An author who fought a six-year legal battle with Oxford University plans to enter the race to become the university's new Chancellor. Philosopher Andrew Malcolm said he had started collecting the 50 nominations he needed to stand, in what many will see as his most outrageous move to embarrass the university.
Mr Malcolm became a bitter critic of the university after the Oxford University Press decided not to publish his book Making Names, which the author believed it had accepted. Now after fighting the university in the High Court and the Court of Appeal, the writer said he wanted to be Chancellor to "restore the university's battered reputation for integrity and academic excellence."
Mr Malcolm denied that he was bent on revenge after being left with legal bills totalling more than £50,000. He said, "I am not doing this in a spirit of mischief or irony, but as a genuine and serious attempt to resolve some of the university's grave problems, including both the general failings which my case highlights and certain particular legal anomalies which it has generated."
The Warden of New College, Professor Alan Ryan, and the OUP Delegate at the centre of the Malcolm case, previously accused the author of "devoting his life to a vendetta against the OUP." Mr Malcolm, 53, who read philosophy at Cambridge, wrote a book about the court battle.
Last summer, he opened a macabre exhibition in Broad Street, Oxford, featuring a model of a don clutching a blood-stained knife, to highlight his long-standing grievances. He was also barred from a speaking engagement in Borders bookshop in Magdalen Street, although he was later permitted to speak at another Borders store in London.
If he succeeds in collecting sufficient signatures to stand, it would represent a huge publicity coup, with every detail of the Chancellorship election certain to be reported across the globe. Mr Malcolm said he hoped to have collected 25 of the 50 nominations by the end of this week.
The prospect of Mr Malcolm becoming the first candidate will cause a collective shiver to run through Oxford common rooms. His personal manifesto published today proposes wholesale reform of the university's "archaic collegiate system" and promises to eradicate "cash for places, croneyism, fustian bureaucracy and the many other problems that have bedevilled and lately publicly disgraced the university."
He promises to oppose top-up fees and privatisation and blames the univiersity's financial problems on lack of accountability and wastage, offering as an example "the £500,000 lost by the university from 1986 to 1992 unsuccessfully defending my simple breach-of-contract claim".
The university rules say that to nominate a candidtate an official form must be signed by 50 members of the University Convocation - which consists of all former student members who have received a degree. The election to find a successor to the late Lord Jenkins of Hillhead will take place in Oxford on March 14 and 15.
A university spokesman said: 'Although by tradition the Chancellor has been an eminent figure from politics, law or the church, these are not necessarily the only backgrounds from which a Chancellor might come. In theory, anyone's name can be put forward for the Chancellorship. They do not have to be an Oxford graduate. "The Chancellor, however, must be visibly committed to the independence of universities and should have the best interest of Oxford University at heart."