Nobel laureate Derek Walcott has withdrawn from the race to become Oxford’s next professor of poetry — one of British academe’s most powerful positions — after the resurfacing of accusations against him for sexual harrassment (see this report from yesterday’s MobyLives). According to a report in The Guardian by Alison Flood, Walcott issued an angry statement saying now that the race “has degenerated into a low and degrading attempt at character assassination, I do not want to be part of it.”

Meanwhile, one of Walcott’s supporters at Oxford, Hermione Lee, issued an apparently unsubstantiated charge — aka, a smear — against one of the other candidates for the position, Ruth Padel, saying of the “campaign” against Walcottt that  “if it did not emanate from her, she should publicly disassociate herself from it.”