Recently the contest to elect the new Oxford Professor of Poetry rose to the front of British News sites when the distinguished Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott dropped from the race after concerns were raised, anonymously, about his conduct with female students in previous teaching positions. The story has only grown in interest for British journalists since it has been revealed that the eventual appointee Ruth Padel, emailed journalists about this issue prior to the vote. Now Padel, a great, great granddaughter of Charles Darwin, has been forced to resign her post and a new election is called to appoint her replacement. A cynic might imagine this story to be a dream come true for Oxford and for poetry, for, short of physical violence, there is no other circumstance that might keep the Poetry Chair on page one for more than a week. The story has however done great damage to two renowned Poets and threatens to damage the reputation of Great Britain's oldest university.

The election, like last years Democratic Primaries, pitted a potential first Black man versus a potential first White woman with a potential first Central Asian male, Arvind Mehrotra, thrown in for spice. Before wading in to the traditional muck of identity politics that attenuate any struggle of this sort it should be noted that both Walcott and Padel are in fact guilty as sin of the indiscretions of which they are accused. Although Walcott continues to claim that he is blameless, it is a matter of public record that he was publicly disciplined by Harvard for inappropriate conduct in 1981, and in 1996 he settled a sexual harassment suit with one of his students at Boston University. Likewise Padel has admitted that she forwarded the concerns of a female Oxford student to two reporters, though she claims to have no connection to the anonymous dossier that was sent to the committee which instigated the questions that led to Walcott's withdrawal. The dossier included photo copied pages from The Lecherous Professor an academic investigation of sexual harassment on American college campuses that detailed Walcott's 1981 Harvard case. In Padel's emails she cites the Lecherous Professor and even suggests that Barack Obama refused to engage Walcott to recite at his inauguration because of these issues, an accusation for which there seems to be no evidence.

When confronted by her involvement in the scandal Padel contradicts herself. On the one hand she claims that she holds Walcott and his work in great esteem and that she is saddened by his withdrawal, on the other hand she argues that the concerns of the female student that came to her were serious and warranted examination. It seems that Padel has realized, far too late, that whatever the merits of the young student's concerns, that she as a candidate was the absolute least well placed person to communicate those concerns. As of today Padel is the former Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and her considerable contributions to literature and scholarship are unfortunately clouded by this fortnight of folly.

As for Oxford one can only wonder. The Poetry Chair has been held in the past by noteworthies such as Auden, Graves and Heany. Most recently the chair was the scholar and critic Christopher Ricks, who is a respected intellectual, but hardly a house hold name. This election was a chance to reinvest the chair with some of it's former glamor while at the same time including “other” voices of the English tradition. While there is a great deal of teeth gnashing about the “smear tactics” of the dossier, there might never have been a question raised about Walcott's suitability without it. Even now, some of Walcott's supporters argue that at 75 he does not pose a threat to young women, an opinion that belies a bizarre naiveté about sex and power. Others argue that the Poetry Professor works only as a lecturer and not as a one to one mentor. Given that there are two public decisions against Walcott one would suspect that any reasonable vetting would have preempted the dossier and made it moot, but questions arose only after it's delivery. It seems that like many inert and tradition bound institutions, Oxford's concern for the accessibility of it's curriculum and society to young women is only to be understood as a fear of complaint and controversy.