Sir, Sir Keith Thomas, in his defence of the Oxford University Press's deletion of its poetry list, has a great deal to say about the current state of publishing. Most of this is mere obfuscation. OUP is precisely not a commercial publisher, but a university press enjoying privileged charitable status. If I were the director of HarperCollins, I would want OUP investigated by the Office of Fair Trading, on the grounds that it appears to regard itself as in direct competition with commercial publishers and on those terms enjoys an unfair advantage. Obviously one would not expect OUP to run at a loss, but Thomas admits that the Press is perfectly profitable and has been able to pass on huge sums of money to Oxford University. The unexamined claim that "a reduction in the Press's commercial effectiveness would diminish its academic effectiveness" is mere Thatcherite ideology masking itself as self-evident economic wisdom. According to Thomas, OUP must do what it does best, publishing academic books: in other words, OUP will publish a critical book about the poetry of Charles Tomlinson, but not that poetry itself.
There is a nasty overall flavour to this apologia for commercial greed, which begins with its tastelessly sexist captatio about marriage to a duchess. The easy resort to the language of a crude and ill-digested business management constitutes a principal trahison des clercs of our time. Keith Thomas talks glibly of the "high opportunity cost" of the poetry list. What then about the considerable "system benefit" that this prestigious list represents? Or, better, let us altogether abandon this jargon of accountants with its means/ends rationality, inappropriate, as Newman showed long ago, to the idea of a university, and confront the important issue: which is what, if anything, (profit of course apart) we value and believe in.
CHARLES MARTINDALE
Department of Classics and Ancient History, University of Bristol, 11 Woodland Road, Bristol.