Then, in 1991, Maxwell disappeared, presumed drowned, from his yacht in the Mediterranean, and in the aftermath, it soon became clear that Maxwell’s empire was a sham. At about the same time, Pergamon Press bought Aberdeen University Press. In 1990, he struck the first brick into the wall of the Robert Maxwell Conference Centre – using a sledgehammer. He arrived at Aberdeen University like a white knight. Robert Maxwell’s publishing empire later spread well beyond Pergamon, but there is an irony that, having made his first millions from screwing the university sector, by the 1980s he was apparently eager to give something back. As any librarian will tell you, for an academic, cutting back on journal subscriptions is like giving up tobacco, even as costs inexplicably rose for journals that were produced almost entirely by volunteer labour. Scholars needed to publish and they didn’t expect to be paid for their work, either writing or editing the content of journals libraries needed to buy these new journals, despite their high cost, and once the library subscribed, it was hooked. My husband, a retired mathematician, recalls how an older colleague of his was encouraged to set up a new journal, in a new sub-discipline of mathematics, with seed money from Pergamon. Plaque at headquarters of Pergamon Press, Headington Hill Science was booming in the period, universities were growing in size and number, and academic libraries subscribed to all the new journals that Maxwell, and Pergamon Press, set up. During the 1950s, he began to make his first serious money when he established Pergamon Press to publish academic journals. He arrived in Britain as a Jewish refugee in 1940, aged 17, and took the name Robert Maxwell. Ján Ludvík Hoch was born in what was then Czechoslovakia in 1923. Nevertheless, times were hard, and the university administration was delighted to find a benefactor. During the slash-and-burn years of Margaret Thatcher during the 1980s, Aberdeen University went through hard times, even though it shares with the universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews, a unique advantage over other British universities: its continued existence is guaranteed in the Act of Union that created the United Kingdom in 1707. I encountered this problem when I spent a couple of months on study leave at Aberdeen University in the early 1990s. Think Cecil Rhodes, whose generous donations to Oxford, and the formation of the Rhodes Scholarship scheme, were based on his crackpot theories of racial supremacy, and funded by what we might today call ‘blood diamonds’.īut when a dictator or a crook is outed, how do you wash your hands of the connection? Do you, like Rhodes House, just adjust your criteria so that the scholarships can go to non-white and female recipients? (There was a precedent in their earlier decision, in 1914, not to award any further scholarships to Germans, as required in Rhodes’ original bequest) Or do you try to erase the memory of your institution’s lapse of judgment more thoroughly, by a few strategic resignations, or by eradicating the name or the connection entirely. In a way, it’s the Robin Hood principle at work: there’s no point in robbing from the poor, but soliciting money from the rich means cosying up to some pretty shady characters. Universities have a long and dishonorable tradition of accepting money from rogues and ratbags, and the odd tyrant. As far as I know, no cause and effect has yet been proved, but it looks bad. The director of the London School of Economics, Sir Howard Davies, has just resigned because he accepted a donation of £1.5m for the university from a Gaddafi foundation, just shortly after Saif Gaddafi was awarded a PhD from the LSE. When his son Titus objected, he said, we are told by Suetonius, ‘ Pecunia non olet’ – ‘money doesn’t stink’. The Emperor Vespasian, a notorious tightwad, once introduced a tax on urine – it was used for washing togas, and other chemical purposes.
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