The Jason Arday question: what do universities owe the people they celebrate?

It is an attempt to sit honestly with a question that has no comfortable answer on either side: when a university builds a public story around one scholar's rise, and that scholar is later accused of serious wrongdoing, who actually failed whom?

A university that receives credible allegations of this kind has an obligation to investigate, and Cambridge says it did exactly that, through its Misconduct in Research policy, while continuing to offer him support throughout.

What can be said without much controversy is narrower: any institution that chooses to build a public narrative of exceptional achievement around an individual should be prepared, before the next crisis rather than during it, to explain what support infrastructure exists to match that publicity, independent of how any future misconduct investigation concludes.