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Jeff wrote: << Yes, I am a bit cynical about the electoral transparency of the elections for the Oxford poetry professorship. Partly because Stevenson seemed to let something slip when she said it was an honour “that a poet was asked to accept”. This sounds as if she had been privy at some point in the past to the behind-the-scenes machinations that might go on. She must be in a position to know what she meant. >> I think the best that can be said about what you say above there, Jeff, is that it's a load of total bollox. Leaving aside whether Anne Stevenson's remark was correctly quoted or not, I'm inclined to think that she was simply indicating, what is a bit of a cliche, that given who has been there before, being elected, or even nominated to the Oxford chair, is an honour. Trite maybe but true. More important is the "there's a fix in already" idea. There are problems with the Oxford elections, and one is that the small size of the electorate has led to greater or lesser degrees dirty electorial politics, hard canvassing, friends tapping friends on the shoulder. This can lead to Bad Things Happening. It's pretty much a disgrace that James Fenton never managed to get elected, but then if he had, would he have written anything he hasn't or wouldn't have published elsewhere? But it also means that the sort of pre-determined electorial fix you're implying above simply isn't possible. Bad things yes, attempts to convince, overpersuade, play the old-boys' club card, sure. But not that particular *kind of fix. But the *real problem with your uninformed and glib remarks above is that they gloss blythely over what happened at the previous election -- you remember, the one where Derek Walcott withdrew? That one *wasn't par for the course, since "the behind-the-scenes machinations" were coming from the outside, in the shape of the latest example of a series of attacks on Walcott which began shortly after he won the Nobel prize. What was fascinating about this particular variant was the way it managed to get played out in public, from the first shot in the article in the Independent through the Anonymously Circulated Dossier and articles in the Cherwell up to the climactic moment of Walcott's withdrawal. Bingo! Mission Over! And Ruth Padel gets triumphantly elected. Then of course -- did nobody tell these people about electronic data trails? -- it all began to unravel. The Walcott Dossier had been photocopied page after page from _The Lecherous Professor_ and the results posted by hand, slightly primitive in this day and age, so I suppose it was hardly surprising that elsewhere in the universe, Ruth Padel didn't seem to realise that her various emails -- there were three of them which finally emerged, forming a narrative themselves -- might just possibly reach the public domain. Especially as they were sent to a journalist. Or that the emails would be date-stamped, so that the various not-entirely consistent statements in them could be put together. I mean, the Ruth Padel Emails constituted a comic epic, albeit micro-sized, in themselves. My favorite moment of electronic ineptitude was the revision made to Seth Abramson's blog, after he, as he would have it, received a letter from a Worried Student at Oxford, and proudly proclaimed that Concerns Were Being Raised. Seth initially received his Oxford Letter forwarded by a correspondent with no source and an untraceable name as a comment to his blog. He first posted it there in its entirety, then, after (silently) deleting two signatures included at the end of the original letter, shifted it front and centre to his blog, printed in such a way as to conflate the "Here you are" introduction with the letter itself, and implied it was from A Real Oxford Student. Problem was, Seth didn't seem to have realised the original version of his blog was held in a google cache, and as a result, for a period of about a week, showed up in the google search engine and could be retrieved. And read. And compared to the "revised" version he finally settled on. Not very clever, really. Smugly implying that "all Oxford elections are a bit dubious" profits no one other than the people behind the really quite extraordinary and heavily-orchestrated catastrophe that was the previous election. Robin