Many explanations have been laid at the door of the @Arday scandal. Low standards, academic groupthink, DEI, racism, and, not least, the alleged poverty of scholarship in the social sciences. Writing as someone ranked in the world top 150 social scientists according to research.com, with 120,000 + google scholar citations, & 10 book awards, & with a UK PhD in sociology as well as a career spent in education faculties in three countries, I want to point out another irony here. The media, much of the public, and now, it seems, academic institutions too, are all too ready to embrace individualistic heroic narratives - whether true, exaggerated, or worse. The Salt Path, Jason Arday, @tarawestover, @JDVance and even the press's treatment of @Lem_Exeter's social mobility arc as going from binman to boffin - are all individualistic tales of triumphing against all odds – testimony to the belief that if they can make it, then anyone can. I couldn't get a Trade publisher to take my own memoir, Moving,in 2020, not just because it came out in the middle of COVID, nor even because almost no-one was yet interested in social class narratives of inequality and diversity. It was also because while the book talks of my “lived experience” of growing up in a somewhat working class family on low income and sometimes on welfare (with back up documentation from my schools and community, I should add), it also discusses what Brian Jackson and Dennis Marsden in the 1960s called "sunken middle class" influences in my apparently working class family, and it fully acknowledges the benefits that accrued to me of a strong, post war, welfare state. Like @hanleylynsey's book, Respectable, my own book explores the non-heroic nuances of upward mobility and triumph over adversity. It echoes Barack Obama’s statement in 2012 that “you didn’t build that” - governments and state policies did. But the media and many members of the public don’t want to hear sociologies of inequality, and the state policies, including higher wealth taxes, that are needed to reduce economic inequality and increase individual opportunity. They want to hear positive psychologists, micro-economists of decision-making, and minoritized people of lived experience, testify to how it’s individual judgements, qualities and characteristics that determine everything. The absence of a sociological sensibility in much of British life, is, perversely, what draws leaders, journalists, and publishers all too easily into the webs of heroic individualism, and what blinds them all to the distortions and exaggerations that are out there, because they, their readers, and their publics thirst for the next individual-conquers-all-by-dint-of -sheer-effort-and-ability narrative. If we are to avoid repeats of the Arday affair in universities, publishing, the media and life in general, we need more sociology and more sociological thinking in our society and its institutions, not less – which is why it completely belongs in our schools and universities. @drianpace @pilotspeaker