Where is the university?

or
six sentences in search of a full stop

First, I must thank this branch of Borders for daring to host this talk, and all of you for daring to come. For the benefit of newcomers, I should explain that when I last tried to give it, at the Oxford Borders last October, after about five minutes we were all surrounded by a team of 'security staff' who started removing the table and chairs, and we were eventually escorted from the store by a team of flak-jacketed police (click for photostory & reports). When asked why they were stopping the talk, the manager replied: "We have our reasons but we do not have to tell you them". I am fully expecting the same sort of thing to happen again today, so please keep a lookout for squad cars and an ear out for sirens, and remember, this is England, 2003.

The situation reminds me of the time, in the mid 1960s, when I was living in Athens during the colonels' junta. Once or twice I found myself at basement sessions where people sang the protest songs of Mikis Theodorakis, whose music was banned. Lookouts had to be posted at the house doorways and at the ends of the nearby streets to warn the musicians of any approaching police-cars. Here was a military regime that felt threatened by folksingers. (I can understand that, but surely one doesn't need to ban them). Such bans always say more about the censors than they do about the censored. I mean, what could I possibly have had to say in Oxford that could have been thought so dangerous?

Perhaps they were afraid that with a few deft philosophical arguments, I was single-handedly going to demolish the logical foundations that are supposed to underpin modern science's atomic and particle theories. But in fact I wasn't going to do that, no, for I had already attempted something of the sort in my first book Making Names.

Perhaps they were afraid that I was going to name the parade of Oxford individuals who, in the course of the historic breach-of-contract suit which that book generated, lied or perjured themselves. But in fact I wasn't going to do that either, for they are already recorded in my second book The Remedy.

Perhaps they were worried that I was going to draw attention to my subsequent discovery that up until 1978 OUP was liable for the payment of corporation tax and but was then secretly exempted on condition (a) that it ploughs any surplus back into non-commercial publishing and (b) that it does not become a source of university revenue. But I wasn't going to mention this surprising truth, For this too I have already set out, in The Remedy's 5th appendix.

Perhaps they were afraid that I was going to remind people that this quasi-charity broke my contract on purely commercial grounds, and then spent half a million quid abortively defending it. And that, a few years later, when it axed its modern poetry list to save an estimated 20,000 pounds, it held cash reserves exceeding 140 million. But I wasn't going to mention these facts either, for they are all on Akme's website.

Perhaps they were afraid that I was going to explain the startling outcomes, for both my books and the university, of our recent new bout of litigation. Well actually, yes, I was and I am going to try to do this, so tough.

But before doing so, what I had planned to do was none of these things; it was to recall some philosophy, some of the very simple but endlessly puzzling philosophy that for me sparked off the whole business. I will therefore begin by reading some passages from my original book, passages that, in the light of subsequent events, have become increasingly eerie. Eerie not just because with hindsight they appear somewhat prescient, but because since writing them, my whole calamitous 'career' seems to have become some kind of unlikely practical investigation of the abstract philosophical problems they raise.

Please note that I wrote these passages back in the late 1970s, long before I had any thought of offering any book to Oxford, or indeed had much of a book to offer anyone. Note too that in Borders' press release for this event (and in Brigton's Argus newspaper), Making Names is described, novelly, as a novel. People do find the book hard to classify. It opens with a prose description of a landscape, as if the direction of a long movie-take.

England. An unusually hot, almost windless early morning in mid-summer. A patchwork landscape of ripe cornfields, cow-grazed pasture and dense woodland undulates gently to the horizon. From this distance the black-and-white cows that dot the grassland appear as motionless as the trees that here and there punctuate the fields' hedgerows. This abnormal stillness, combined with the intense shimmering heat and the low steady buzzing of insects, imbues the scene with an air of vaguely threatening unease.

The insects' ceaseless droning reminds us that the tranquility of this landscape is only apparent. Amongst the grasses at our feet, as the briefest inspection will reveal, are countless tiny creatures all going intently about their business: a shiny black beetle carefully making his way through a thicket of clover; baby spiders scurrying up and down the tall stems of couch grass; a furry brown caterpillar hiding in the shade of a dandelion leaf; here an ants' nest, a whole civilization of black specks busily encamped in the remains of an old tree-stump; and there, a bee, buzzing diligently from flower to flower and then suddenly away, flying quickly out of sight.

As we draw back and our view of the countryside widens into a panorama, we can see that the landscape is dotted with buildings and is criss-crossed by a number of tracks and roads. In the distance a railway line runs straight for several miles, and beyond it there is the silvery glint of a small river twisting and turning its way eastwards. At the point where the river, the railway line and two of the larger roads meet, the greenness of the countryside is marked by an irregular greyish blot... a fair-sized country town.

As its detail gradually comes into focus we soon realize that this is no ordinary English town. There is the usual concentration of shopping streets, office buildings and a market square at the town's centre, and the usual sprawl of cramped terraced houses, public parks, new estates and small factories surrounding it, but there are also large areas, especially along the banks of the river, where complexes of massive buildings of stone, rich with ornate masonry, fine spires and grand gateways, are set amongst spacious lawns and gardens and wooded groves. There are great chapels, shady quadrangles and some fine modern buildings too, their white stone and glass glittering fiercely in the sunshine. This, certainly, must be one of England's historic university cities...

[The camera closes in] Along one of the narrow winding streets which lead to the market square, a young driver is dreamily steering a battered but stylish old MGA sports car. Without warning, a university man, also with things on his mind, steps out absently from one of the college gateways into the street, and into the path of the car. The early-morning tranquility is rudely shattered by a fierce squealing of brakes, a clatter of shuddering bodywork and... no thud. By a miracle there is no collision. A split-second reaction on the parts of both driver and pedestrian has avoided a potentially fatal accident. Any anger is at once forgotten in the two mens' immense relief at their lucky escape. The driver anxiously walks over to his near-victim to make sure that he is unhurt, and since the man's nerves are obviously shaken, he offers him a hand. They fall into conversation...

The book then switches into dialogue form, becoming the two men's day-long conversation. For today's talk I will take both their 'parts'. To add to the classification difficulty, in its last chapter the book's format changes again into a playscript, a play that the philosopher has written and which the two men enact, or at least orate, in his room. This play is the inspiration of the whole enterprise, but cannot be fully understood, I think, until the rest of it has been read; I will not attempt that today.

Back at the beginning, after their lucky escape, the two men look around at the strangers in the street, as you might look around now at the people around you in this room, and ask "how do I know that these people have perceptions and feelings and thoughts - in short have minds?" It turns out that one of the men is a scientist, the other a philosopher, and quite soon their conversation becomes an examination of behaviourism, and in particular of Gilbert Ryle's classic 1949 text The Concept of Mind, a copy of which the philosopher keeps permanently in his car.

Gilbert Ryle, it may be noted, was educated at Brighton College and Oxford, where he then taught, coming to be regarded as one of the great philosophers of the modern era. In The Concept of Mind, he famously opposes the idea that the relationship between the mind and the body is that of a kind of spectral puppeteer trapped within and somehow directing a physical mechanism. My fictional philosopher, as I will now do, begins by quoting from Ryle's book:

"I shall often speak of the official theory with deliberate abusiveness, as the dogma of the 'ghost in the machine'. I hope to prove that it is entirely false, and false not in detail but in principle. It is not merely an assemblage of particular mistakes... It is one big mistake and a mistake of a special kind. It is, namely, a category-mistake... I must first indicate what is meant by the phrase 'category-mistake'...

A foreigner visiting Oxford or Cambridge for the first time is shown a number of colleges, libraries, playing fields, museums, scientific departments and administrative offices. He then asks "But where is the university?"... It has to be explained to him that the university is not another collateral institution, some ulterior counterpart to the colleges, laboratories and offices which he has seen. The university is just the way in which all that he has already seen is organized. When they are seen and when their coordination is understood, the university has been seen. His mistake lay in his innocent assumption that it was correct to speak of Christ Church, the Bodleian Library, the Ashmolean Museum and the university... The mistake is made by someone who does not know how to wield the concept university... The puzzle arises from an inability to use a certain term in the English vocabulary."

In Making Names the philosopher and the scientist pursue Ryle's analogy [page 47]:

Scientist: Come to think of it, I know a number of places around the world where the so-called 'university' is little more than a single large building.
Philosopher: The foreigner's mistake was explained with the help of just a dictionary or a moment's explanation, no philosophy was needed. Even if, pray God, he had come from a culture with educational practices quite different from our own and spoke a language which contained no words for 'college' or 'university', our explanation would still be perfectly straightforward and uncontroversial, and nothing like trying to persuade him that we don't each have our own perceptions and feelings and thoughts; no book like Ryle's would be required... I cannot imagine a language which used the same word for 'me' and 'you'... No, a better parallel with the man who observes another's behaviour and then asks "Yes, but what is going on in his mind?" is the visitor who is shown around the university's colleges, libraries, laboratories and so on and then asks "Yes, but where does the money come from?"
Scientist: Ah, but that question could be answered quite easily, quite factually.
Philosopher: Could it? Are you sure? Think carefully: where would the bucks stop? In the end don't we always come up against the other minds problem, or rather against the trustworthiness problem? It is ironical: the idea which is the greatest anathema to Ryle is the picture of human relationships as being that of mysterious, ghostly intellects somehow communicating with one another via their bodies' interventions in the physical world, yet his writing and my reading of The Concept of Mind is a classic candidate for just such a picture: one mind trying to change another mind's view through the agency of a public object, a book.

There are two more passages I should like to quote. First at page 177; they have been reading another famous modern analogy, Wittgenstein's 'family resemblances' passage. By this stage, the philosopher has revealed that he himself has written a book, and that he is looking for a suitable title and publisher for it.

Philosopher: As far as I am concerned philosophy must have some purpose. The philosopher's job is not just to chart the networks of criss-crossing similarities between the instances of universals, not just to trace the complex patterns of family resemblance and relationship amongst our various intellectual and moral concepts. This is work for cartographers and lexicographers and biographers, the sort of people one tends to find around this place. By the way, I have a pet argument which proves that universities, paradoxically, are the last places in the world in which to discover philosophy. Since philosophers are necessarily people reacting against prevailing ways of thinking and philosophy is necessarily their intellectual revolt, a university which is in every sense an intellectual establishment, is going by definition to be the last place in which to find either.
Scientist: In which case what are you doing here? Are philosophers also necessarily inconsistent?

And at page 328, by which time the philosopher's scientific targets are clear:

Philosopher: Remember, before you assert that controversies are always resolved on purely scientific grounds, when rival theories are vying to explain some new phenomenon, that behind them stand rival scientists, rival laboratories, rival academics, and that behind these stand rival publishing houses, rival universities, rival governments. One must not underestimate the jealousies and powers of the academic institutions, whose interests are vested in keeping this theory as the accepted explanation of so-and-so or that model as the accepted interpretation of such-and-such or the other university as the recognized centre of bla-bla research.

I repeat: all this was written long before I had any thought of offering my book to Oxford. Anyway, what I should now like to do (and had intended to do last October) is to return to Ryle's category-mistake analogy. I must stress that The Concept of Mind is a classic, a beautifully written and argued philosophical text of the highest importance, and yet (and this may tell us something about philosophy altogether), it is also perfectly mad, crazy and ridiculous.

Digression: it seems to have become Oxford's stock line that I too am mad, crazy and ridiculous. I hear this now from all angles. "Oh that Malcolm fellow, he's mad isn't he?" Is this the best, I ask myself, that they can do? Will they not explain or elaborate such a diagnosis? I have not actually been sectioned yet, so perhaps we should be listening out for ambulances too.

I say that The Concept of Mind is mad because of course a summary, however complex, of a person's behaviour and behaviour-patterns is not what we mean when we ascribe them perceptions and feelings and thoughts (i.e. mind or mentality). It might be argued that the book's very title demonstrates the point: it is only minds - as understood in the 'old', pre-Ryelan way - that can entertain concepts.

The Concept of Mind is important, however, because it reminds us that the only way in which we can know of others' minds is through their behaviour. The madness lies in Ryle's further, positivist, perhaps tongue-in-cheek step, that therefore people's behaviour is all that they are. The craziness is neatly caught in the philosophical dirty joke: Two behaviourists have sex. Afterwards one says "That was great for you, how was it for me?"

But let's go back now to Ryle's foreigner, gazing puzzled around Oxford's Radcliffe Square. He asks "Where is the university?" We must at once be careful that his words do not slide into other, general questions, some of which are politically hot ones at the moment. "What is a university?" for example, perhaps asked in the light of the ever-expanding scope of the term to encompass former polytechnics. Or "What or who are universities for?" asked in the light of the government target of providing university education to 50 per cent of school-leavers. Or "How should universities be financed?" the question that currently consumes all of the higher education journals. These are clearly not the sorts of question that Ryle's foreigner is asking, and I will steer clear of them.

Let us agree too that he is asking the particular question "Where is Oxford University?" rather than any general query about the state of higher education at the turn of the 21st century. Even then, his words taken out of context could still suggest a variety of answers: "Eighth in the national ratings, and falling." (rf. a Times article, 8/99), though this might be thought facetious. True, but facetious.

Another answer might be "All over the country." After the Crown and the Church, Oxford and Cambridge Universities are country's biggest landowners. It was once said to be possible to walk from one to the other never leaving land that their colleges owned. Again such an answer may be thought facetious. True, but facetious.

Or perhaps "In the High Courts." It so happens that roughly 50 out of the roster of 55 Chancery and Appeal Court judges are from Oxford or Cambridge, a fact of decisive relevance to our recent legal proceedings. But again such an answer may be thought facetious. True, but facetious.

No, let's be absolutely fair to Ryle, and to his foreigner's question. Even when it is taken absolutely literally, some genuine new observations can be made.

Ryle's answer "The way these buildings are organised" is a surprisingly materialist one, coming as it does from a philosophy professor. He concentrates on the buildings. Where is the university? Could not, should not other valid answers be: it is 'in' its members, the 3,000 or so professors, lecturers and administrators that make up Oxford's Congregation; or 'in' the education it provides its undergraduates; or 'in' the research it undertakes; or 'in' its faculties (another nice word in this context). Without these things, it would be said, there would be no university, and its buildings would be... just buildings - bricks and mortar; mortar without mortar boards.

First, some history, history that was invoked in court against me only last year: the university is said to be just an aggregation or confederation of entirely independent, separately founded colleges, some of which date back to the 13th century. There was no university as such until 1570, when a group of the colleges were so incorporated. A foreigner in 1500 could have been shown some of these same buildings, as they were then, and been truthfully told "But there is no university" or "There is no university yet." In court last year Michael Beloff QC, President of Trinity College, talked of the relations between the colleges and the university as being "shrouded in seven centuries of mystery."

Next, by corollary, imagine what might become the case, if certain present-day 'modernisers' get their way. Some of Oxford's colleges are immensely wealthy, others claim to be nearly broke. The colleges are educational charities, yet they give little or nothing to one another, guarding their independence and their assets fiercely. This can bring enormous pressures and conflicts into the university's organisation. At Oxford the colleges' present trend seems towards splintering rather than centralising, with some of the rich ones like New College seeking to go private so that they can charge students whatever they choose and become exclusive finishing schools for the rich.

In a few years time, as these financial pressures intensify and these splits become more open, perhaps some of the colleges will actually break away from the university altogether and disincorporate. So it is perfectly conceivable that in twenty years' time, with Tony Blair starting his seventh term, some of the buildings a foreigner now sees in Radcliffe Square will not be part of Oxford University.

On the other hand, all sorts of fringe colleges in Oxford are all the time seeking to join the university - that is its history - and many grades of membership and affiliation are differentiated. In short, Oxford University, even conceived as merely a set of buildings, is in a state of perpetual flux.

Again, think something unthinkable. Suppose Oxford were A-bombed, perhaps in some upcoming Iraqi retaliation, and all of its buildings were destroyed. Suppose, mercifully, its Congregation members had been warned, evacuated, and rehoused elsewhere, to continue their education and research, would not Oxford University continue to exist? Might not the right answer for the foreigner standing in the Radcliffe rubble then be "in Headington." "Oxford University is in Headington" may sound like a contradiction, but then Oxford University (Brookes) is in Headington.

Digression: many OUP books now have little or nothing to do with Oxford, but are packaged by a private company in Aylesbury and then stamped with the 'Oxford' Logo. Publishing-wise, 'Oxford' has for some time been little more a brand-name.

Conversely, suppose the city were suddenly neutron-bombed, leaving its buildings intact but its university members largely wiped out. Would Oxford University continue to exist? Presumably not, or at least not for a while.

The purpose of such grisly thought experiments is, of course, to illustrate that just as we cannot conceive of a living human being devoid of (a) mind, so we cannot conceive of a functioning university being devoid of staff, a staff that engages in education, research, scholarship and so forth.

In short, Ryle's behaviourist thesis is mad not just because it endeavours to persuade us that human beings do not have minds - perceptions, feelings, thoughts - as we all know them to have, but also because it is based on a logic - that of his category-mistake analogy - in which a university is conceived as consisting merely of an arrangement, a 'coordination', of buildings.

Now, to repeat, much of this was already written into Making Names long before I offered it, or thought of offering it, to OUP, something I ended up doing in August 1984.

Observe here several other points that have by now emerged: how a large part of philosophy, the sort of philosophy that interested me, concerns the meanings of words and concepts and their logical relations. In this respect Philosophy is also very like Law, the subject that is about to rear its ugly - or beautiful - head. Note too that the university about to become involved in this story regards itself and is regarded, and with some justification, as the custodian not only of much of this country's philosophical and legal heritage, but, with its lexicography, as the chief custodian of our language.

At risk of boring listeners who have heard all this before, for the benefit of newcomers I must here quickly outline my OUP saga, and, I'm afraid, identify three participants in it whose names will recur. There are various points to note: I sent Oxford a book to consider for publication, not just an outline or a synopsis, but this book [picks it up] complete; they had it for over nine months and sent it to three referees before deciding upon it - there was no rush; the first of the referees was Alan Ryan, an Oxford philosopher and one of the Delegates (the committee of dons responsible for OUP). He wrote two enthusiastic reports, the first of which "got the ball rolling" for the book, and the second of which suggested it had the potential to become a bestseller

The senior editor Henry Hardy also got enthusiastic about it and offered to publish it, provided I revise it to Oxford's specifications (e.g. cut its length by 20 per cent), which I did. At this point I would display three key sentences we exchanged, long before anyone ever dreamt of summoning lawyers.

Forget the legal analysis, forget the Law of Contract: does anyone find any ambiguity here, is there anything here that needs explaining? Are there any difficult words, any complex hypotheses?

To cut a long story short, OUP's Managing Director a Mr Richard Charkin then intervened and binned the project, sight unseen, on commercial grounds (the book was going to cost £5,000 to print). Charkin tried to sack Hardy, against whom he had been waging a "power-struggle" for control, in which he used Making Names as a "pawn" (all his words). With my help Hardy won this battle and kept his job, then urging me to go ahead with the revision of Making Names as agreed, which I did. I returned with the revised script seven months later, found that Hardy had been moved to another department, that Ryan was running a mile (he went to the USA), and that Charkin was refusing to honour OUP's agreement. In December 1986 I sued the university for breach of contract. I quote from The Remedy, page 48:

Another thing to remember is that very few people, I guess, who embark upon litigation remotely imagine that they will actually end up in court. I certainly did not. Although one never wants to make threats one does not intend to execute (early on Richard Charkin warned that Oxford would fight the case to the House of Lords), and one must beforehand carefully weigh all the possibilities in the awful event that it does go the distance, yet, certainly to start with, one expects the first solicitor's letter or two to do the trick. With this in mind, and aware that so far we had failed to penetrate the OUP hierarchy above Hardy and Charkin's level, my solicitor composed a very careful (and, as it turned out, very prescient) letter before action to George Richardson, the Secretary to the Delegates, and OUP's equivalent of Chief Executive.

In other words, the lawsuit soon became my own personal pursuit of an answer to the question "where is the university?" - that is a search for the people who comprise, run, and are responsible for it. Sure enough, up the hierarchy the case went, to OUP's Delegates and beyond, but never at any stage did I find anyone interested to hear or read those three little sentences. The Remedy, page 57:

The law soon became a fascination for me too. Academically, it bears strong resemblances to analytical philosophy: it often involves the minute explorations of words' meanings, and their different meanings in different contexts; its logic of commitments, conditions and undertakings is as clear as syllogism; its ceiling-high corridors of precedents that form the law libraries present an endless balancing of one moral principle off against another, centuries of argument establishing a hierarchy of rights, prohibitions and obligations. Even in its arcane, at times apparently absurd rules of procedure, every provision has a reason, every obstacle a purpose. It is, I suppose, as near as one can get to moral philosophy in action, ethical debate whose conclusions cost money. There's the rub, of course, for the expense of enforcing the law can soon overshadow the remedy being sought, distorting all judgments on all sides and turning a noble cause into a ruinous folly. Thus it is that, at the hands of professional lawmen and determined litigants, a five-thousand pound dispute can easily end up costing half a million. Litigating is not a career for those of an ulcerous constitution.

This is where some of the philosophical disputes in Making Names, and the issues raised in the legal battle over it, began to merge in a fascinating way. As the case slowly ate its way up through Oxford's establishment, rather than encountering someone ready properly to take control and sort it out, instead I found their fibs and fabrications relentlessly begetting further, higher fibs and fabrications. At one point an eminent Delegate denied having been at a particular meeting, the minutes of which recorded his attendance at it. The Remedy, page 83:

The steady multiplication of cavalier lies was beginning to echo the programme at the heart of Making Names itself, in which the philosopher sees it as his mission systematically to strip away the fibs, fudges and fallacies that underlie many of the scientist's assumptions and theories, and to claw his way closer to some more sustainable, if less precise certainties. Similarly, here I now was, sentence by sentence, affidavit by affidavit, lie by lie dismantling the barrages of illogic and falsehood with which Oxford was continually trying to block the judicial path. Though pinching myself against such delusions, I could never completely silence the thought that these people are the authorities, the experts who hand us down the truths of physics, philosophy, ethics and the rest. Students take notes of their lectures on the structure of matter, the meaning of meaning, the origins of the Universe and the sources of morality. Some of them are even in charge of the nation's plutonium. Yet how can they be trusted on such grand and weighty matters as these if, when something in real life is actually at stake, they err on the simplest trivialities of lists, meetings, dates, or what they said last week?

The university's motto, its logo, is Dominus Illuminatio Mea. Without inviting the various possible translations of this, let us agree that a university must set as one of its aims the pursuit of truth. It is a truism, for behaviourists and non-behaviourists alike, that actions speak louder than words. Without listing all of Oxford's attempted deceptions and chicaneries, I should like to dwell for a moment on one aspect of the case which had enormous potential significance.

Look at all the books around you in this shop: the vast majority will have depended for their existence upon an agreement between an author and a publisher. I would venture that, as a matter of fact, in less than one per cent and perhaps even zero percent of these agreements did the publisher contract to print a particular number of copies or formally agree the book's format (hardback or paperback). These are never matters to be agreed with the author, they are always at the publisher's discretion - a fact that has the status almost of common knowledge. Yet the denial of this fact was to become Oxford's last-ditch defence at my trial in March 1990.

The judge found that Oxford had made "a firm commitment" to the publication of Making Names and had agreed to pay me "a fair royalty", but then accepted Oxford's 'no specified print-run' defence, despite the fact that he himself had had books published and so must have suspected it to be untrue. If his judgment had been left to stand, not a single publishing contract in the country would have been worth its paper: from 1990 onwards, in any such dispute publishers (or authors) would have been able to say "Under the judgment in Malcolm v. Oxford, this publishing contract is incomplete: it does not agree a print-run."

For my appeal (which cost, by the way, another £30,000) I therefore had to get evidence - from a literary agent and the Society of Authors - to prove the bleeding obvious. Yet this certain, commonplace fact was fought tooth-and-nail by Oxford, which used every available means to block its introduction. In other words, Oxford was prepared to sacrifice an obvious truth, and turn publishing law altogether on its head, in order to win the battle. But don't take my word for this, hear the words of LJ Mustill in December 1990, words that to this day have gone unreported by any newspaper or journal. The Remedy, page 142:

"I find it disturbing that when Mr Malcolm attempted to meet the print-run and format point with evidence from the trade, the university stoutly resisted its introduction: and yet, when it was introduced they caved in and made no attempt to controvert it. The university had ample notice of the application and the fact that they had not come to the hearing of the appeal armed with evidence to the contrary must show that there was no such evidence to get. The Press is one of the longest-established publishing houses in the United Kingdom, and no doubt in the world. They must have been aware from the outset that the absence of agreement on the matters in question was not, in the trade, regarded as preventing a formal agreement from coming into existence. Candour would, I believe, have required that this should have been made clear to the judge and ourselves, rather than a determined refusal to let the true position come to light.

This is not quite all. I do not know whether an outsider studying the history of this transaction and of this litigation would feel that, in his self-financed struggle with the assembled Chancellor, Masters and Scholars of the University of Oxford, Mr Malcolm has had a fair crack of the whip. I certainly do not... If the evidence adduced by the Press is to be relied upon, the project was never the subject of grave deliberation by the Delegates on whether the intellectual merits of Making Names would measure up to the high standards which the Press had always set for itself. The staff of the Press stopped the project before it ever reached the Delegates. Mr Charkin took the decision, not because he thought the book was no good - he had never seen it and the reports were favourable - but because he thought it would not sell. Let there be no mistake about it, the failure of this transaction was about money, not prestige. Nor does the course of the litigation give any reason to suppose that the Press had any interest but to resist the claim, no matter on what grounds, so long as they succeeded."

My print-run evidence was admitted and accepted, and my contract was found to be complete. In the further words of of LJ Leggatt:

"It is difficult to know what the Deputy Judge meant by a "firm commitment" other than an intention to create legal relations. Nothing short of that would have had any value whatever for Mr Malcolm. He had made it clear that without a commitment he was not prepared to undertake the work of revision expected of him. To suggest that Mr Hardy intended to induce Mr Malcolm to revise the book by giving him a valueless assurance would be tantamount to an imputation of fraud... In my judgment when Mr Hardy used the expressions 'commitment' and 'a fair royalty' he did in fact mean what he said; and I venture to think that it would take a lawyer to arrive at any other conclusion. There was therefore an enforceable contract for the publication of Mr Malcolm's book."

After five years and hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of litigation, the case was in the end decided upon those three little sentences (in blue, above). Although the court overturned the earlier judgement and awarded me damages, it did not evaluate them, assuming that they would be negotiated.

But there was no negotiation and Oxford made no offer. Instead, it sacked its local solicitors, instructed the top City firm Clifford Chance, appointed Harvey MacGregor QC, author of the chief textbook on damages and then Warden of New College, and recruited executives from all the major UK publishers to testify in court against a book which none of them had read, or even seen. To again cut the story short, eventually there was a settlement agreement endorsed by court order on 1st July 1992.

Oxford had spent £500,000 and six years losing a case that had become the most important in publishing contract history. Although it has generally been kept quiet, even airbrushed out of the legal annals, in fact my victory has greatly advanced authors' rights. It was clear that the university's self-justification for this disaster would be that my book was rubbish in the first place. They had already started publicly denigrating it, despite keeping no copy. (When they lost the appeal, they were obliged to buy one from me for evaluation, at lawyers' photocopying rates, for £100 - my first sale.)

I on the other hand had the rights in a book that, whatever its philosophical merits or sins, was now historic, but I had also become a total publishing outsider: no UK publisher would touch me, and I could touch no UK publisher. In The Independent's recent phrase, I had become the ultimate "difficult author".

Our agreement of 1992 had therefore to settle more than just the litigation and the money. Oxford was worried that I would reveal the agreement's financial terms and make them a bad, dangerous joke for the rest of the trade. I was worried that my efforts to distribute the book would be forever dogged by Oxford's denigration. Whatever else, no-one doubts Oxford's academic power. The purpose of such settlements is to allow, as far as is possible, everyone to get on with their lives. The lawyers therefore carefully drafted into our agreement clauses of mutual protection. Clause 6 imposes undertakings of confidentiality with respect to the agreement's terms. Clause 7 consists of these further three key sentences:

The last of these three sentences had to be added because by the time of the agreement, Ryan, Hardy and Charkin - its prime 'targets' - had all left Oxford or OUP, so were arguably outside the scope of the phrase "servants and agents (i.e. employees) of the university". Charkin, by the way, is presently Chief Executive of Macmillan, while Hardy is the custodian and editor of the Isaiah Berlin archive in Oxford. All three duly received solicitors' letters requesting their forbearance.

Just pause for a moment to ponder some of the paradoxes and conundrums this agreement generates (and of course philosophers love paradoxes and conundrums): the university, which purports to be an institution dedicated to freedom of thought, speech and ideas, because it is now also a contract-breaching publisher, has acquired a vital interest in ensuring that a particular book, this book, which purports to exercise some free thought and ideas, never sees the light of day, that it becomes as unpublished as possible. Also, the university, again dedicated to freedom of expression, is also bound by an agreement which, should it ever become known, could render itself an academic laughing-stock. Worse still, it is arguably bound - by clause 7's second sentence - to express this fact to all of its members.

I, on the other hand, now have an agreement which looks unique, unprecedented, and in publishing terms priceless: I have written an evidently controversial philosophy text which one of the world's most famous universities and its staff are in law barred from ever denigrating. I would add that even without such an agreement they would have been morally so obligated anyway, for after all this history they have surely forfeited the right to criticise the book. As Hardy prophesied way back in 1985 when the row first broke: "it isn't going to get a fair hearing here now that it has been treated in this way."

It may be argued that this clause is an unwarrantable restriction of free speech. To this I would reply that this is not a general restriction of free speech, but, given the history, just the perfectly proper condition imposed upon the staff of a commercial publishing house that has breached its contract and then defended its breach and been defeated at law. And I would add that the whole history highlights the dangers of allowing a university to become a publisher, a concession that, for a number of other reasons besides, may be thought corrupt. And I would also like to ask where is my freedom of speech in all of this? Marched out of Oxford's Borders by armed police, with my books off the shelves, locked in a back room. We do not have to give you a reason.

But whatever these arguments, it remains a fact that Oxford University is for all time bound by these three sentences. The paradox for me in 1992 was that, because of the confidentiality clause 6, I could not say so without invalidating the agreement. Net result: everyone sat tight and prayed. Oxford, in apparent breach of clause 7's second sentence, informed nobody of the condition. In August 1992 I self-printed Making Names without any mention of it, only to find that the book was totally ignored by almost everyone, even by the newspapers which had reported the lawsuit.

Digression: I say self-printed rather than self-published because self-published sounds like a self-contradiction, a bit like the philosophers' notion of a private language.

Flash forward: years later, at a publisher's suggestion, I started writing an account of the case, when, lo, OUP infamously axed its entire modern poetry list, and its quasi-charitable status became a hot public issue, generating swathes of newsprint, ministerial statements, Lords' debates etc. OUP Finance Chairman Sir Keith Thomas was obliged to defend the poetry-cull and in February 1999 wrote a long piece in the Times Literary Supplement. Thomas' article, by the way, provided the single most shocking, most breath-intaking quote on display in my 'Gallery of Oxford Shame' last May:

"To ask OUP to continue publishing new poetry is to invite it to subsidize creative writing... It is not our task to engage in talent-spotting among the present generation."

This prompts the earlier question "So what, then, is a university's task, its literature faculty's for example?"

In April 1999 I wrote a counter-article in the TLS that raised the matter of OUP's charitable status, and later that year I took a stand (literally) at the TLS Book Fair, where from an insider I learnt the surprising truth - that in fact OUP is not automatically a charity, that it used to pay corporation tax, and that it was granted exemption secretly in 1978, on condition that it ploughs its surpluses back into non-commercial publishing. This seemed to me like media-dynamite, so I decided to self-print The Remedy as a paperback featuring this revelation as an appendix. Again, despite all of the public hoo-ha over the poetry-axing, there was not a single mention of The Remedy or its tax revelations in any of the national newspapers, until a whole year later, when there appeared in the Times Higher Education Supplement a review of the book by... Henry Hardy.

In his review, Hardy referred to himself, behaviourist-style, in the third person as 'an editor', blamed the whole fiasco on an unidentified Delegate, re-ran his courtroom nonsense of 1990 and, amazingly, fulsomely extolled both of my books. Two weeks later Delegate Ryan identified himself and in the paper's lead letter described Making Names as "coarse and jeering." I guess that, having now heard some of the passages from Making Names, you may think Ryan is right. But I am sure you will also agree that his denigration is a clear breach of the three sentences above, and indeed is exactly the sort of thing they were intended to prevent.

Ryan had returned to Oxford in 1996, taken over from Harvey MacGregor as Warden of New College, become a senior lecturer in politics, chairman of the university's Equal Opportunities Committee, Deputy-chairman of its Admissions Committee, Director of its American Institute, and a dozen other things besides. He is currently prominent in the newspapers as the backer of Bill Clinton's candidacy for the Oxford chancellorship - the dry cleaners' choice. (Ryan was Clinton's politics tutor there back in the 1960s). As my barrister confirmed, obviously Ryan is covered by our agreement; he is even named in it.

In 2001, as a correspondence bubbled in the THES, I therefore went back to court seeking an injunction to enforce clause 7 and prevent Ryan from reoffending. Rather than simply agreeing to this, Oxford resisted and spent a year and another £42,000 to get Ryan off the hook, arguing that he is not covered by the phrase "servants and agents of the university". Because of the High-Court hegemony of Oxbridge, which I've already mentioned, the new case went back before the very same judge who ten years earlier had made the print-run mistake that was overturned on appeal.

This time he learnedly reasoned that as the head of a college, Ryan was an "independent contractor" with respect to the university, although one without a contract. The case invoked by the university to support this strange conclusion concerned a driver who owned and maintained his own cement truck and was contracted by Ready Mixed Concrete (South East) Limited to fulfill their orders, with his truck painted in RMC livery. Dominus illuminatio mea.

This new judgement in Malcolm vs. Oxford, was set in legal concrete in January 2002, and puts Ryan and his fellow heads of college in a tiny category (about 40 out of Oxford's 3,000-plus Congregation) that includes all of the university's highest administrators. Oxford's vice-chancellor, pro-vice-chancellors, and most of its Council are therefore now in law no longer its servants or agents or in any way responsible for it. My personal quest for an answer to the question "where is the university?", my own long, futile search for Oxford's conscience, has finally received its definitive legal response: it is nowhere, which is perhaps to say, it has none.

The bad news for me was that I was ordered to pay £12,500 of Oxford's costs, the good news was firstly the confirmation of the authority of our 1992 agreement, and secondly that, having been through the courts, its clause 7 is no longer confidential. In other words, I can now at last safely, truthfully and publicly state that Making Names is the first book in history to bind a university to silence.

As to where all this leaves Ryle's famous category-mistake analogy of 50 years ago, Oxford at last seems to have achieved the ultimate behaviourist folly: just as Ryle argued, in philosophy, that people, presumably including him, are only bodies without perceptions, feelings or thoughts, now his grand university has argued, at law, that it consists of nothing more than an agglomeration of unstaffed buildings. In short, while Oxford has suggested merely that I am mad (and you may by now agree with this), I suggest something far more serious: that one of our great universities has altogether lost its mind.