Yesterday morning I queued in the autumn sunshine to vote for Abdul Arain as Chancellor of Cambridge University. We were guided by top-hatted administrators, and helped into gowns by others. I found myself next to an elderly lady who was separated from her husband for technical reasons I won’t go in to. She told me that she was a scientist and had graduated from Newnham College in 1944. She didn’t get a degree, she told me, but a certificate that told her that she would have been awarded a degree if she had been a man, but as a woman she could only be given a certificate. I’ve been reading about women and universities recently and I believe that Cambridge University only started admitting women in the 1920s.
\nOnce inside to vote, the assistants looked up my name in two huge folders. I told them that I had not really expected them to have a computer database. One of them laughed and said ‘Give us another 800 years’.
\nDetails of the vote and the result are at http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/education\/universityeducation\/8829408\/Lord-Sainsbury-to-be-Cambridge-University-Chancellor-exit-poll-shows.html<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday morning I queued in the autumn sunshine to vote for Abdul Arain as Chancellor of Cambridge University. We were guided by top-hatted administrators, and helped into gowns by others. I found myself next to an elderly lady who was separated from her husband for technical reasons I won’t go in to. She told me…Read more Chancellor of Cambridge University<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[32,33,51,56],"class_list":["post-901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-abdul-arain","tag-al-amin-stores","tag-cambridge","tag-chancellor"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/obliquepanic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/obliquepanic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/obliquepanic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/obliquepanic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/obliquepanic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/obliquepanic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/obliquepanic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/obliquepanic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/obliquepanic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}