Poetry scandal! Scarlet woman Padel versus sex-pest Nobel man! Disgraced professor resigns! Oh, calm down chaps. Unpick what actually happened over the Oxford poetry professorship, and only then decide who is the most disgusting. In brief: Derek Walcott left the contest in dudgeon after a (still anonymous) mailshot and a minxy article digging up sexual harassment accusations more than two decades ago. It was all on Wikipedia anyway. Ruth Padel, the other strong contender, denies being behind this.

But last Saturday an arts-gossip journalist dug out an e-mail in which (at the end, in a couple of lines) she passed on the concern expressed by some female student who frets about these things. This was, she admits, stupid. But not a capital offence. We all chat helpfully on e-mail. Some are naive enough to think that arts journalists are interested mainly in art.

The said hack — so committed to covering the poetry professorship that somehow he bothered to look back in his computer’s e-mail inbox only after Padel’s election victory, so as to maximise humiliation — rang round her known supporters. I got a call, asked for the text of the e-mail, decided that it was imprudent but not malicious and pointed out that it proves nothing about the wider campaign, which Padel said she was horrified by. I mildly told the reporter that I still thought she was a good choice, and thought no more of it.

But by morning it transpired that the same call to more eminent rent-a-quotes had a quite different result. Lord Bragg said she was “disgraceful” and should resign; Sir Jeremy Isaacs echoed this, expressing how “upset” he was. Neither man, I happen to know, rang the poet to ask for her side of it before putting on the black cap.

Which I suppose goes to show that the arts world — at least its parasitic and pompous TV arm — is baby-frightened of the Sunday press, and that nobody should ever make the mistake of relying on the loyalty, calm judgment or even common courtesy of clapped-out old media grandees who have spent too long thinking that they own the arts. A.C. Grayling, who also rushed to condemn, did at least contact her; Professor John Carey, by far the most genuinely distinguished of the lot, just gently said that a re-run of the election would only hurt Padel and that she should not be thus “insulted”.

For the record, Ms Padel is not a buddy of mine — I hadn’t seen her for more than 15 minutes since a slight acquaintance in the Eighties — but I was enthused by her ideas for using the job to bring poetry to other university departments. Moreover, I don’t really care about professors hitting on their adult students; I come from a less prissy generation. We knew that when your learned mentor’s gasps of wonder at your brilliance turn to hot breath on the cheek you back off, make yourself clear and get on with your work. Or, in extremis, ask the Dean to have a word. Nor do I see any reason for Derek Walcott to have resigned his candidacy, not if he actually wanted the job.

Later attempts yesterday to amplify the charges with fragments of e-mails have not, in any calm view, changed a thing: Padel’s actions remain a bêtise rather than a dark conspiracy. The furore merely betrays the “me-too” attitudes of gleeful, sanctimoniously prurient journalists who hate to be left out. Marginal bloodsuckers have meanwhile weighed in with sniggering references to how exciting it is to have a sexual frisson in the dull poetry world after enduring — as one put it — “Andrew Motion droning on” for years.

The whole episode stinks of hypocrisy, malice and media having fun with the lives of real artists. If any of Padel’s lemming critics has never tittled an injudicious tattle to a journalist over a glass of warm wine at Hay or Cheltenham, let him cast the first stone.

The bitter irony is that her real campaign was about bringing together the literary arts and the sciences. As Darwin’s great-great granddaughter she has a vision of ending the “two cultures” (geeks-versus-aesthetes) which dominated 20th-century academe. She held a vibrant session at St Peter’s College with students from all disciplines, and had promised to visit every college and offer sessions to science departments. That was the real idea. And the irony? Well, scientists and engineers are trained to examine new evidence, check it, weigh up probabilities, decide on how important flaws and irregularities really are, and only then draw conclusions.

But hell, that’s not the way the arts-media titterocracy operates. Too boring, darling.

Look, love, what’s the big deal?

The trouble with sexual harassment is that it’s so subjective, dependent on all kinds of factors, and what can be hilarious from one man’s mouth can be flesh-creeping an threatening from another’s. Derek Walcott withdrew from the initial race for Oxford University’s Professor of Poetry position after a dossier detailing two sexual harassment allegations against him was sent to around 100 Oxford academics.

The first allegation dated back to 1982, when a student at Harvard alleged that, while discussing her work with Walcott after class, he asked her to “imagine me making love to you. What would I do? . . . Would you make love with me if I asked you?” After rejecting his approaches, she was then given a C grade in his class. Walcott was reprimanded by Harvard. The other allegation, in the mid-1990s, was settled.

Back then, sexual harassment was a political red hot potato, of course. Women had woken up to the fact that they didn’t have to put up with s*** this anymore but they had nothing specific in law to protect them. At university in the Eighties I remember female students picketing newsagents that sold The Sun and kicking in the shins any male student seen buying it or looking at the Page 3 photograph.

Women had to have their wits about them then: before 2005 anyone wanting to report an act of sexual harassment had to make a claim of sex discrimination, meaning that you had to show you were treated in this manner purely because of your gender. Employment tribunals defined sexual harassment as unwanted contact of a sexual nature. When the new Employment Equality laws came into force in 2005, the Sex Discrimination Act was broadened to mean more than lewd comments and Carry On-style bottom-pinching but generally creating an “intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment”.

But now we have the mechanisms in place to stop sexual harassment is the issue a bit, well, last century? We have a voice after all and the pendulum has swung so far the other way that teachers and lecturers are now afraid to sit on their own with a student in a room with the door closed lest they find themselves landed with a career-ruining harassment suit. Indeed we sometimes verge on the hysterical: in Boston a school wanted to prosecute a six-year-old boy found with “his hand inside the waistband of a girl’s pants, touching the skin on her back”, in violation of the school’s sexual harassment policy. According to the boy’s mother, however, her son did not even know what sexual meant. Happily, the district attorney’s office deemed the boy too young to be prosecuted.

We still hear harassment horror stories from the City, of course, but you’d think that, now employers are so super-sensitive about the minefield of harassment law, surely the number of complaints should have come down? Not so. One in five of calls to the Equal Opportunities helpline are regarding sexual harassment, with 40 per cent of complainants being male. And people are generally more litigious these days.

Rachel Dineley, group head of the diversity and discrimination unit at the law firm, Beachcroft LLP, says that while women are more confident about complaining, some feel it easier to keep quiet because of the consequences.

“What is still lacking is a confidential means whereby allegations can be addressed satisfactorily from the point of view of the complainant and alleged harasser,” she says. “It’s all too easy to assume that there is substance to the allegation, and it is important not to victimise either party in the pursuit of a resolution. There are instances where employers are the recipients of misconceived allegations of harassment, where the complainant may be overly sensitive or, if one is being sceptical, seeking to exploit the prospective damage to the employer’s reputation.

“Employers must find a way to facilitate a resolution in a low-key way so that relationships are restored.”

On student campuses lecturers are encouraged to declare any relationship with a student, especially a romantic one, to a superior, colleague or third party after consultation with the University and College Union.

“Any declaration must be treated in complete confidence and there should not be a requirement to give details of the nature of the involvement,” said a spokesman. “It should then be the duty of the appropriate authorities within the university to organise the staff member’s professional duties to avoid contact with the student concerned. While staff are strongly advised to disclose such relationships, failure to disclose should not, in itself, constitute grounds for disciplinary action.”

Universities are clearly on the case regarding sexual harassment with procedures plainly outlined, so is it too simplistic to describe Oxford University, as Jeanette Winterson did this week, following the Padel row, as a “sexist little dump”? While old-boy networks surely still flourish, there are umpteen high-flying female academics and many thousands of female students who do extremely well at Oxford and in other academic establishments. Winterson’s hyperbolic language debases a debate that has moved on.

Real sexual harassment is miserable for those who suffer it but establishments such as Oxford are nirvana compared to the sexism that exists in the real world outside academia.

In Russia, for example, sexual harassment is an “accepted” part of office life and according to a recent survey, 100 per cent of female professionals said that they had been subjected to sexual harassment by their bosses and only two cases have been won since the collapse of the Soviet Union. A judge recently threw out another case brought by a female advertising executive. “If we had no sexual harassment,” ruled the judge, “we would have no children.”

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