Melville House Books

A day after Oxford University announced (as per this Moby story) that it’s re-written the rules for attaining its poetry chair — so as not to embarrass any more poets the way its last contest embarrassed Derek Walcott! — than does Walcott issue a kind of fuck you to the fabled institute, and another school reveals its lack of respect for its female students: As a Guardian story reports, the Nobel Prize-winning poet announced “he is next year to be made professor of poetry after all: but at the University of Essex, rather than Oxford.”

In a statement, Essex — not a spokesperson apparently, but the entire school itself — said it was “aware of the allegations made against Professor Walcott in the 1980s which were revived in the media during the election for Oxford University’s professor of poetry position earlier in the year, causing him to withdraw his candidacy.” Presumably, this means Essex wasn’t aware of the charges made against him in the 1990s. No matter, says Essex: “the university is focused on giving its students and the literary community the rare opportunity to benefit from working with an internationally acclaimed writer.”

Let’s hope that rare opportunity isn’t as opportunistic as it was for Walcott’s students at Harvard and Boston University in the 1980s and ’90s.

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.