Poets as pioneering and internationally-renowned as Denise Riley and Anne Carson are being excluded from serving as the Oxford Professor of Poetry.

There’s something wrong with the rules.

The Oxford Professor of Poetry is one of the most significant honours that a poet can earn in the UK. The role used to be open to anyone, of any age, and was often held by poets in their seventies or eighties, with great success. 

But in 2015 the University introduced a new compulsory retirement policy. The policy said that senior academic and non-academic staff must retire ‘not later than the 30 September immediately preceding their 69th birthday’. 

The result has been the exclusion of a number of otherwise world-leading poets, many of them women, from consideration for this role.

It makes no sense to apply blanket HR policies to this particular post, which has no equivalent anywhere else in the University. The Professorship is not a conventional University job. It's won by election, and the Professor only gives one lecture per term, and only for four years. Normal HR rules should not apply.

This policy has already made the pool of potential candidates less diverse. In the 2019 election, there was only one female candidate, when there could have been three — or more.

Women, poets of colour, and other minorities frequently take longer to attain the kind of status in their creative careers that would make them viable candidates for the Professorship. It's therefore imperative that the University of Oxford ceases to discriminate against them on the basis of age.

Tell the University of Oxford to reverse its decision to exclude poets over the age of 69 from becoming the Professor of Poetry.