Knowing what we know now, if we review the list of successive professorial terms in the modern era, there were times when Marianne Moore could have been appointed, or Elizabeth Bishop. But the reason to appoint them would have been that they were great and learned poets, and not because they were women. If they had run in elections, of course, they would probably have lost, because the electorate, all the graduates of Oxford, would have had to be persuaded that it was time for a woman. 

The electorate is no doubt persuaded of that now, but what is the persuasion worth? It's all a matter of mediatised opinion, when what should count is well-informed opinion, as agreed on by a panel of people whose chief concern is poetry, and who rank poets by their achievement and vocational wisdom, and not by their membership of a group that is thought to be deprived. The group might very well be deprived, but it will be deprived still more if it is mined for a token.

How this board of experts should be constituted is beyond me. But before he was ever Oxford Professor, Seamus Heaney was a visiting professor at Harvard, an office to which he was not elected, but appointed, to the vast benefit of both Harvard and himself. So Harvard must know how to make a board system work. For the Oxford post, drafting all the surviving holders might not be a bad start, and then you could add in some critics and literary editors who know what they are talking about. Who those might be would itself be a matter of expert choice, so I can already see that there could be a welter of in-fighting and no clear course to a workable result. But we can be sure that the current system no longer works at all. Another election along the lines of the one we have just had will be a kamikaze convention, and we might as well have Ant and Dec presiding over the phone-in.