Three years ago the MIT Press, a well-established publisher of a brainiac science-and-technology-laden list, and The Baffler, a feisty-skeptic journal that published erratically, entered into an unlikely marriage.
Now the cheeky political and cultural journal has asked for, and been granted, a divorce. The five-year publishing deal, signed in 2011, allowed either party to bail out after three years, and John Summers, the journal’s editor, said on Monday that he and members of the board of the nonprofit Baffler Foundation had decided they absolutely must do so, at the first opportunity.
On Monday, while still waiting to see whether a separation agreement would emerge, Mr. Summers said that a few weeks ago, on behalf of the Baffler Foundation, he had asked the press to agree to part ways, but the separation had stalled over terms of settlement: Who would get the dog? Rather, the debt.
The initial agreement had stipulated that the Baffler group would meet any shortfalls, and those had mounted. At Mr. Summers’s request, the press had forgiven some earlier debt, but it balked, he said, when he raised the issue of separation. He said press officials had insisted that it could be done only with payment, in full or in installments, of a shortfall that, while not fully tallied, was certainly “in the six figures.”
He spoke with praise of the MIT Press, saying it had raised The Baffler from the ashes and given it “some breathing room.” But its proposed exit terms, he said, “threaten to put us out of business all over again.”
He said he had argued to press officials that, while the Baffler group had produced a well-received publication, had always paid its writers, and had even raised money for a new website and speaking events, the press had not done its part.
The contract called for the press to invest in the costs of publishing the journal and its distribution and marketing until the break-even point, after which profits would be shared. But circulation had failed to meet even its modest, undisclosed benchmarks. “And now we are supposed to own this failure all by ourselves?” exclaimed Mr. Summers.
On Monday, when asked for the press’s view of the disagreement, Ellen W. Faran, its director, replied in an email that addressed the impasse, saying simply: “This has been resolved.”
In an email to Mr. Summers that the journal’s editor shared with The Chronicle, the press’s journals director, Nick Lindsay, wrote that the press had “decided to accept your proposal of terminating the agreement” after publication of the next issue with “no repayment of the cumulative deficit from The Baffler Foundation to MIT Press.”
Neither Mr. Lindsay nor Ms. Faran responded to requests for additional comment on Monday.
Erratic Output
The Baffler began in 1988. Due to its frequent publishing delays, it became known as “a quarterly that came out once a year.” A 2001 fire in its offices further disrupted an already erratic output. No issues appeared from 2006 until 2009, when only one did.
That was when Mr. Summers became editor. Two years later, in 2011, he purchased the publication from its founder, Thomas Frank, and moved it from Chicago to Cambridge, Mass. A former adjunct professor at Harvard University and author of a well-reviewed essay collection, Mr. Summers in October of that year signed the deal with MIT Press.
To forestall fears that the publication might cease to be, as its deck declares, “the journal that blunts the cutting edge,” its mission would remain “to criticize the dogmatic conception of progress on offer in American national life,” as he put it then.
Its targets would include, from the get-go, the institution that runs the press. Even as he signed the agreement, Mr. Summers had among his editorial crew as a columnist Aaron Swartz, the Internet “hacktivist” who was arrested by the MIT police and later prosecuted for downloading millions of academic articles from JSTOR. In January 2013, during pretrial proceedings, he died by suicide.
A new book collection of Baffler articles from the eight issues of the MIT Press era that has just appeared, No Future for You, is dedicated to Mr. Swartz. In other ways, too, the book shows that Baffler writers have continued to take a bite-the-hand-that-feeds-you tack.
But on Monday Mr. Summers was conciliatory in describing the break with the press. “It was like a marriage. This could have been great, despite the culture clash,” one of “a start-up versus an entrenched bureaucracy.”
But, he said, “recriminations are of no use. I think we’ve both gotten things out of the partnership, and the last argument doesn’t have to sully the whole relationship.”
Now, with a clean slate, he and his colleagues at the journal will look for another way forward, he said. The plan? “To try to bring the publishing operation in-house. It’s really the only way to do it.”
He added: “We’re bullish on The Baffler.”
