Virginia Quarterly Review, a 90-year-old literary journal at the University of Virginia, suffered wrenching events a few years ago, and now is experiencing more.
Among disagreements about how to proceed in a shifting publishing marketplace, its editor of 18 months, W. Ralph Eubanks, has learned that his two-year contract will not be renewed in June. Faculty supporters and literary-magazine colleagues are, like Mr. Eubanks, astonished. “I rearranged my entire life and that of my family to become editor of VQR,” he says.
Some observers of relatively low-circulation publications like VQR—which currently has just a couple of thousand subscribers—are wondering how tenable it is for colleges to host such periodicals when administrators boast of their contributions yet resist investing in them.
In 2013, Mr. Eubanks came to VQR from 18 years as director of publishing at the U.S. Library of Congress. His résumé listed publishing jobs at the American Psychological Association and Taylor & Francis; two well-received books recounting his family’s mixed-race Southern heritage; and extensive publishing-industry teaching at UVa.
The journal was still recovering from the 2010 suicide of a managing editor; a university audit that cleared its editor at the time, Ted Genoways, of bullying him; and the editor’s departure soon after hiring Jon Parrish Peede as publisher in late 2011.
The six print issues Mr. Eubanks has edited have won praise. This week Ron Charles, editor of The Washington Post’s Book World, applauded VQR’s “refreshing range of voices.” That led Greg Britton, editorial director of the Johns Hopkins University Press and a friend of Mr. Eubanks, to let the cat out of the bag with this Tweet: “Too bad they’re apparently not renewing [his] contract.”
Mr. Peede delivered the bad news to Mr. Eubanks in early November, in an official notification that followed a meeting with UVa’s vice president for research, Thomas C. Skalak, who did not return requests for comment.
Yet Mr. Peede has seemed intent on framing Mr. Eubanks’s departure as a decision Mr. Eubanks made. In a December letter to the VQR staff, he wrote: “I regret that Ralph Eubanks will conclude his editorship on or before June 3, 2015.” And in his letters to Mr. Eubanks and the VQR staff, and now in communications to reporters, Mr. Peede has called Mr. Eubanks “a fine colleague, an engaged editor, a dedicated member of the university community.”
“I am being forced out,” Mr. Eubanks says bluntly, “for someone else to build on a foundation that as editor I laid.”
The E-Journal Question
Mr. Eubanks’s fate may provide lessons about how, and even whether, universities should manage their sponsorship of literary journals.
He says he and Mr. Peede disagreed about the merits of online publication, which some publishers have seen as a way to increase income. While he favored an emphasis on print issues with cohesive groups of topics, Mr. Peede pushed for themed issues and increasing emphasis on running more content online only.
Yet when VQR’s online-copy editor left in June, Mr. Peede did not replace her.
Mr. Eubanks says he also alerted Mr. Peede that the industry wisdom is that fiction and poetry will never be read much online. He cited the fortunes of an illustrated e-book he published while at the Library of Congress—roughly comparable to what the four-color VQR would become, if published as an illustrated e-journal—to argue that even with energetic marketing, such products sell far too few copies to warrant placing any real hope in them.
Mr. Peede acknowledges that he wanted more of a web presence than Mr. Eubanks did, and says that to produce future issues, which will have new online-only sections, he will work with the three remaining staff members, none designated as “editor.”
Mr. Eubanks and literary journal-publishing observers say Mr. Peede’s plan, as far as they can tell, is a sure-fire recipe for editorial inconsistency: paying recruited writers and academics honoraria to screen and edit submissions, and leaning more on interns. Mr. Peede declined to say whether that was his strategy.
Even among aspects of the publisher’s plans that he will detail are some that don’t convince observers. He writes in an email to The Chronicle that, with “diversified revenue streams from subscriptions, royalties, endowment funds, and fund raising, VQR is financially secure and well positioned for the future.” Then why, asks Mr. Eubanks, was he was told budget strictures explained his dismissal?
In fact, says Mr. Eubanks, despite Mr. Peede’s talk of “diversified revenue streams,” during the last two years the publisher obtained only three grants totaling less than $50,000. He “clearly has not raised enough funds to support the magazine,” says Mr. Eubanks. There has been no fund-raising campaign or subscription drive. While in raw numbers VQR’s online hits look healthy, paid print subscriptions have fallen from about 4,800 in early 2008 to only 2,248 per issue in 2013, and in 2014 only 2,079.
Mr. Peede says VQR can now receive income each time its issues are accessed on the Internet through ProQuest and Project MUSE, but the publication’s budgets of 2012-13, 2013-14, and 2014-15 show that that avenue is reaping virtually no income. Worse, says Mr. Eubanks, pushing those services also pushes down print subscriptions.
Problems on Campuses
Publicity, promotion, distribution. There lie the problems, says Jay Tolson, editor of The Hedgehog Review at UVa’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture: “There are no problems with the editorial content; the product is excellent. It should have been more aggressively promoted.”
He and some UVa faculty members are asking the university’s president, Teresa A. Sullivan, to reinstate Mr. Eubanks.
Raising funds and selling subscriptions are not the only tasks universities struggle with when running quarterlies, says Mr. Eubanks. Also problematic are inflexible university regulations and procedures: “It’s hard to tell an agent that you can’t pay until 30 days after publication. That’s a university rule, but in publishing that’s not how people make their money. Agents want to call you up and make a deal.”
Last year, The Baffler, a political and cultural journal with “attitude,” begged out of a cooperative publishing agreement with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press over disagreements about how to run publicity and other operations in the larger literary marketplace.
Universities undoubtedly have budgetary constraints, but their pleading “the bottom line” generally signals trouble, says George Core, the editor for 40 years of Sewanee Review at the University of the South. He recalls plenty of disasters, over the years, such as Kenyon College’s closure of its eminent Kenyon Review from 1960 to 1979, when—as Mr. Core sees it—administrators forgot that “even small colleges are helped by having a quarterly.”
The nature of the campus-administrator career path is problematic in that regard, says Mr. Genoways, the former VQR editor: “Every new key administrator comes in and has to show that they did something to improve their unit, so they cut budgets and try to get out of there before things implode so they can say, to other institutions, ‘Look, I cut 10 or 20 or 30 percent and the place is still standing.’”
Thus, he laments, core campus contributions to intellectual, cultural, and civic life—periodicals, museums, concert halls—become “ancillary” operations. “Most administrators are so transient these days,” he says, “that they can’t have any real long-term investment in these cultural institutions.”
