Scholarly Publishing’s Last Stand

Dave Plunkert for The Chronicle Review

This month, Kentucky’s General Assembly overrode Gov. Matt Bevin’s veto of the budget, restoring many of the cuts in education that Bevin had proposed in January. But the funding Bevin eliminated for the University Press of Kentucky was not restored. To remain open, the press has a rough road ahead.

This is only the latest challenge to scholarly publishing at public universities. Given the causes, it is surely not the last. And the problem isn’t limited to public universities. Just last week came news that the University Press of New England will close at the end of the year.

University publishing is nearly as old as printing: Within 23 years of Gutenberg finishing his Bible in Mainz in 1455, Oxford published a commentary on The Apostles’ Creed. Four decades later, Cambridge set up its own press. In North America, Harvard began printing a few years after its 1636 founding, beginning with religious texts, as they all did, but quickly moving on to publishing secular works. So the publishing of scholarship by university presses has long had something of the sacred about it. As Daniel Coit Gilman, founder of the country’s oldest continuously operating university press, at Johns Hopkins, put it, “It is one of the noblest duties of a university to advance knowledge, and to diffuse it not merely among those who can attend the daily lectures but far and wide.” This sense of noble duty informed university presses from the beginning: They were founded to publish work that commercial publishers wouldn’t take on. They were motivated by something other than commerce.

The Future of the University Press

Publishers, press directors, editors, scholars, and other insiders share their views on the state and future of academic publishing.

• Our Contributors
• What is the most common misunderstanding that scholars have about university presses?
• Scholarly prose gets a bad rap. Is it deserved?
• Do we need more university presses? Fewer?

That doesn’t mean they’ve always been bastions of free inquiry. In 1916, Thorstein Veblen submitted The Higher Learning in America for publication in University of Missouri Studies, an in-house organ and predecessor to the university’s press. At the time, Veblen was a member of Missouri’s economics department. The publication was blocked by President Albert Ross Hill, who told Veblen that there were “so many paragraphs that reflected on educational leaders of the universities that I considered it might seem discourteous for the University of Missouri to become officially responsible for its publication and distribution.”

Those who know the book will understand Hill’s point. For those who don’t, the subtitle was at one point “A Study in Total Depravity.” In 1918, after Veblen had left Missouri, it was published by a commercial publisher with the subtitle A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men.

The publication of a book about the disastrous effects of having universities run by “business men” and business principles, then, was blocked by a university run by business men under business principles. While Hill was an academic, the Board of Curators largely consisted of men of business, and the decision seems to have been motivated by a desire to protect the brand and perhaps the system.

This is an example of the constraints on the pursuit of knowledge made inevitable by conditions Veblen describes in The Higher Learning: “Plato’s classic scheme of folly, which would have the philosophers take over the management of affairs, has been turned on its head; the men of affairs have taken over the direction of the pursuit of knowledge.” Veblen was of course not so naïve as to think that large operations that involve lots of money don’t need people with appropriate expertise. What he objected to was captains of industry and “captains of erudition” (his mocking term for university presidents) not valuing the “intangible, immaterial uses” of what he called “esoteric” knowledge — knowledge, in The Theory of the Leisure Class’s definition, that is “primarily of no economic or industrial effect.”

Much of the landscape Veblen describes a century ago remains the same, but much has changed. The roles boards of trustees and university presidents play are quite different, and the privatization of public universities as a response to defunding proceeds apace. The conditions that allowed university presses to thrive are now threatened by the drying up of press and library budgets after the end of the Cold War boom. To borrow a metaphor from environmental science, the relationship between the public university press and the public university is like that between the frog and the pond — if the frog gets sick, the pond is probably toxic.

The University of Missouri Press, established four decades after President Hill blocked Veblen’s book, has managed to survive on its backlists and local-interest lists, books on flora, fauna, and folklore, but its ability to freely publish scholarly monographs that may or may not recover their costs is seriously challenged when it is not directly threatened. When it is, it is by business men whose expertise does not include matters concerning higher education — men who are chosen to run our universities because, as Veblen puts it, of the “high esteem currently accorded to men of wealth at large, and especially to wealthy men who have succeeded in business, quite apart from any special capacity shown by such success for the guardianship of any institution of learning.”

Such was the case in 2012, when Timothy M. Wolfe, late of IBM and Novell and then president of the University of Missouri system, announced that its academic press would be shut down. He had never been to the press or talked to its leaders. After a national outcry, the resignation of series editors, and threats by authors to sue to get back their rights to titles on the press backlist (a backlist whose profits, as is the case at many presses, helped support the publication of new titles), Wolfe reversed course.

The increased pressure to commercialize causes presses to be treated more like businesses, expected to turn a profit, more than even big-time college-sports programs are. This treatment results in editors being required to sign books that each bring in a minimum in projected sales or risk losing their jobs. It has resulted in me and other series editors being asked to find “crossover” books with commercial appeal, and in presses putting resources into high-risk trade books.

Looking at the ways public higher education is increasingly about the bottom line — with moderately successful former chief executives focused on the brand, on patents, on providing cheap research and development for private corporations, and decreasingly about the extension of the boundaries of knowledge, even and especially useless knowledge — we can see that scholarly publishing is at risk, in Missouri and Kentucky and elsewhere. This is not simply because of isolated decisions but because the tax-cutting, anti-intellectual philosophy by which so many state and federal politicians govern has led to the drying up of revenue that could sustain public higher education, and of support for initiatives like university presses that further the kind of study that might lead to the public’s rejecting that philosophy.

Another book to come out of Missouri, John Williams’s 1965 novel Stoner, reminds us of what’s at stake. Williams earned his Ph.D. from my department in 1954, and wrote a novel about William Stoner, who earns his B.A., Ph.D., and tenure from that same department earlier in the century. The book ends with his death, and this death scene ends with a book. Stoner realizes on his deathbed that he was wrong to think about life in terms of success and failure, that what mattered is who he was and what he loved, and he picks up his monograph: “He did not have the illusion that he would find himself in there, in that fading print; and yet, he knew, a small part of him that he could not deny was there, and would be there.

“He opened the book, and as he did so it became not his own. He let his fingers riffle through the pages and felt a tingling, as if those pages were alive. The tingling came through his fingers and coursed through his flesh and bone; he was minutely aware of it, and he waited until it contained him, until the old excitement that was like terror fixed upon him where he lay.”

This excitement is one of the things that Stoner loved. It’s the excitement of study, of things not known but reached for. It’s an excitement that’s not about him — “it became not his own” — that’s not about careerism or worldly success, that’s not on the yardstick by which universities too often find themselves getting measured.

As we learn the fates of presses like Kentucky’s, we might try to think about the connections to what is happening to the public universities in which they live and, in turn, to a culture that starves and poisons these homes.

Samuel Cohen is an associate professor of English at the University of Missouri. He is the editor of the University of Iowa Press series The New American Canon.