Word: sheldonian
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Back in November 1998, I stood in line outside the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford University to hear Amartya Sen?who had just won the Nobel Prize in economics?talk on "Reason Before Identity." A long queue of students were waiting for admission; and I had to cram into one of the uncomfortable seats upstairs. Sen, in his heavy academic robes, began brilliantly, with a joke about how he had just been pestered by a dim-witted immigration official at Heathrow Airport who couldn't grasp the notion that an Indian like Sen could be the Master of Trinity College...
...quite 700 votes were cast since, in effect, it is largely the resident dons in Oxford who have a say in the outcome. After weeks of argument at "high tables" and public readings of both men's poetry, the M.A.s filed in their black gowns into the domed Sheldonian to cast their ballots. The sur prise winner at week's end-and Oxford poetry professor for the next five years: Edmund Blunden, with 477 votes v. 241 for Loser Lowell...
...approximately 30,000 eligible voters--those who have received master of arts degrees from Oxford--only 718 donned their gowns and marched to the Sheldonian Theatre to vote. Blunden defeated his American rival...
Last week, in solemn ritual, a record 658 berobed M.A.s padded into Oxford's Sheldonian Theatre and presented ballots in Latin for the now hotly desired chair of professor artis poeticae. The winner: Robertum R. Graves, with 329 votes. Enid Starkie finished last with 96 votes, a bitter reminder that kingmakers never become kings. Hearing the news in Madrid, Winner Graves composed a victory communique in three minutes flat...
...Oxford Old Grads-Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and Laborite Leader Hugh Gaitskell-donned flowing robes and floppy velvet bonnets to receive honorary Doctorates of Civil Laws at the university's centuries-old Encaenia-the first time opposing party heads have ever been jointly honored there. In the Sheldonian Theater, a Public Orator read out the traditionally glowing, donnishly funny praises in Latin, described Macmillan (Greats, 1919) as an "imperturbable Scot" who "watches the signs of the sky most attentively, but above all the Great Bear, whose progeny has lately added a bleep to the music of the spheres." (". . . caeli...