CHANGE (U.S. higher education journal), Potpourri section, edited by Harold Orlans, September 2002
The persistence with which Andrew Malcolm has attacked Oxford University Press may inspire aggrieved authors and send academic press managers to legal advisers. Plainly, Oxford wronged Malcolm. An author and publisher, it is said, regard each other as a necessary evil. But must their relations be as evil as this?
After 27 publishers had rejected Malcolm's Making Names, a 200,000-word discourse on philosophical themes cast as a dialogue between a philosopher and a scientist, he submitted it to Oxford. Philosopher Alan Ryan, who read it at senior editor Henry Hardy's request, thought it "vastly too long... but I'm rather keen that we should have a go... its philosophically rather good."
Asked to revise and cut the manuscript, Malcolm said he would if Oxford would publish it; in a phone conversation Malcolm taped, Hardy agreed if the revision were no worse than the draft. When told of the agreement Press director Richard Charkin objected on commercial grounds, rebuked Hardy, and withdrew the commitment. "A furious row then broke out within the Press," a judge later remarked.
Malcolm's revision, 25 per cent shorter and admittedly better, was rejected. He sued for breach of contract and managed his own case helped by unknown sympathizers who supplied records Oxford failed to disclose. Oxford's expensive lawyers bumbled and contradicted themselves. In a March 1990 judgment, Justice Gavin Lightman held "Mr Malcolm has been harshly and unfairly treated," but, with no contract, no relief was warranted. In December 1990, the Court of Appeal found that the verbal commitment constituted a contract and awarded Malcolm damages. "All authors, particularly academics, should honour Malcolm as his case has benefited them," a literary agent stated.
"I don't feel like having a anything to do with publishers any more," Malcolm, a Cambridge graduate working as a builder, said. He published Making Names himself in 1992. It was praised by, amongst others, Karl Popper and Henry Hardy (then at Oxford's Wolfson College, editing Isaiah Berlin's works). The Reward (sic), which Malcolm published in 1999, tells the saga of his dealings with Oxford. On a Web site <www.akme.btinternet.co.uk> he posts documents attacking Oxford's tax-exemption and law reports that may interest "all authors conducting or contemplating litigation against publishers."
Oxford, Britain's largest publisher after Macmillan (now headed by Charkin), had £324 million in gross income in 2000. Last year, it lost its tax exemption in India and must pay back taxes; in the United States, a for-profit publisher has complained to the IRS about Oxford's non-profit status.
"Apart from their ownership... the Oxford and Cambridge presses are nowadays indistinguishable from other academic and educational publishers such as Macmillan, Longman or Routledge," Macmillan Managing Director Adrian Soar states. "Does the ownership by the universities lead to a greater distinction in their academic and educational publishing? I doubt it. Are the two organisations any less hard-nosed in their commercial attitudes? Certainly not" (Bookseller, August 1993).
This April, Malcolm opened a bookshop on Broad Street, Oxford to sell and display his books and other materials critical of the university.
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