Shame on Stanford

Justin Renteria for The Chronicle

In the wake of the decision by Stanford University to either kill its scholarly press immediately or bring about its slow death by withdrawing a $1.7-million annual subsidy, a story (perhaps apocryphal) is making the rounds. It seems an important administrator at another elite institution once said that his university spent less every year to subsidize its prestigious press than it did to fund a faculty dining hall. If my back-of-the-envelope calculation (of space, staff, and other operating costs) is at all accurate, this story is at least plausible, both for that institution and for Stanford.

The point is that $1.7 million a year, in the operating budget of an extremely well-supported university, is pocket change. One scholar notes that if the 5-percent spending cap on Stanford’s $26 billion endowment were raised to 5.01 percent, there would be $2.6 million more a year to spend on the press. In addition, the university is in the midst of a major fund-raising campaign.

To declare austerity now and blame a smaller-than-expected return on the university’s endowment (the third-largest in the country) as the rationale for cutting a subsidy to a distinguished scholarly press is ludicrous and hypocritical. It’s also selective.

For that, in the end, is the point of virtually all arguments about austerity that come from wealthy institutions. The burden of austerity is a matter of choices that reveal assumptions about who does or does not deserve support, what values are or are not esteemed. Since the publishing of scholarly books and journals is largely the domain of the humanities, qualitative social sciences, and those broader sciences that seek to reach an audience beyond their disciplinary domain (environmental studies, medical humanities, and so forth), the university is making an implicit judgment that those domains do not deserve resources.

Austerity is not the same as “inability to pay.” At such a wealthy university, austerity is a shabby excuse. Stanford is casting its lot against 100 years of excellence and a long tradition of crucial intellectual work in a wide range of intellectual domains — just not the disciplinary ones, most likely, that produced $1.3 billion in gifts last year.

So what does it mean if this great institution, which has benefited mightily from Silicon Valley, which in turn has benefited mightily from the university, decides that research in the humanities and social sciences is no longer worth supporting? Is Stanford saying:

• That the technologists that have enriched and been enriched by the university have no need to think about their social and ethical choices?
• That profit alone matters and that, when the third-wealthiest university in the country suffers a negative blip in its investment returns, it’s time to dump the scholarly press?
• That its own humanities and social-science faculty members are second-class citizens who do not deserve the same kind of attentive, rigorous peer review that their counterparts in science and technology and quantitative social sciences enjoy?
• That it will no longer require its own professors in the humanities and social sciences to produce peer-reviewed scholarship for hiring, tenure, and promotion?

If Stanford is suffering from an austerity that results in the end of its subsidy for scholarly publishing, then who will be refereeing and peer-reviewing and editing its own humanities and social-science faculty members? Who will be publishing their scholarship? Surely Stanford’s austerity can’t compare with most other universities committed to supporting academic publishing. Shame on Stanford for pleading poverty in these beleaguered times for most of higher education.

The unfortunate truth is that scholarly publishing needs to be subsidized. Like the fabled faculty dining commons that cannot support itself, university publishing is a greater good that enhances the life of the scholars and students who make up academe.

Given that all of higher education is reputational — rankings, accreditation, and beyond — scholarly publishing is the most rigorous form of peer review. There are many other forms, including open-access publishing. They all cost money. They all require subsidy.

That’s because, by definition, academic publishing is too specialized for commercial, trade publishers. “Worth” and “merit” are demonstrated because the research contributes to foundational knowledge. Specialized research reaches the larger public in classrooms, and through generalists using scholarship in wider contexts.

Rigorous, specialized research must be conducted without profit as its goal. If a university’s intellectual and educational reputation is to rest on the scholarly output of its faculty, including in highly specialized areas, then scholarly publishing must be subsidized as part of the educational mission.

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In the sciences, subsidy is often part of a grant, and a scientist typically pays to publish a paper with grant funding. Such grants are rare in the humanities and social sciences, although more and more universities are offering “subventions” to their authors to help defray the cost of publishing a book. Without subvention, scholarly books typically lose money. That does not make them lacking in worth.

What will be the fate of the humanities and social sciences — disciplines dedicated to the study of culture and society, individuals and nations — in higher education? How is Stanford weighing in on this urgent topic by announcing its proposed cuts?

Technology by technologists for technologists, with no regard for the human and social implications, is what has brought the world to a fraught and morally vexed place. Ironically, among the many fields Stanford University Press publishes are legal studies and security studies. Given the state of our world and the role of monopolistic, global, invasive, and irresponsible surveillance and communications technologies in that world, Stanford’s decision is not just symbolic; it is irresponsible and even dystopian.

If this decision is the cost of being the educational center of Silicon Valley, then in the process of becoming one of our wealthiest universities, Stanford has sold its soul.

Cathy N. Davidson is a professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. A version of this article originally appeared on the Hastac website.