transcript, see: https://www.youtube.com/live/yBcCf2eOcbY?si=poIIXytvmqpU9Sqe)
What if the future of the academy depends not on producing more exceptional individuals, but on building stronger intellectual communities? This question emerged from the panel discussion on Jason Arday and race in the academy. When the conversation’s focus moved beyond the controversies surrounding one scholar and toward a much larger question: who defines excellence, where does knowledge come from, and can communities themselves become authorities in determining what intellectual value means?
This was where Professor Vik Bahl offered an important intervention in the discussion. Bahl did not simply argue for the rejection of standards associated with Eurocentric and white supremacist institutions. He pushed the conversation further by asking what should come after that rejection. If inherited standards have excluded or diminished particular communities, then critique alone is insufficient. Communities must also be able to set their own standards of excellence and expectations and hold accountable those who purport to represent them. The importance of this argument rests in its different scale of analysis. Universities generally measure excellence on an individual basis. They find the star student, the distinguished teacher, the renowned researcher, or the great intellect. Degrees, publications, awards, and promotions define excellence.
Sabelo McInziba pushed this argument to its most provocative conclusion: perhaps Black people should reject the demand for Black excellence and instead insist upon the possibility of Black ordinariness. His argument was not that excellence is undesirable. It was that excellence becomes dangerous when it becomes the standard by which an entire population is judged. The exceptional Black figure is elevated precisely because the surrounding system continues to make ordinary Black presence difficult. The exception becomes evidence that the rule is fair. One person makes it, and the institution can point to that person as proof that others could too if only they worked hard enough. Structural barriers then disappear behind an individual success story.
McInziba illustrated this through the idea of the exception that confirms the rule. In his account, Black exceptionalism elevates certain individuals while simultaneously isolating them. The exceptional figure becomes an ideal against which other Black people are expected to measure themselves. Rather than expanding what Black life can look like, exceptionalism can narrow it. There are the exceptional ones, and then there is everyone else. McInziba argued that this creates a particular form of loneliness at the top because the Black individual who has crossed the institutional gate is still expected to carry the meaning of that crossing for everyone behind the gate.
The power of this argument lies in its refusal to make the individual disappear. McInziba carefully acknowledges Arday’s agency while locating that agency within structural conditions. This distinction matters. Structural analysis should not erase personal responsibility, just as individual responsibility should not erase structures. A person makes choices, produces scholarship, writes books, accepts positions, and enters institutions. But those actions take place within systems that distribute opportunity unevenly; the challenge is to hold both realities together. Jason Arday can have agency, and the academy can have structures. He can be responsible for his actions, while the institution can remain responsible for the conditions under which those actions are judged.
That balance becomes important when considering the history of Black intellectuals. McInziba reminded us that the problem did not begin with Arday. He moved through a much longer intellectual genealogy, invoking figures including Wilhelm Amo, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Cornel West. His point was that Black intellectuals repeatedly encounter institutions whose standards and judgments have historically been shaped by racial power. The names change, the institutions change, and the vocabulary changes, but the underlying question returns: what level of achievement must a Black scholar demonstrate before being considered unquestionably entitled to occupy intellectual space?
The history of Black intellectual production itself complicates the idea that Black scholarship begins when elite Western institutions decide to recognize it. McInziba pointed to the Timbuktu scholars like Muhammad Bagayogo, Ahmad Baba, and Mahmud Kati, along with intellectual traditions such as those of Zera Yacob and Walda Heywat in East Africa. Their names remain known, McInziba said, but universities do not always cover their writings and theories in the same way as those of their European counterparts. This is not simply a question of representation on a syllabus. It is a question of how intellectual history itself is constructed: whose ideas are treated as foundational, whose works become required reading, and whose intellectual contributions are confined to biographies about the people who produced them.
McInziba drew on Lewis Gordon’s concept of what he called epistemic reductionism to explain this problem. Black intellectuals can become trapped in the biographical story of their lives, with attention directed toward where they lived, whom they knew, and what happened to them rather than what their intellectual work argues. Arday’s relevance is difficult to miss. His biography became part of the scrutiny surrounding him, and the public conversation could therefore become absorbed in the story of the man rather than the substance of the intellectual questions his scholarship raised. Once again, the Black intellectual risks being reduced to his body, his biography or his symbolic significance.
But Bahl asked whether excellence might also exist collectively, within communities whose histories and intellectual contributions have often remained outside the formal structures of the university. He invited the panel to consider whether communities of color could be understood as collectively excellent because of their histories of survival, their capacity to confront extraordinary violence, their strategies of resistance, their intellectual frameworks, their cultural practices, and their ability to create meaning, celebration, and joy. This does not mean romanticizing suffering. It means refusing to assume that intellectual value begins only when a university recognizes it.
Intellectual thought in Africa has never been limited to universities. Families, religion, politics, oral history, professional organizations, cultures, and people dealing with day-to-day issues have created knowledge. African societies have had a complex knowledge of history, authority, ethics, conflict, identity, and social obligations long before these topics were incorporated into university departments. The university does not come into an intellectual void. It enters societies that already think, remember, interpret, and create. Bahl’s intervention asks what happens when universities begin to treat those communities not merely as subjects of research but as participants in knowledge production. The difference is substantial. A community is more than an audience waiting to receive knowledge from the university. It possesses memories, experiences, intellectual traditions, and standards of its own. The scholar who enters the university does not necessarily arrive there carrying only individual talent. That scholar may also carry languages, histories, cultural knowledge, social experiences, and intellectual resources formed through collective life.
This changes the meaning of representation. African American scholars have often been pressured to speak on behalf of communities based on their status, and Bahl’s writing has helped dispel that notion. While he agrees with the conventional wisdom that being of color comes with pressure to speak for one’s community, he suggests there must be more to it; representation cannot be written off as merely an unwanted burden. If communities have intellectual traditions overlooked by the mainstream, scholars from those backgrounds may be better positioned to express them. Bahl was equally careful about accountability. His argument was not that identity automatically confers intellectual authority. Being Black does not make a scholar infallible, just as belonging to a marginalized community does not exempt anyone from criticism. If communities are to set their own standards, they must also be able to evaluate those who claim to serve them. That makes Bahl’s position more demanding than a simple call to replace one institutional standard with another. He is asking for a broader distribution of intellectual authority, in which communities help define excellence while retaining the right to question and hold their own members accountable.
This is where the idea of collective excellence becomes particularly powerful. Collective excellence is not simply a larger collection of exceptional individuals. It changes the unit through which achievement is understood. Instead of asking only which scholar has reached the highest academic position, it asks what communities have produced across generations. Teachers who open educational opportunities, researchers whose studies are informed by community needs, culture bearers who help sustain collective memories, or organizations that devise ways to address exclusion can all be engaged in collective excellence that eludes conventional measures of academia. The implications extend beyond the question of Black scholars in Western universities. They speak directly to the future of African higher education. African universities often operate within international systems in which prestige, rankings, citations, and institutional recognition influence how excellence is understood. These measures can serve useful purposes, but they can also encourage institutions to pursue definitions of success established elsewhere. Bahl’s intervention invites a different question: can African universities become institutions that do not merely pursue established definitions of excellence but participate in producing new ones? Across borders, they can exchange experiences and imagine a more confident future for the continent.
A genuinely Pan-African academic future will require universities to become connected intellectual communities rather than isolated national institutions. Scholars should be able to move across borders, institutions should exchange knowledge, and students should encounter intellectual traditions from different parts of Africa as part of their education. The continent’s intellectual future cannot depend entirely on institutions competing for recognition from outside. It must also depend on Africans developing networks through which knowledge, experience and institutional innovation circulate within Africa itself. This is perhaps where Bahl’s idea of community meets the larger question of the African university. In essence, he means that Black scholars constantly encounter institutions with standards and criteria shaped by racial power relations. Institutions may differ, and the vocabulary may differ, but the fundamental question remains: at what point do Black scholars reach a level of accomplishment to be allowed intellectual space?
The future, therefore, should not be another generation of exceptional individuals carrying the hopes of entire communities. Excellence should remain possible, but exceptionalism should not become compulsory. A Black scholar should be able to achieve extraordinary things without becoming responsible for representing everyone who shares their identity. Another should be able to make mistakes without becoming evidence against an entire community. Another should be ordinary without becoming invisible. That may be the deepest meaning of allowing Black scholars to be ordinary. It is the freedom to be fully human—to succeed, fail, disagree, change, learn, and grow without every individual action being converted into a referendum on an entire people. It is the freedom to be a scholar before being a symbol.
To end this conversation along the path suggested by Bahl, the academy’s larger challenge is not just to admit more Black scholars or celebrate more African intellectuals. It is to create intellectual communities in which individuals and communities can participate in defining the meaning of knowledge itself. It is possible to imagine the academy that Bahl advocates for as one in which excellence is not the monopoly of any institution, one in which communities are acknowledged as creators of knowledge, and one in which accountability exists in more ways than one. Perhaps this is the kind of academy worth aspiring to build: not one that constantly hunts for exceptional Black individuals to confirm that inclusion works, but one thoroughly transformed so no single individual bears the responsibility.