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May 17, 2024 - 10:30am
In a few months, Britain will go to the polls to make a once-in-a-generation choice. I speak, of course, of the University of Oxford’s chancellorship election which, like everything else associated with the country’s ancient universities, attracts disproportionate public attention.
It was no doubt with this in mind that the university authorities attempted to amend the electoral rules, establishing an election screening committee whose job was to screen out objectionable candidates. Details were few, except that the candidates list was to have “due regard to the principles of equality and diversity”. If only one candidate satisfied this and other unnamed requirements, the committee could declare that person elected.
Now, after a barrage of criticisms, the university has backed down, releasing a new set of regulations to “better clarify” what it really meant and swearing that it never intended to disqualify anyone on EDI grounds.
Though I was a participant in the campaign which forced the climbdown, I do in fact believe the university’s explanation. The real purpose of the attempted stitch-up was not to hoist onto the university a diversity ideologue — Oxford has a handsomely-salaried chief diversity officer already — but, rather, to install a bore who was both bland and unobjectionable. An election, by all of Oxford’s alumni, risked ruining that goal; indeed, it risked introducing an element of fun, and hence had to be quashed.
After all, chancellorship elections have historically been unpredictable affairs. At Oxford, at least two former prime ministers have been defeated at the polls because their politics were disliked by the electorate of the time. In 2011, Cambridge briefly risked being ruled over by a local grocer who ran to oppose the opening of a Sainsbury’s by the family of Lord Sainsbury, the eventual winner.
No doubt Oxford’s administrators felt emboldened, having successfully imposed the new Hong Kong-esque electoral system for the Professor of Poetry, the other Oxford job filled by alumni election. This used to be a feisty event, involving a fair amount of backstabbing among literary grandees, with the attendant media coverage. Occasionally, there was a joke candidate who promised to write unartful limericks instead of the respectable contemporary verse the post demanded, but in the end some worthy writer was always elected. No more.
The revised election rules for the chancellorship tell the story. Excluded from the post are students and staff, those disqualified from running a company (all fair enough), but also “a serving member of, or a declared candidate for election to, an elected legislature”.
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SubscribeFantastic article, Mr Zhu. I love insights into these weird and wonderful corners of modern life.
Despite your apparently successful efforts, I of course am hoping the next Oxford don will be a disabled, black, transgender with severe dyslexia and only pidgin English. Someone we can celebrate on Twitter.
Sorry, ‘X’.
Everyone claims to love democracy, so long as their side is winning. It’s loving it when the other side wins that’s the challenge.
The answer is, of course, to love having the opportunity to change the narrative so that next time, you win.
The Chinese Century where Western academia follows the authoritarian impulses of the current Maoist regime.
But beware, friends on the Left, the corporatist drive of the PRC and focus on concentration camps, makes the regime essentially Fascist in character.