Dons get their knickers in a knot so easily because the stakes they are playing for are pitifully low, the theory goes. That may be why Oxford University’s professorial seat in poetry, paying just £6,901 (Rs.5.37 lakh) a year, inspired a feud frosty enough to turn sherry to ice in common rooms in early summer.
Every five years the university’s academic staff, and everyone who holds an Oxford degree, may vote to fill the 301-year-old post. Anyone can stand. It is the stellar list of past occupants, including Matthew Arnold, W.H. Auden and Robert Graves, that gives the job its cachet, not the meagre stipend.
The plotting this year was lunatic. Anonymous letters went to a hundred Oxford movers-and-shakers, detailing claims of sexual harassment made in 1982 against Derek Walcott, a West Indian poet fancied to win. He dropped out, leaving Arvind Mehrotra, of Allahabad University, and Ruth Padel, a great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin, in the race. Both condemned the smear campaign. On May 16 Padel became the first woman to win the job, though a tenth of the ballots were spoiled.
Eight days later it emerged that Padel had in fact helped to spread the story of the sex scandal by e-mailing journalists with recommended reading on it. (She claims no link to the anonymous letters.) She resigned the post on May 25 after it became clear that a motion against her was being drafted by excited dons. She has apologised, sort of, for sending e-mails that could have been “misconstrued as being against (Walcott)” — as if briefing reporters about his alleged sexual misdemeanours was not intended to affect his chances.
A fresh election is expected next term. Walcott has said he will not run again; the sounds from behind Mehrotra’s beard are so far inconclusive. Whoever stands, Oxford might want to look at ways of increasing the turnout. This year, out of more than 4,000 academic staff and 150,000 graduates, only 477 people bothered to vote.
It may be hard to prise dons away from the important business of writing acid e-mails to each other. But more graduates might vote if they could do so by post. At a time when the university is spending millions on tea parties and the like to cultivate alumni donors, it would be a cheap way to maintain links — and would make nobbling voters harder too.
Library budgets hit badly
Academics in Britain are bracing themselves for “severe” cuts in access to new books and journals in the next academic year, as higher costs caused by the fall in the value of the pound have put libraries under pressure.
Times Higher Education reported in January that the drop in the pound’s value was having a “crippling effect” on the budgets of UK university libraries, which faced huge increases in subscription costs for research journals from the US and elsewhere in Europe. Now a new survey of 38 university libraries conducted by the Research Information Network (RIN) reveals just how serious is the situation.
Preliminary findings presented to Times Higher Education show that although the current academic year has been “financially challenging”, it is in 2009-10 that the pinch will really be felt. The survey shows that nearly 40 percent of libraries plan to cut books and serial purchases from next year. One in five plans to cancel one or more so-called big deals with publishing houses to access bundles of journals online. A single bundle can contain hundreds of titles.
Toby Bainton, secretary of the Society of College, National and University Libraries (Sconul), says the swift slide in the value of sterling since the start of the current academic year has already “caused havoc” for libraries. He says many libraries have received invoices in January for orders placed last September which have punched six-figure holes in their budgets. “I have heard stories of £500,000 (Rs.3.75 crore) rises at some large research-intensive universities,” he says.
Although many vice-chancellors have heeded special pleas and authorised contingency funds, these covered only the current academic year. “2009-10 is going to be the really bad time... It is a problem for entire institutions because the only thing to cut is the big deals of journals, and that means hundreds of titles at once, which will affect researchers all over universities,” says Bainton.
(Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education & The Economist)