From the Secretary to the Delegates and Chief Executive of fhe Oxford University Press

Sir, Alan Howarth, the Arts Minister, chooses to describe the Oxford University Press as "barbarians" (report, "OUP attacked for erosion of standards", February 4).

This is a bizarre charge to levy at an organisatlon which publishes over 4,000 titles each year, including hundreds of very specialised monographs. It spends over £5 million a year on completely new editions of the Oxford English Dictionary and The New Dictionary of National Biography - a scale of scholarly subvention which would be quite inconceivable to any other publisher.

Mr Howarth rightly observed, on the same occasion, that OUP "is part of a great university which the Government supports financially". But he omitted to mention that the Government does not support the OUP, and, indeed, it is the OUP which gives financial support to the university.

OUP's primary purpose is to publish scholarly, academic and educational books; we are striving achieve this in an increasingly competitive publishing and bookselling environment. To ask OUP to continue to publish contemporary poetry is to invite it to subsidise creative writing, to behave as if it were an outlying department of the Arts Council. This is not part of the remit of a university press. We have never published any other kind of contemporary adult creative writing. Neither has anyone ever suggested that we should. Writing poetry is a valuable activity, but it is not an academic one and not part of OUP's primary purpose.

The open debate taking place within the university community about poetry, even though the decision has twice been ratified by meetlngs of the OUP's governing body of academic delegates, only confirms how much we care about these issues. Oxford remains a home for lively debate, free thinking and, of course, civilising publications.

Yours faithfully, HENRY REECE.
Secretary to the Delegates and Chief Executive,
Oxford University Press,
Great Clarendon Street,
Oxford OX2 6DP
February 5.

Go to the next item in Oxford's 1999 poetry fiasco.