The Bhutto degree
Sir: Oxford has only one Professor Trevor-Roper.Your readers will learn with no surprise that his outlook was hardly shared by the rest of us who in the end did not vote against Mr Bhutto's degree. We did not observe among those who did any paranoid self-righteousness, hysterical martyrdom, leftwing infatuation, Jewish conspiracy, or savagery, suffused with sanctimoniousness, to engross the anthropologists. Alas, this university is a duller place than Professor Trevor-Roper claims, though more concerned to get its facts right. Once Mr Bhutto's name had been proposed, Congregation did no more than its duty in debating the proposal, in view of his possible association with the Bengal massacres. Dr Gonibrich,a distinguished scholar not previously known for political partisanship, put the case against him with dignified restraint. Dr Finnis of University College argued in careful detail that Mr Bhutto, immured and isolate in his Dacca hotel, could not have been responsible for the initial murders of March 1971. Others attached weight to Mr Bhutto's recent public statements of regret. But disquiet remained about Mr Bhutto's stand in the critical months between March 1971 and his accession to the premiership. Few can have been persuaded by Professor Trevor-Roper's own speech praising Mr Bhutto as an opponent of army rule, when everyone knows that the army still exerts massive power in Pakistan under the command of the notorious General Tikka Khan. Voters on each side thus had sensible' reasons for their decision. As for the "shameful public affront," the robust, mercurial Mr Bhutto is accustomed to worse troubles, and is not averse to delivering the odd buffet himself. One affront no member of Congregation took much to heart was his hustling Pakistan out of the British Commonwealth. Nor, for that matter, is Oxford likely to be much grieved by the affronts to his university in Professor Trevor-. Roper's article. Traditional oxford would have been horrified; indeed, it would not have stood for his amazing anti-Christian article in The Spectator a few, years ago. Today, Oxford can regard with tolerance, if not always With approval, the scurrilities of one of the most brilliantly entertaining controversialists of our time.
Thomas Braun Merton College, Oxford
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