A radical proposal to privatize the 500-year-old Oxford University Press to raise extra funds for the ailing university has this week been condemned as a threat to academic scholarship.
The proposal - to sell off a 49 per cent stake of the OUP - has been made by Dr Graham Richards, a senior tutor of Brasenose, in a letter to the Oxford Magazine which is distributed free to all Oxford dons.
Dr Richards believes the sale would raise between £100 million and £150 million which could be used to offset an expected annual shortfall in the university budget of around £10 million. Oxford has already decided to shed 140 academic posts over the next five years because of University Grants Committee-imposed cuts.
But Professor Roger Elliott, professor of theoretical physics, who chairs the OUP finance committee, dismissed the proposal as totally unworkable and a threat to a unique institution. "The new arrangement would force the Press to commercial rather than scholarly interests and would undermine the OUP's long-standing aims, which are the same as the university's: to promote scholarship, sound learning, and education, only via publishing rather than teaching and research," he said.
"The OUP, with its counterpart the Cambridge University Press, are unique, enjoying charitable status because of their scholarly aims. As such they do not make profits, but plough back any surplus into further scholarly publication. If OUP was sold publicly its charitable status could be in question".
Professor Elliott however did not rule out some kind of help being given to the university by the OUP which currently publishes around 1,200 book titles a year and has a turnover of £86 million. Another sign of the growing squeeze has come with the news that Oxford has just agreed its 200 professors should be paid to teach undergraduates, because there are no longer enough college tutors to cover the work. Until now it has been felt professors should be protected from teaching pressures which could distract them from research work and the supervision of graduate students.
The OUP, though, is still trying to rebuild its operation five years after it plunged into crisis facing a six-figure deficit. Since then the press has been reorganized with the loss of around 306 jobs. New technology has been introduced, new storage warehouses built, and the printing division in 10 years has shrunk in size from 900 jobs to 325. Now another 69 jobs are to go in printing over the next two years, mainly compulsory redundancies, tied to a further investment in new machinery. But it is understood the move follows the loss of a major contract from West Africa and the unsuccessful purchase of a two-colour web printing press. The OUP's financial reserves are still low, but once they are deemed sufficient it is thought money could be transferred to promote academic work in the university.
Click for Professor W. G. Richards' privatisation proposal.