Context:
Nobel prize winner Derek Walcott has withdrawn from the race to become Oxford's professor of poetry following an anonymous letter campaign.
The campaign saw up to 100 Oxford academics sent photocopied pages from a book detailing a sexual harassment claim made against Walcott by a Harvard student in 1982. The student alleged that Walcott asked her to, "Imagine me making love to you. What would I do? ... Would you make love with me if I asked you?", and claimed that after she turned him down, she was given a C grade in his class.
Shortly after, he withdrew his candidacy, citing disgust at the "low tactics" and the "low and degrading attempts at character assassination." Today we have this comment in the Guardian:
Derek Walcott should still be in the race
Let's be honest. Poets tend not to be demure milquetoasts. Au contraire, they tend to be people of sublime passion, and often vice. They save the virtue for the written page.
Catullus, Villon, Byron, Baudelaire, first-rate poets , all led salacious and intemperate lives marred by tragic flaws. In fact, a craving for temporary opiates or a lubricious disposition are almost a sine qua non of the role. As Willy Loman once said, it comes with the territory. Be it the absinthe bottle, syphilitic prostitutes or even murder, poets have not just long frequented, but actively bathed in the demi-monde, and are accustomed to the moral twilight.
[...]
So why should it have been any different with Walcott? If he were to have won, he would have been appointed to a professorship of poetry, not virtue.
But the emphasis should be on "professorship" not "poetry". We're not talking about his quality as a poet, that's already been acknowledged by the fact that he's being considered for the post. We're talking about whether or not he is fit for a teaching position at a university. Considering the harassment allegations suggest that this particular poet abused his power at a university with consequences for a young, female student, I fail to see how this is anything less that highly relevant to the potential position at Oxford, especially when the letters of the campaign in question were sent by Oxford academics.
I wasn't going to use this story because the claim remains controversial and contested, but to see it defended as merely a quirk of the artist is upsetting to say the least. How much are women worth, really? Assuming the worst case scenario, is this writer actually insisting that it would be acceptable to install a man who harasses his female students and punishes them if they don't comply into a position of power in an educational institution, under the understanding that it comes from a place of "sublime passion" and "moral twilight"? Excuse me?
The lofty peaks of Mount Parnassus are seldom scaled by the prudish, the boring or the virtuous, but by the passionate. Long may it thus continue.
Apparently not harassing your female students is 'prudish' and 'boring.' There's the writer's answer - that is what women are worth. Heaven forbid a pesky wish to be treated on an equal footing with male peers get in the way of a man's career.
