What on earth qualifies Alan Rusbridger to run an Oxford college?

When Alan Rusbridger announced his departure from The Guardian, two questions presented themselves. The first was: who will succeed him? And the second — admittedly far less interesting — was: which Oxbridge college will he end up dumped in? The answer, we now learn, is Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford. Lucky old them.

It’s a sign of the phenomenon which The Spectator’s Peter Oborne outlined: the inexorable rise of the media and political classes. Rusbridger is no academic — he was a chorister at fee-paying Cranleigh School and then he read English Literature at Magdalene College, Cambridge. But aside from that, he’s spent most of his life on Fleet Street.

But it fits with the trend which Dennis Sewell pointed out in The Spectator a few years ago: increasingly, plum positions once reserved for academics are being handed out to the media elite. Here’s the original piece:

At high tables across the university, former journalists, broadcasting executives and quangocrats are increasingly occupying places of honour once reserved for scholars of great renown.