Breaking the mould

The election of Professor Sir Curtis Price as the next Warden of New College, Oxford, is remarkable in two respects: he is (or was) American and he is a musician. The American side of it is just one of those things. Sir Curtis has lived and worked in the UK since 1981 and has been Principal of the Royal Academy of Music since 1995. His period of tenure there is hailed as having been one of sustained growth which, believe me, is no mean achievement. One notices that the same thing is not being said about the Royal College over the same 13 years. Evidently a signing of the necessary forms has enabled Price to use his title, which unfortunately puts him in the same category as the appalling Sir Allen Stanford (the first American to be knighted as an adopted citizen of Antigua and Barbuda, evidently an unsatisfactory practice).