What Really Happened at Stanford University Press: an Insider’s Account

The near-execution of Stanford University Press is no surprise. For years it has been on death row. A five-year plan, another five-year plan, an execution date, a reprieve. … death by a thousand cuts. That’s what the university’s publishing business has been going through, and it represents the culmination of a process that began when I was director, during the 1980s and early ’90s.

I took office promising to greatly improve productivity and to open new lines of publication in the humanities. It was my perception that the press, while enjoying a sterling reputation for its editorial and its sales and distribution services, had not kept pace with the times and was weakly funded. The university wanted the press to do more in the humanities. We quickly tripled the output with no increase in staff, opened new channels of co-publication and distribution with several British publishers, and, while maintaining existing book programs, became a leading publisher of literary and social theory.

To close the gap between income and expenses, I proposed vigorous fund raising. Like other university presses, we needed an endowment. History provides many examples of this happening at prestigious university presses. But Stanford was unwilling to authorize fund raising; the hardheaded economists and scientists who held the highest offices in the hierarchy had other priorities. They insisted that, along with the university’s other “auxiliary services,” the press needed to be self-supporting. Most of the successors in those policy-setting roles have been equally unsupportive.

Here a bit of history is in order. By the late 19th century, the world’s great universities had, almost without exception, recognized that scholarly publishing was integral to their missions. The founding of Stanford’s press can be traced to an 1891 letter written by David Starr Jordan, the university’s first president, to Leland Stanford, its founder. The letter specified several conditions for accepting the position, including his expectation that the university would establish a press. In the circumstances of the time, that meant installing a small printing plant as well as editorial and distribution capacity. A century later, By the time I arrived, the press had been stripped of its printing and binding services, which had long subsidized its scholarly publishing, and had become dependent on small subsidies written into the annual budget.

But we still had our own office building and our own modern warehouse, right in the middle of campus. Our geographic position appeared to symbolize the press’s centrality to the university’s mission: We were located at the time on a pathway that led, on a five-minute walk, from the quad to the faculty club. What could go wrong?

Stanford’s commitment to the humanities has, at least in recent decades, been a matter of debate. Its great reputation was earned in the sciences and in engineering and medicine. Its schools of business and law were similarly favored. In all of those departments, the watchword was growth. The development office put carefully written proposals into the hands of potential donors. We can draw conclusions about the university’s priorities by observing the locations of the construction cranes.

To be a great university, the humanities and social sciences were needed but not necessarily central. Ditto for the university press. Soon after I resigned, the press was reassigned administratively to the library and physically relocated to the perimeter of the campus. After another few years, it was moved again, this time off-campus, several miles away. These changes reflect choices made at the highest level of the university.

As the digital age was dawning, there was panic in some executive suites at Stanford, where the first take was that books would become less and less important. To some key figures, the press appeared to represent old technology married to sentimental notions about the intrinsic value of scholarly books. Humanists and a few social scientists were our principal defenders on the faculty.

So now a downward financial spiral at the Stanford press that started 30 years ago is getting steadily worse. The annual net cost to the university of maintaining a press, having grown steadily, is now many times what was required for the support of a healthier press in the ’80s and ’90s. To be sure, it’s a lot of money — a sum that could instead support several graduate fellowships, a proposition that was recently dangled by the provost.

But this is a false choice. No capital expenditure, and no commitment to support operating expenses, can be equated to income streams for faculty members or students. Were it otherwise, engineering classes might be meeting in tents on the ground formerly occupied by the university press instead of in their new building.

Like its parent institution, a university press is viable only if its reputation is intact and its status permanent. It cannot succeed if it is known to be dangling by a series of five-year threads. A healthy university press is one that takes particular care with the works of its own faculty members and graduates, and which takes part in the international system of scholarly publishing. That system encourages submissions from outstanding scholars wherever they are located and facilitates financial support for authors wherever they publish.

The support of university-press publishing has thus become a shared obligation of all research-oriented universities. The system provides sorely needed aid to neophyte writers, many of whom have just obtained their doctorates. The system encourages fields of study that have little appeal to commercial publishers, such as the arts and classics; peer review that makes an honest effort to provide objective decision-making; and editorial services that deeply engage the author’s intellect as well as writing strategies.

The digitization of everything has not killed off books. Many universities still see some of their best mirror images in the great books they publish. It continues to be true, as Jordan believed, that the glories of a great university include the refinement and dissemination as well as creation of science and scholarship.

Stanford University Press has a long way to go to catch up to the reputation of its parent university. That was not the case in days of yore, and it will require removal from death row, years of hard work, and major investments to bring it back.

Grant Barnes is director emeritus of the Stanford University Press.