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Friday 9 January 2009

Breaking the mould

Peter Phillips on the election of Professor Sir Curtis Price as the next Warden of New College, Oxford

The election of Professor Sir Curtis Price as the next Warden of New College, Oxford, is remarkable in two respects: he is (or was) American and he is a musician. The American side of it is just one of those things. Sir Curtis has lived and worked in the UK since 1981 and has been Principal of the Royal Academy of Music since 1995. His period of tenure there is hailed as having been one of sustained growth which, believe me, is no mean achievement. One notices that the same thing is not being said about the Royal College over the same 13 years. Evidently a signing of the necessary forms has enabled Price to use his title, which unfortunately puts him in the same category as the appalling Sir Allen Stanford (the first American to be knighted as an adopted citizen of Antigua and Barbuda, evidently an unsatisfactory practice). It is not Price’s fault that they are both in the news at the same time.

But the fact that he is a musician is genuinely significant. Since when did Oxbridge colleges — or their junior departments, the public schools — appoint musicians as head of house? To do this is to go against at least 150 years of received opinion about who is and who is not suitable for such a leadership role. Originally the leaders were priests, giving way in the 19th century to mandarins who, if not career soldiers, knew about Empire and had the aspect of pillars of the Establishment. At the universities these qualifications would have needed to be supported by academic ones, but in neither category did musicians qualify.

Perhaps you thought that the tough, masculine principles of education which traditionally obtained in our older places of learning have been slowly replaced by gentler, more artistic ones? Many public schools nowadays parade their music departments as a good advertisement for what they have to offer, while a succession of Oxbridge colleges have woken up to the fact that choral scholars make good profile. Yet the underlying trends have been astonishingly slow to change. I realise this wouldn’t surprise anyone who studies how Britain really works, but it is depressing for those of us in the Arts who like to think they’ve shaken the place up a bit. The hard truth is that the place is still not fundamentally shaken. How the luminaries of the old schools would hate to be told that their charges would have become more effective human beings in Catholic Europe.

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