Take this with the appropriate-sized grain of salt:
Apparently his field was “sociology of education” and his thesis was something about peer mentoring in the process of training educators. He also wrote a memoir of his faked life experiences.
These credentials don’t seem to form a very strong basis for appointment as a professor at the University of Cambridge, and moreover nobody seems to have done much vetting of them.
In my observation, DEI hires are vetted, their stories check out. They have to be bulletproof on paper to support the decision to prioritize their application in case it’s challenged later. That doesn’t seem to have happened here. If this was a DEI hire, the responsible administrators are not very good at DEI hiring (which may well be the case).
I would never underestimate the power of likeability.
If you like someone’s vibe, you may be willing to overlook a lot, like a lackluster CV, simply because you want that person to be your coworker. It sounds like this guy was a charmer.
In many universities, there is no obligation or expectation for faculty members to supervise graduate students. In such cases, often it is absolutely an act of service or charity or something.
In my experience, people who engage in academic dishonesty (and I am not commenting on the particulars of the charges in this case) usually do so because they feel bad rather than engaging in grift and graft as a premeditated plan for self-advancement and profit.
Well, they do toil in your lab 24/7, and you do not even have to pay them!
I wish I had a history lab! And I should have clarified my remark: I meant students, not faculty members.
One time in history lab in college I was trying to make a Baroque Period but accidentally made a Renaissance. Luckily I didn’t have to fix it.
I don’t have any experience with the British system, and I would expect an elite institution like Cambridge to engage in a bit more vetting of scholarship than search committees do at my little regional university, but honestly … in academic hiring, you do take a lot on faith. Most search committee members are not going to be able to do a fine-grained assessment of the candidate’s scholarship, since the whole point is to hire someone in an area you haven’t already got covered. A particularly diligent or suspicious committee member might check to make sure that the publications listed on the candidate’s CV actually exist, but they would generally assume that the peer reviewers had vetted them for quality.
We do call references, usually including the candidate’s dissertation advisor and others familiar with their scholarship, but these calls tend to yield a limited amount of information, as nobody ever says anything negative. (If you are faculty in a graduate program, you most definitely want your students to get good jobs, and the candidates themselves, obviously, try to pick references whom they believe will help and not hurt them!)
And I would absolutely take it on faith if a candidate started talking about their achievements as a long distance runner, because 1) why would they lie?; and 2) I have only a very vague sense of what is a plausible or implausible achievement in that area.
Poor old Cambridge can’t get out of its own way these days.
It turns out that the university has hosted an academic project calling for schoolchildren to not learn about evolution, since it conflicts with Islamic teachings, reflects “Eurocentric monoculture” and could lead young people into temptation.
The prof carrying on this noble work further inveighs against "gaining literacy and numeracy and other disciplinary skills demonstrated through qualifications.” Seems a bit at odds with Cambridge University’s mission, but whatever.
Article in The Spectator (possibly paywalled).
A summary is provided here
There was nothing to fix there! You would have gotten the Baroque Period you were looking for if you had let your Renaissance rest undisturbed for a century or so, three at the most. But nobody has any patience these days anymore!
The cause of death will be for the coroner to determine and they won’t do that until a full inquest has been held. That usually takes months rather than days or weeks, even in straightforward cases. London coroners have a reputation for being especially slow.
Thanks. 
Besides, if it ain’t Baroque…
The very phrase “DEI hire” implies the person wasn’t really qualified for their position. Back when I dabbled in recruiting when I was an HR generalist, our DEI efforts did not include taking race into account when hiring a qualified individual. Our DEI efforts including things like casting a wider net to attract more under represented candidates and making the promotion process more transparent. Never, not in a million years, would I describe anyone I hired as a DEI hire. I hired them because they were the best candidate available. Or the second best. Hey, sometimes your first choice isn’t available.
Your prof went easy on you!
No, that’s the standard policy when it isn’t Baroque.
This is completely wrong, at least in every academic setting I’ve been part of over decades.
@hajario got it exactly right.
It’s interesting (really!) that we have had such divergent experiences.
I mean, yes, academics are expected to work on a high proportion of weekends. But this task is no less important than any other, and is as likely to be done on weekend, or not, as any other.
ETA: You’re in the UK, which is of course more relevant to this thread. Thanks for the lesson on the vast differences across the pond. I’m amazed…and now better-informed.
This may vary across countries, universities, and departments, and often depends on government priorities that are reflected in funding. In my experience in Canada, there is less expectation of taking on graduate students in arts and humanities, for example. And there is a difference between supervising a graduate student and reviewing a thesis as a member of a committee, which is often done as a favour to the supervisor and here is not a necessary expectation of the job.
There simply can’t be any culture where supervising grad students isn’t a part of being a professor, because if there were, that culture would find itself without professors, a generation later.