Late in May, administrators shut down the University of Missouri system’s 54-year-old press, citing its continuing inability to close a “growing” deficit. Now, in the face of vehement protests from inside and outside the university, the administrators have rushed to announce their plan for a replacement.
The new press, which will emphasize digital and possibly multimedia publishing, will be directed by a novelist and journal editor with no experience running a publishing house. It will operate as a “teaching press,” staffed, in large part, by graduate students completely new to the daily business of acquisitions, editing, production, marketing, and distribution.
Still, officials at the University of Missouri are touting the plan as a bold way forward for academic publishing. Given years of cuts in state support, the university can no longer subsidize a traditional press, they say.
It “ran up against time, and time said, We can’t continue to do this,” says Natalie Krawitz, the system’s vice president for finance and administration.
According to financial records obtained by The Chronicle, though, the press had operated at a loss for years and was actually well on the way to righting itself just as the university pulled the plug. Those documents and others, along with interviews with more than a dozen people from the press floor to the senior levels of university-system administration, reveal that conflicting philosophies of press management often operated simultaneously. They also show that signals from the administration were sometimes unclear, and that the press’s ambitions long jeopardized its financial stability.
A Unilateral Move
The University of Missouri Press, which opened in 1958, built a large list of academic and regional titles, many of them award winners by the likes of Langston Hughes, Howard Nemerov, and Cleanth Brooks, along with esteemed series on Mark Twain, Harry S. Truman, and the political philosopher Eric Voegelin. With a backlist of 1,000 titles, the press sells more than 100,000 books each year. Its specialties include presidential politics, regional history, and 19th-century Western expansion.
The administration’s decision, announced on May 24, shocked the press’s 10 employees and university faculty members, none of whom had been consulted or apprised of the move in advance.
Timothy M. Wolfe, a software executive who took over as system president in February, said the university would discontinue its annual subsidy to the press at the end of June. During the last 25 years the subsidy had ranged from $370,000 to $635,000, and in recent years it had hovered at around $400,000 of the university system’s $2-billion budget. (Critics of the decision to pull the subsidy point out that it coincided with the administration’s announcement of plans to borrow $200-million to upgrade athletics facilities.)
Nearly all of the 134 members of the Association of American University Presses are given subsidies and could not operate without them. But Missouri officials said they had lost patience with the press’s dependence on system underwriting.
If the faculty response was muted when administrators announced the shuttering of the old press, it has exploded since. About 5,000 people have now signed a petition urging reinstatement of the press, as it was, and a Facebook protest group has drawn 2,500 supporters.
John M. Budd, a professor of information science and learning technologies at the university’s Columbia campus, was among a few faculty members invited onto a committee that over the last two years had considered ideas about the future of scholarly publishing. Often, during the panel’s meetings, administrators expressed support for the press, and they never discussed closing it, he says.
“It is foolish to destroy an organization and then try to rebuild it from the ground up,” says Mr. Budd, whose specialty is organizational management. “This is precisely what has happened, with no infrastructure in place.”
Why not simply require the old press to innovate? System officials say that question ignores how long the press was a problem. Interviews and records from the last 20 years suggest persistent disagreement about whether the press was performing well, or was a money pit.
The ‘University of Beverly Jarrett Press’
The person with the most influence on the press until recent years was Beverly Jarrett, who moved from Louisiana State University Press in 1989 to become director and stayed until her retirement, nearly 20 years later.
Upon her arrival, Ms. Jarrett pursued an ambitious plan to raise the Missouri press’s size and prestige. She committed the press to buying a $1.4-million building that would make room for its growth, but payments for it, on top of maintenance and fixed costs such as utilities, hobbled the press for many years.
In an interview, Ms. Jarrett recalls that administrators asked if the press could afford the new building: “I naïvely said, ‘Sure.’”
But asking the press to do that, she insists, “was just part of the university not taking full responsibility for providing its state university with an active and operational press.”
Ms. Jarrett doubled the size of seasonal lists, to as many as 67, plus up to 15 reprints, always able to persuade at least some administrators of the wisdom of the approach, says Clair Willcox, who served as acquisitions editor and then editor in chief for 24 years. “She was in touch with that administration,” he says. “She could charm the socks off a snake.”
She was a workaholic, he adds: “I tease people that it was the University of Beverly Jarrett Press.”
In the three years before her retirement, the press’s staff grew to 26. Ms. Jarrett won notice for cultivating outstanding authors in several fields, including John Hope Franklin and Sissela Bok. The press won acclaim for both the content and the design of its books.
But deficits grew—to more than $360,000 in 2007 on sales of $1.4-million, even after a university subsidy of $480,000. That fit into a pattern of overstaffing, overpublishing, and overprinting, according to consultants who reviewed press operations at the end of 2008.
Sources including former administrators say system leaders encouraged Ms. Jarrett to expand the press, even as others in the administration—like Steven W. Graham, now senior associate vice president for academic affairs, and Ms. Krawitz, the financial vice president—demurred. Says Ms. Krawitz: “The rationale brought to us, and that was in our thoughts in the early and middle part of the last decade, was that we weren’t publishing enough books, and would become a sustainable operation if we published more. That didn’t seem—the way we were doing it—to be sustainable. But we depended on the people we hired to do it, and they weren’t able to make it work.”
She insists: “The university system never pushed the press to grow; that came from the press.”
Figures tell a different story. In various years, senior administrators allocated additional subsidies to the press, when the sizable original subsidies still left imposing deficits.
Also telling is what happened in 2003, when the press received a windfall from an author Ms. Jarrett had cultivated: $1,060,000 from Eugene Arthur Davidson, who had served as editor of Yale University Press for 26 years, had published several books with the Missouri press, and had married into a fortune. The gift was spent on tamping down deficits, rather than invested in an endowment.
Dwight Browne, who became interim director upon Ms. Jarrett’s retirement, believes the gift was actually “very detrimental to the press” because it allowed Ms. Jarrett to continue a growth strategy even as other fund-raising efforts failed.
Ms. Jarrett disagrees, saying it was economic forces that hit the press hard: “Libraries bought fewer books; sales diminished.”
But again, the numbers tell an additional story. From 2005 to 2009 the press was paying, on average, 23 staff members. The salaries of the press’s two top earners, Ms. Jarrett and the chief financial officer, Linda Frech, alone accounted for two-thirds of the university system’s subsidy. Their pay was toward the high end of standard academic-press ranges, according to Association of American University Presses surveys, and even while some longtime staff members earned well below them, the overall payroll was burdensome.
Mixed Messages
A key issue in the fate of the press has been whether it was expected to end deficits or to end its reliance on subsidies from the university system—a tall order for any academic press. Ms. Krawitz, who arrived at the university system in 1996, says that during her time there administrators had repeatedly emphasized that the press should be self-sustaining, “in the way other auxiliary operations are self-sustaining.”
Mr. Browne, the interim director, who began at the press as a student employee in 1981, says that over the years officials vacillated on the subsidy, an assertion confirmed by two system officials.
When Ms. Jarrett left, leaving a $284,000 deficit even after a subsidy of $530,000, “the ship was sinking and on fire,” he says.
It was Mr. Browne’s decision to call in five university-press consultants. Their report, submitted in 2009, praised the “excellent, knowledgeable” remaining staff for achieving the goals set for them and for providing “an outstanding return on the university’s investment.”
But the report also alluded to several earlier years of too many books, with too many copies printed, too little list planning and strategic planning, and misguided pricing of books.
Mr. Browne responded in 2009 by laying off seven staff members and taking several steps recommended by the consultants: He outsourced fulfillment processing to a large distribution center in Chicago. He reduced the inventory by one-half; some 200,000 books were removed from the press’s warehouse before the remainder were shipped to Chicago. He also raised the number of the press’s titles available as e-books, to 500.
The changes took some time to save money. Under the “write-down” method of accounting that presses commonly use, Missouri incurred a substantial on-paper cost from getting rid of so much of its unsalable stock. Severance and vacation payments to the laid-off employees added to costs, too.
Nonetheless, the press reduced its deficit almost to nil. But Mr. Browne was perplexed that during his four years as interim director the university did not advertise for a permanent leader, and he was frustrated that administrators did not adopt one of the consultants’ top recommendations: to institute an industry-standard independent advisory board of alumni, scholars, and editing professionals who would guide and oversee the press.
He says he understood the administrators’ reluctance only when he saw their May 24 announcement.
Widespread Denunciation
The administration’s plan to run a press with graduate-student interns leaves Mr. Budd, the organizational-management specialist, “dumbfounded.” He contends that it is not just an affront to the skills of the professional editorial and production staff, but also irresponsible. “While Ph.D. students are likely to be very bright, their first job is as students,” he says. “And our first responsibility is to help them complete their program, not to get cheap labor out of them.”
The Facebook protest group, the Coalition to Save the University of Missouri Press, raises other objections. “Why,” the group asks, “must 10 trained professionals with decades of experience be put out on the street,” to be replaced by student interns who may well scare away authors? “Who will want to publish with such a press?”
“This decision was made by looking at spreadsheets, with no concern for traditions, scholarship, or people,” say the protesters. And they suggest that the spreadsheets are wrong because digital publishing is proving to save little money and multimedia publishing is likely to be very expensive.
Officials at the university’s Columbia campus, which will house the new press, say those objections miss the point. The new press will forge a new path for scholarly publishing, and will do that by drawing on campus strengths, they say.
Speer Morgan, an English professor there and editor of The Missouri Review, will be the director. He plans to hire an editor in chief and two other editorial staff members, in faculty positions that will include teaching and research responsibilities.
The new press will be analogous to many hands-on university programs, says Brian L. Foster, the Columbia provost, citing as examples the student-run law review and the work that advanced students perform in medical and other clinical programs and in science laboratories. “We’re extending a model,” he says, “that is very common in research universities.”
He says converting the press into a teaching operation also makes its expense more palatable, a cost of instruction. Nonetheless, he says, it will enjoy the same safeguards as any academic press when it comes to, say, vetting manuscripts.
Mr. Foster freely acknowledges, however, that many details of the new press remain to be worked out. Asked, for example, whether staffing levels will be adequate for such urgent tasks as finding books for next year’s lists, he says: “We’re not sure. We’ll know the details of that in a year or two. My point is that the business model for scholarly communications is changing so rapidly. So it’s hard to know where we’re going to be.”
And the cost? Although the press will be able to use about $800,000 in income from sales of existing Missouri books, Mr. Morgan says, “nobody is so unrealistic to expect us to turn it immediately into a black-line operation.”
A ‘Perfect Storm’
In a letter seeking applicants for the editor-in-chief post, Mr. Morgan makes use of the drama of the process. He writes: “We are going through a ‘perfect storm’ of bad publicity at the moment due to the fact that the management of the transition was done so awkwardly.” But he says he thinks that the storm “is beginning to calm down.”
Meteorologists might differ. Several authors are dissociating themselves from the new press. John Shelton Reed, a prominent sociologist and essayist who has written or edited 19 books, five with Missouri, wrote to system administrators of his “dismay and disbelief” at their actions: “Your New Model Press ... is not something that I care to be associated with. Please tell me what I must do to ensure that I’m not.”
Several other authors have also requested the rights to their books, asserting that the Missouri system has failed to live up to contractual guarantees.
Among other prominent detractors of the new plan is a Missouri native, William Least Heat-Moon, the author of Blue Highways (Little, Brown, 1982). In a July 15 newspaper column, he suggested that the decision to close the original press was “an expression of the worst in bottom-line thinking.” He added: “Missing from all the manipulated figures out of University Hall is the universally recognized fact that a university press exists to further learning, not to make money.”
The chairs of six departments at the University of Missouri at St. Louis wrote to President Wolfe: “As a research university, if we can’t make the case for a university press, how can we make the case for anything else that we do?”
In his letter to potential candidates for editor in chief, Mr. Morgan paints a picture of opportunity. The new editor will be able “to redefine the press,” he writes.
For now, Mr. Morgan and whatever colleagues he can muster to his cause face a daunting task. They will know that going electronic saves little if any money. They will also know, or learn, that some Missouri authors, past and present, are considering lawsuits. And that almost all the authors of books that the old press was considering have spent the last eight weeks placing their books with other presses eager to snap them up.
Mr. Foster, the provost, insists that “there are risks here, for sure, but I’m also strongly convinced that there are risks in not doing something different, too.” Meanwhile, the wits on the system’s campuses have been sharpening their pencils, and so far have come up with several new monikers for the new press, including “Morgan’s Folly” and “Mizzou Lite.”
