Cambridge University politics/satire
University politics. You've got to love it, else you'd hate it.
This is, for the moment, a simple list of useful links to pages both here and elsewhere.
Serious Content
Cambridge University is, at the moment, in a state of some flux. Major
governance reforms are on the table; some of them indeed have already been
voted on. The results of the ballots on the Graces of November 20th, 2002
can be found
here. The Graces themselves were presented in a rather piecemeal fashion
in the Reporter (as I pointed out in a speech at a Discussion in
the Senate House on May 27th 2003). I took
the liberty of rearranging the little bits and pieces of amendments to
Statutes and Ordinances corresponding to individual Graces in a saner fashion.
I outlined some of my misgivings about the current voting system (Single
Transferrable Vote) when applied to ballots in a
speech
which I presented at a Discussion in the Senate House on January 28th, 2003.
Note: it's not at all the case that I'm anti proportional representation (in
fact I'm strongly in favour of it); I just question whether it's helpful for
deciding between issues as opposed to between people. Using
the Single Transferable Vote method (or another method - perhaps the method
of pairwise comparisons ?) as a means of sampling the mood of the University
on an issue, and then putting a definitive Grace seems to me to be much more
sensible.
11/03/2003: Never afraid to change my mind, I now have to say that I utterly oppose the Single Transferrable Vote method in its incarnation as the Instant Runoff Vote method (which is what is used for ballots of the Regent House) due to its failure to satisfy the most fundamental of all voting criteria: the monotonicity criterion. This basically states (the relative order of the other candidates being unchanged) that ranking an option higher should never cause the option to lose, nor should ranking an option lower cause it to win. I gave a particularly apposite example in my speech at the Discussion in the Senate House on March 11th, 2003. I still think that sampling the mood of the University via a straw poll is the way to go before putting a definitive Grace, but I now believe that the Condorcet method, with Cloneproof Schwartz Sequential Dropping (CpSSD) to resolve the voting paradox, is the right system to use. See the website of the Election Methods Education and Research Group for further details about all of this stuff.
11/01/2005: Over the past couple of years, the debate has rumbled on. The Board of Scrutiny took up my points in its Eighth Report. Eventually the Council agreed to set up a Voting Review Committee; despite the obvious sanity of asking either Professor A.W.F. Edwards or me to serve on it, this did not take place. I supplied a certain amount of evidence to this Committee, which I was then invited to explain to them. A couple of months later they produced a hopelessly confused report. This provoked a certain amount of uproar and at the Discussion of 19 October, 2004 I made this speech. No reply has yet been forthcoming, but I have little hope that the serious points I have made will be addressed. Furthermore I have also been unable to obtain the results to Graces 5 and 6 of 20 November, 2002 in a form that would permit analysis for methods other than IRV. I consider this to be reprehensible; and, perhaps worse, (being an academic!) an invaluable research opportunity wasted.
There's an active debate concerning intellectual property matters going on. Ross Anderson has put together some useful information about the proposals being debated, and about the Campaign for Cambridge Freedoms. The campaign has a mailing list, which can be investigated by following links from this introductory page.
Fun Stuff
At the Discussion about the intellectual property issue on October 22nd, 2002,
a brilliant speech lampooning the University's proposals (with reference to
the wondrous Poldovian Academy of Literature) was made by
Professor Tom Körner. It may
be found here.
My ex-husband, Patrick Gosling, and I were most
entertained by this and decided to produce a Poldovian crest, a Poldovian
letterhead and a Bureau of Contracts graphic. The Poldovian merchandise
page is available
here.
A new Cambridge satirist has emerged, phoenix-like, out of the ashes of the governance proposals. Back in 1908, Francis Cornford anonymously wrote Microcosmographia Academica (an online copy can be found here). When he came to write a preface to the second edition in 1922 he wrote:
`I fancy (although I am not sure) that there is just one feature of academic life that has become a little more prominent since the war. If I could have recaptured the mood of the fortnight in which this book was written, I might have added a chapter on Propaganda, defined as that branch of the art of lying which consists in very nearly deceiving your friends without quite deceiving your enemies. But the subject is not yet ripe for treatment; the art is still imperfect. We must leave it to be worked out by the party whose mission it is to keep the university safe for aristo-democracy.'
Cambridge's modern-day satirist, L'Espiègle, has written the Propaganda chapter and threatens a further chapter on Ballots.
Update: I "came out" (to less-than-popular acclaim) as L'Espiègle during the course of 2004. I am now in the process (under another pseudonym!) of writing a novel about a fictional university: it is part academic politics, part academic satire, and part speculative fiction.
Content and design by
Diana Galletly
Last updated January 2005.