[Muanet] MUP falls to commercial Newspeak

[Dion Giles]

Independently of whether or not Melbourne University Press was delivering 
value for money, I'm passing this item on as a remarkable example of the 
prostitution of language.  A university spending resources on publishing is 
dubbed "university subsidies propping up publications".  One wonders what 
expenditure on teaching is called.  Or on libraries.  Or on 
research.  University subsidies propping them up?  How about expenditure on 
management?

Dion Giles


Uni publisher sheds staff

January 23 2003

By Larissa Dubecki, The  Age

Respected scholarly publisher Melbourne University Publishing has shed 
almost all of its staff as part of a commercial restructuring.

Six of its 16 staff members have taken redundancies and eight have resigned 
or are being moved elsewhere at Melbourne University.

Ten new positions at MUP are being advertised, including a general manager, 
sales and marketing manager and managing editors.
Staff were told they could apply for the new jobs but only two of the four 
who did so were re-employed, The Age believes.

The changes coincide with the appointment of Louise Adler as chief 
executive. She started last month after leaving her position as deputy 
director at Melbourne University's Victorian College of the Arts.

Ms Adler is charged with implementing the recommendations of last year's 
internal review into the loss-making enterprise, which operates as a 
semi-independent department of the university.

MUP, which was renamed from Melbourne University Press after the review, 
was split from the university's profitable bookshop.
The changes have raised fears that the commercial focus could threaten the 
existence of Australia's oldest academic publisher, which started in 1923 
and produces about 50 books a year.

Ms Adler said MUP would help academics commercialise their often arcane 
research.

The restructured MUP will also place a new emphasis on electronic publishing.

Former MUP director Brian Wilder, writing in The Age last year, said: "It 
was not set up to be a profit-oriented operation."

Mr Wilder, who is retiring from his position of MUP commissioning editor 
next month, questioned whether the publisher could be commercially 
successful divorced from the bookshop arm.

But Ms Adler said a careful selection process would mean that the 
university subsidies propping up publications would no longer be needed.