Jonathan Wyse cuts a familiar presence around College; his profile stalks these pages too, with his regular applications of stolid if steadfast neo-liberal fiscal ideology to a variety of issues. While the targets of Wyse’s differ greatly from each other, the frame he forces each one into, remains the same. This is a humble response to that article from the Students’ Union (SU) Bookshop.
His modest proposal was of course the privatisation of the current Students’ Union Bookshop (Wyse’s sinister Americanism, ‘bookstore’, pays salute to his imported American solution). As often with very theoretical people, Wyse’s grand idea is risibly impractical, as well as repugnant to the student-centred practices and ideals of the SU.
The College Board, which kindly gives space to the SU, does so to promote a sense of community within Trinity’s walls. Ann Summers is as likely to open in House 6 as a private enterprise bookshop. We should be proud that College does not allow the community spirit to disintegrate as Wyse wishes and we fully support calls to set up a student-run luxury lingerie boutique.
As it is, the co-operative structure of the bookshop embodies the ‘By Students, For Students’ approach imperative indeed in times of recession and cutback: a privatised bookshop would neglect smaller subjects, squeezing out Ancient Greek or Theoretical Physics or Linguistics, and only supplying the needs of big, immediately profitable courses like Bess. The Bookshop Co-op tries to supply all needs to the best of its ability. Greek and Bess and all the others are looked after, and rightly so because the SU belongs equally to all students. Given the physical restrictions of the premises, a privatised bookshop would be like Read’s of Nassau Street, selling only Bess best-sellers. Discount course texts for all!
Wyse does a fine line in wild and unsubstantiated allegations, showing, perhaps, that he learned more than brutal economics from his time as an intern at neoconservative think tank in America. The Bookshop Co-op is not “a cabal of racketeering students that [sic] exploit [sic] their [sic] privileged position by celebrating significant events in the Trocadéro”, nor is Barack Hussein Obama an Al-Qaeda terrorist. We will focus on the first allegation, the Charvet-et-champagne lifestyle Co-op members apparently live at the SU’s expense.
Bloodhound Wyse sniffed out this story at the Piranha Christmas party; unfortunately all the free alcohol must have g
one to his head and in his haste to accuse all around him of embezzlement, he absolutely misunderstood the situation. Like most workplaces, the Bookshop has a Christmas party, with a budget for food. This money went towards a meal in the Trocadéro, with the outstanding balance paid by the individual members.]]>
The “annual pilgrimage” to London is another of the by now thoroughly sodden Wyse’s targets. This book-buying mission is a simple affair: London bookshops and warehouses give us very generous discounts when we bulk buy their stock. So, it is economic to source many of our texts in London and still sell them to students at lower rates than comparable second-hand bookshops, like Chapters. We receive modest expenses for this trip which is, of course, enjoyable, but we do not reside in luxury and are not paid wages. The trip is not paid for by the SU, it is paid for by the Bookshop.
Like his neo-con mentors, Wyse is at his happiest when contemplating the poor, from a distance. Bookshops, he decides, are not for the poor, books are a luxury. They may go to the Library (which, not being run ‘By Students, For Students’ has reduced its service and access to books for students). Only a fantasist would claim the Bookshop is a substitute for Trinity’s copyright library. We are a supplemental service, a successful one, which turns a profit for the Students’ Union while meeting the academic and leisure-reading needs of thousands of students at agreeable prices – a maximum of 60% of the recommended retail price. Indeed, as we buy most of our course texts directly from the student body – at a much higher price than most second hand shops – Trinity students enjoy a double benefit in buying from and selling to the SU Bookshop.
Every business has difficult customers. Perhaps it is inevitable that, in a university, some of these difficult customers should become overheated with the fervour of the free market theory they have just discovered in a book’s introduction, or ‘Heartless liberalism for Dummies’ (the Bookshop, incidentally, does not neglect right wing economics). Flattered certainly by the interest Wyse shows in us, we wish him the speediest of recoveries from this latest infatuation. In the interests of the next news cycle, this is our last word on the matter.
