Voting for Oxford Poetry Professor Going On, Despite Protests
Posted on May 15, 2009
Despite many calls for a postponement, the race for the post of Oxford Professor of Poetry is going forward, as planned. After the withdrawal from the race by Nobel laureate Derek Walcott over alleged sexual harassment claims, many felt that the remaining candidates weren't up to snuff and demanded a postponement of the voting. But those voices were overruled.
Oxford Poetry Society secretary Eloise Stonborough said that responses from students, graduates and fellows backing her call for the current candidates to withdraw and allow nominations to be reopened had been pouring in on Friday. She believes that unless the election is suspended, the "importance and dignity" of the professorship, held in the past by Matthew Arnold, Seamus Heaney and WH Auden, will be damaged.Never before has the selection of the Oxford poetry professor been fraught with such drama. Emotions are running quite high. Some voters are threatening to abstain, others are determined to vote. And there have been editorials in the major British newspapers arguing about what to do. If only Americans could get so worked up over poetry and the selection of the next poetry professor. What a lovely thing that would be.*****
Even one of Padel's own nominators, philosophy professor AC Grayling, believes the election should be postponed, and wrote to his candidate asking her to withdraw in protest. "To win because anonymous and malicious persons witch-hunted Walcott out of the race would be a hollow and tainted thing," he wrote in a blog for the Guardian. "The election for professor of poetry at Oxford is about poetry, not morals. Plenty of poets in the past have behaved very badly in all sorts of ways, and far worse than Walcott is said to have done. Do we refuse to read them therefore? That is, do we silence their voices, exclude them, bar them, on the grounds that they did those things? No, we do not."