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.
Once 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’.
Details 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