Sir, A number of disturbing issues are raised by Maggie Hartford's excellent report about OUP's anomalous tax status, A message from India (March 30).
There is the university's admission that, despite all its fanfare of last year, OUP's £54 million 'donation' has, after all, not been spent. There is the revelation that this charity's lawyers are still seeking ways to dispossess India's education system. There is the boast that, on the back of its not-for-profit dispensation, OUP has become the most profitable publisher in the UK. And there is the deafening absence, from this city of logicians, of any comment on such a magnificent contradiction.
However, perhaps most disturbing of all are the OED custodians' philological flounderings. My own lawsuit saw them in protracted difficulties over the words 'commitment', 'encouragement' and 'list'. Recently their problems with 'charity' and 'donation' have become evident. Now we have 'integral', as in "OUP is an integral part of Oxford University" (OUP spokeswoman, The Oxford Times, 5th November 1999).
First, labouring as it does under its ancient collegiate system, whereby it is Oxford's individual colleges, rather than its university, which enjoy educational charity status, it is arguable that the university is by no means 'integral' in itself.
Second, even if it were, there is no OED sense, in either fact or semantics, in which OUP is 'integral' to it. It is not a necessary condition of being a university to own or to run an international publishing house, let alone one as commercially ruthless as Oxford's.*
Nor is it even loosely true in either fact or law, for of course the Press has, and has to have, its own accounts. How else can Philippa Corson talk of OUP's £54 million "being transferred" and "staying in the university's coffers"?
But to turn to the practicalities and their history, if OUP ever had been 'integral' to its university, it would not, up until 1978, have been liable for corporation tax.
Nor would its tax-exemption, secretly granted that year, have been conditional upon its ploughing all of its surpluses back into 'non-commercial publishing' like poetry, a fact which brings us neatly to another, related word which Oxford apparently finds awkward: 'integrity'.
Andrew Malcolm
AKME Publications, Brighton
* Clause edited out.
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