Just before I parted company permanently with the British university system, in fact my retirement was less than a week away at the time, I was invited to act as independent chair of a student disciplinary case. I was independent in the sense that none of the students involved was in my faculty. It was with a heavy heart that I agreed but, as it turns out, it was probably a good thing that I did.
The case involved a final year student accused of using a racial epithet and the person to whom the alleged epithet was aimed made a complaint. This was not the use of the dreaded ‘N-word’, this was the ‘P-word’ that is sometimes used in a derogatory fashion towards people from South Asia.
After watching a Premiership football match in the student union there had been some football banter between opposing supporters and quite an aggressive approach made — and not denied — by a Pakistani student to the student against whom the complaint was made. It is then alleged by the Pakistani student that the other white male student called him a ‘Paki’. The student vehemently denied this as did his friends and an independent witness who saw the incident and was concerned that it might turn violent heard nothing to that effect.
It was one person’s word against another yet somewhere along the convoluted process of the student disciplinary procedure someone decided that there was a prima facie case, and the disciplinary tribunal was formed. The members were presented with copious paperwork and CCTV video footage. The paperwork repeated the details above and the CCTV footage showed the Pakistani student and a friend walking off in one direction and several minutes later the accused student and his friends following. They all lived in the same Halls of Residence and that is where they were heading. The Pakistani student reported seeing the other group of students in the car park but reported nothing more. We were called on the basis of the CCTV footage to judge the motives of the accused student and his friends. It is telling that the Pakistani student did not attend the tribunal and did not respond to any further communications about the incident.
Essentially, we were being asked to evaluate an incident and to pass judgement on a student, possibly to the detriment of his university record or even his graduation, on the basis of an unsubstantiated word-of-mouth accusation and to judge whether he and his friends were walking with intent to confront the Pakistani student. Case closed, you may think, and I made every effort as chair to do so from the outset and to bring matters to a close in favour of the accused student. But matters in the woke hatcheries that now constitute British universities are never that simple.
One of my members voiced that the accused student “may have used the P-word” and I had to agree. Indeed he “may” have but as we had absolutely no evidence to that effect, no accuser present and the student in question had at least bothered to turn up at considerable inconvenience after his degree programme was finished, I considered the matter over. She came back, repeatedly, with her view and finally with the view that the Pakistani student must have “perceived” that the epithet had been used and that we ought to take that seriously. Again, I had to agree that he may well have “perceived” the insult but that his perceptions were insufficient to take matters further.
Eventually, after a long afternoon, the day ended, and we all went home. I considered that a good job had been done until the scribe sent me the notes from the meeting to approve in which was contained the view that the Pakistani student had perceived the insult and that action was recommended against the accused student. I strenuously intervened, the accusation was wiped from the record and the student heard no more from us other than that we had not found against him. However, on another day, with a different panel the outcome could have been very different.
The problem in the above case is obvious and it has permeated the university system. In common with other walks of life, feeling offended, or assuming that someone may have felt offended, is the same as being offended and is sufficient grounds to make an accusation, have it taken seriously and to expect an outcome in your favour regardless of the guilt or innocence of the person accused. Thus, it is a field day for people to make complaints and mainly against young men. Take the football banter in the example above. We can imagine many an alcohol-fuelled exchange of words between people of opposing views, opposing teams or even from different cultures. No violence occurs, no blood is shed, no physical damage is done, everyone feels a bit stupid afterwards and that is an end to it.
But extrapolate that to the young female student who willingly slips between the sheets with a male student, who then perceives that she has been sexually assaulted and makes an accusation. It does happen and the men in question are assumed guilty before trial, usually immediately excluded from study and their lives are probably ruined, even if the young lady later recants and admits she fabricated the accusation.
False accusations are not new, and I am not saying that the Pakistani student in the above case made a false accusation. But evidence remains crucial, even in the legal storms in the educational teacups of British higher education. If we head down the road of condemning people on the basis of allegedly offended parties’ imputed perceptions (and in absentia) that they have been offended then what we will see being done is judgement, but not justice.
Dr. Roger Watson is Academic Dean of Nursing at Southwest Medical University, China. He has a PhD in biochemistry.
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But the question is: “Why? What was the purpose of such an elaborate conspiracy to give all the credit for all those writings to the man of Stratford, instead of the other authors?”
I remember reading two strange things about his life: 1) the unproven suggestion that one of the “Annes” to whom he was engaged was actually a six-year-old local girl, who accompanied him to London and was later married off to one of his friends, but buried near him. It was suggested that she was the “Dark Lady of the Sonnets”. And 2) the unproven suggestion that his “friends” may have caused his death by tampering with the wine they gave him, which occurred the day after they visited him in Stratford to celebrate his birthday or something. They all went back to London the next day, and he suddenly died at home only hours? later. I don’t remember the sources, only their odd suggestions.
Maybe he had something on all of them
Or maybe the other way – maybe they all agreed to hand him loaded guns – make him the fall guy in case the political environment became too hot for truth tellers.
Or maybe he was a genius. Writing occupied too much of his time, and came too naturally to him for him to spend any time self-aggrandizing. To me, much of his writing gives the feeling it was bashed out in one draft, relatively quickly, each in single intense sittings, without meals over several days, as a stream of consciousness – which had brewed in him over many months.
The trouble with all this WS BS is it’s trying to analyse genius. Sorry but in my experience aristocrats are most unlikely to be geniuses, genius is far more likely to be something in the middle classes or lower. Take a Mozart from a thoroughly middle class background, if his life wasn’t so well documented from his letters I’m sure some middle class twits would be arguing his works were done by the Baron Van Swieten. Or in 200 years will ppl argue Ronnie O’Sullivan was in fact prince Harry in a wig? Most likely WIlliam S was just William S from Stratford but being a genius understood mystery would only add to his mythology. We equate genius with modern day fame, IE attention seeking dick heads.
Good point. The great inventiveness that underpinned the wealth produced in the Industrial revolution did not come from the aristocracy but was bottom up. This is something that nations like China have trouble accepting as we are described as an insignificant backwater.
“Two things are outstanding in the creation of the English system of canals, and they characterise all the Industrial Revolution. One is that the men who made the revolution were practical men. …they often had little education, and in fact school education as it then was could only dull an inventive mind. The grammar schools legally could only teach the classical subjects for which they had been founded. The universities also (there were only two, at Oxford and Cambridge) took little interest in modern or scientific studies; and they were closed to those who did not conform to the Church of England.
The other outstanding feature is that the new inventions were for everyday use…”
Jacob Bronowski
Or the nerd like Gates. Remember the Harry & Paul piss take of Gates and the Apple dude in their come back comedy around 2008.
Something to whet the appetite, James Delingpole in discussion with Alexander Waugh:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Utxw4NghBD8
Gareth Roberts should know the correct explanation. The Tardis dropped off a copy of Shakespeare’s plays in Stratford.
If he was so familiar with Italy, any evidence that he was there, or as the author says, maybe we are talking about a handful of people. Delingpole interviewed someone talking about this and said to tomb where he was supposed to be buried is empty.
Good old Stratford Upon Avon. Remember being chased there as a youth by a group of youths. There was only three of us as they approached, my mate started running and we all legged it to a Pub and didn’t leave until the group had gone. Good old days!
If the work is not attributed to a single person, then why does the time frame span the period of a man’s life ending suddenly? Such works of genius would have continued, if produced through a conspiracy of production.
I read somewhere an interesting argument for their being a reasonable doubt in the authorship question, which went something like this:
If writing the works of Shakespeare was a crime and were Shakespeare of Stratford tried for it in a civil court, the amount of circumstantial evidence for him being the author is so wafer-thin that it would fail to get a conviction.
The same can’t be said of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.
De Vere’s entire life reflects the triumphs and the tragedies in the works. The various contemporary chancers and charlatans surrounding QE1 appear, barely disguised, throughout the plays where they are lampooned and derided for their affectations, cunning and malevolence.
The idea that an unknown writer from a country town would have had access, never mind permission, to take on and send-up these dangerous factions is fanciful. That no-one, including the Queen ever mentioned ‘Shakespeare’ in any context, points to the name being a pen-name.
Writing about these powerful factions can only have come from an intimate knowledge of the Elizabethan court and the permission to do so, vested in the writer by the Queen. We know that Elizabeth was a lover of plays and since all published works had to be officially sanctioned it follows that she must have sanctioned them.
Elizabeth, notoriously frugal, paid De Vere a huge sum of money (£1000 per year) from1586 until his death to write the plays, many of which had been developed by him over the previous fifteen years. Elizabeth understood the important of the history plays in particular, to shape a popular patriotic narrative at the time of the Spanish Armada.
What’s more, in Shakespeare’s two early epic poems (which were big hits in London on publication), the poet hints at a very personal and erotic relationship with the Queen herself. The intimate relationship between De Vare and QE1 was an open secret at court.
So De Vere was a concealed writer, part of the establishment but a thorn in many sides, working directly for the monarch whom he had been involved with in an intimate sexual relationship. Is it any wonder that he hid his identity behind a pen-name?
So why continue to hide his identity long after the works were written and De Vere dead?
The answer lies in the political turmoil leading up to death of the Queen and the succession of James 1st; turmoil which continued to plague the country during the reign of James 1st and which led, eventually, to Civil war in 1642.
De Vere had been linked via the Sonnets (all copies of which were confiscated on the day of publications) and his support for the Essex rebellion, to a Tudor line of succession through Henry Wroithesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton.
It was a dangerous time for De Vere’s family and descendants who had powerful adversaries ranged against them, including James 1st and Sir Robert Cecil. The publication of the First Folio in 1623, another powerful political act, coming at a time of a national crisis over the ‘Spanish Match’, could then be laid at the feet of an unknown man from Stratford and not the descendants of Edward De Vere.