Dons are starting to contemplate the coming election. Most of them are vaguely surprised that the time for another one should have come round so quickly, but here we are.

There is growing expectation in the bright wintry morning air: keen anticipation and perhaps some mild trepidation, for the run-up to the crucial vote can prove a bumpy period in the don’s life. Normally placid colleagues – retreating souls whose passions are usually stirred only by the occasional non-appearance of fish and chips on the Friday lunch menu – will become transformed into excitable partisans, exuberant in their support for one party and implacably opposed to another.

Families will be broken as votes are pledged on different sides: chilly silences will fall across many an Oxford breakfast table. Marmalade will be passed with quiet asperity. Students will petition dons; dons will petition each other. Long-quiescent friendships will be abruptly reawakened in the hope of securing someone’s vote, and then no less abruptly cast back into dormancy when the acquaintance turns out to have already declared for the wrong side.

There will be emails, many emails. And there will be pieces written from the highest of moral high grounds in the university’s in-house rag, the Oxford Magazine. Altogether, it will be rich pickings for the anthropologist of the don.

Oxford’s Professor of Poetry is elected every four years. Every other professor is chosen by a small committee of other professors summoned by the Vice-Chancellor, meeting in what it always feels should be a dark, wood-panelled, smoke-filled room – though in truth these days the rooms are more often pastel-shaded modernist boxes flooded with fluorescent light, and the smoke is, alas, purely metaphorical.

But the Professor of Poetry is different: he or she is elected by something called Convocation, which is composed of the senior members of the university and everyone who has graduated from the university, whoever and wherever they may be. The total electorate, that is to say, is enormous – in fact, no one knows how big it is for sure.

In the past, you had to turn up in person to cast your vote in the Divinity School, so the wishes of the dons, who were already here, naturally held sway.

But now the university has leapt into modernity and embraced online voting, and the result is in the hands of the entire Oxonian diaspora. It is, as a Cambridge friend of mine once wonderingly observed, unmitigated democracy.

It’s true: if you are a member of the House of Lords or a lunatic you will be denied your vote in the other election that, I hear, is set to happen quite soon.

But Oxford characteristically takes a more tolerant view of such misfortunes.

Sir Geoffrey Hill is coming to the end of his reign, having triumphantly filled the biggest room in the Examination Schools on his every appearance. He has been spell-binding, more than a worthy successor to an extraordinary line of incumbents, Matthew Arnold, W.H. Auden, Robert Graves, and Seamus Heaney among them. Who will be his successor? Well, I will keep you posted.

Seamus Perry