At Oxford University, where they have this really over-valued poetry chair, which they had a really revealing campaign for a few months ago, which was won by a woman, Ruth Padel, who subsequently was hounded from office within days after it was discovered that she had observed in some emails to journalists that her opponent — Nobel-winner Derek Walcott — had been subject to numerous charges of sexual harassment … they have “announced changes to the centuries-old tradition of voting for its professor of poetry post,” according to a Guardian report by Mark Brown.

Brown lauds the school for “introducing processes that bring it something closer to the 21st century.” What are they? Allowing eligible voters to vote online. In this way, says Brown, “Oxford hopes to avoid” the kind of embarassments the school underwent with the Padel-Walcott contretemps.

Brown then goes on to mis-report several notable things. He says Padel was implicated in a smear campaign, whereas she was actually guilty not of a “campaign” but of writing two (count ’em, two) emails citing the factual cases against Walcott. He says there were one charge of harassment against Walcott when there were actually several, including two in which he made out of court payments; and he says the poetry chair at Oxford has been “vacant since Sir Christopher Ricks finished his five-year term last year, by autumn 2010.”

Brown seems to have forgotten what he himself wrote only a few paragraphs earlier: Padel won an uncontested election for the chair, and was the last person — the first woman, and the last person — to hold it.

Sounds like voting online isn’t really going to solve the problems there.