Letters | 28 December 2012

Distinguished Wardens

Sir: Contrary to Dennis Sewell’s statement (‘Assault on the Ivory Tower’, 15/22 December), Wadham College did not ‘elect’ John Wilkins to be Warden in 1647 after Parliament’s victory in the Civil War. Rather, Parliamentary Commissioners sacked the royalist Warden and almost all the Fellows and Scholars and imposed Wilkins as the new Warden, followed by new Fellows and Scholars. Since Wilkins is by far the most distinguished Warden in the College’s history until the election of Maurice Bowra in 1938, his appointment is an uncomfortable example of state interference in university affairs actually doing good.

Wilkins would, as Sewell suggests, have felt at home among the media-types of modern Oxford. Scientific populariser, extremely influential in the foundation of the Royal Society, talent-spotter (Christopher Wren), he was an adept politician. Having married Cromwell’s sister for, he claimed, the good of the university, he nonetheless was appointed Bishop of Chester by Charles II. However he was also a weighty scholar in his own right, as a pioneer in linguistics, and, paradoxically, a defender of the traditional university syllabus against the assaults of contemporary modernisers.
Clifford Davies (Emeritus Fellow)
Wadham College, Oxford

Rape of Africa

Sir: I must take issue with Richard Dowden’s comment in his article about the Congo (‘The sick man of Africa’, 8 December) that ‘the rest of Africa is now doing better…’ In fact, his description of the government of the DRC — ‘unpopular, corrupt, rapacious, incapable of establishing effective institutions’ — applies to most African governments. In South Africa, President Zuma, having failed to buy himself a 747, has spent £15 million of public money on his private house. Meanwhile, the citizens are significantly worse off now than they were under apartheid. Mugabe in Zimbabwe, having stolen all the white-owned farms, is now busy stealing the newly discovered diamonds.