Blame Jesus for Jason Arday

When I was a fresh-faced undergraduate, newly arrived at Jesus College Cambridge in 2007, I remember listening to a speech by its then-master. He was very, monotonously, clear: the college’s mission was the undiluted and single-minded pursuit of scholarly excellence — with no compromises. To me anyway, the speech seemed so obvious as to lapse into tedium and truism. Of course. Why else would we be there? This was Cambridge, after all. The master who gave that speech was one of the world’s greatest experts in geo-engineering. His predecessors were similarly renowned in their scholarly fields. He had taken over from David Crighton, an applied mathematician who made important contributions to the study of aeroacoustics. His immediate predecessor was Colin Renfrew, an archaeologist of global f