A leading academic has disclosed how he hoped for the death of a colleague whose drunken, irrational behavior had become an embarrassment, and learned with relief that the man committed suicide.
"My problem was one which I feel compelled to define with brutal candor: how to kill him without getting into trouble," Sir Kenneth Dover, 74, wrote of historian Trevor Aston in a new autobiography.However, there is no evidence in the book that Dover had a direct hand in Aston's suicide. Excerpts from the book, "Marginal Comment," were printed in The Sunday Times of London.
Aston, a historian at Corpus Christi College at Oxford University, overdosed on drugs in October 1985, the day he was notified of formal divorce proceedings by his second wife, and several days after a heated confrontation with Dover.
Dover was president of Corpus Christi College at the time of Aston's death and a professor at large at Cornell University. An expert on ancient Greece, he is now chancellor of St. Andrew's University in Scotland.
Dover said Monday that he was not responsible for his colleague's death.
Would he have tried to kill Aston had he not committed suicide?
"Oh no, no no," Dover said. "Well, I think it just wasn't practicable," he added.
Dover wrote that Aston's college fellowship was renewed in 1982 for seven years but only reluctantly.
Dover said psychiatrists told him Aston was extremely vulnerable. "A formal letter from me . . . threatening his tenure of his fellowship, might push him into suicide," he wrote.
Dover did write to Aston, "telling him that we just couldn't have fellows falling around and shouting abuse at the staff."
And Aston appeared to take it well, he wrote.
Dover says he did not tell Aston about the 1982 vote to provoke his suicide. "Oh no, it didn't enter my head," Dover said.