In an article that provoked widespread discussion in Great Britain, from letters in The Times Literary Supplement to debates in the House of Lords, Sir Keith Thomas raised the question of what university presses should be doing in today’s marketplace. The distinguished historian is head of Oxford University Press’s finance committee and was, therefore, one of those responsible for Oxford’s recent decision to discontinue the publication of contemporary poetry and some intellectually important imprints and series. The decision, and Sir Keith’s attempt to defend it in the T.L.S., elicited cries of anger on both sides of the Atlantic. The barbarians were no longer at the gate, it was argued, but well entrenched in Oxford’s management.
Oxford is not a typical university press, but some of the questions raised by its actions are important to assessing the financial condition of all university presses today. Oxford is much larger than most other university presses; its worldwide sales ($450-million) are greater than those of all U.S. university presses put together ($430-million). Like the others, Oxford publishes scholarly works; but unlike them, it also has an extensive trade-book list, and what it does best includes a very large number of highly commercial books.
Nevertheless, when -- near the end of his T.L.S. article -- Sir Keith defended Oxford’s right to “a reasonable return,” most university-press directors must have shuddered with recognition. He noted that his press is increasingly expected to pay a portion of its profits to the University of Oxford. Over the past five years, it has paid the university an average of $16-million a year. It seems clear that Oxford’s decision to cut back on poetry was more than simply a question of deciding what areas to concentrate on: It was a classic executive decision to increase annual profits at the expense of “product lines” that were, perhaps wrongly, seen as having a limited constituency. (Understandably, executives at the New York branch of the press were reluctant to answer questions on behalf of their British colleagues.)
American university presses do not face all of the familiar changes in publishing that Sir Keith invoked -- the concentration of ownership of publishing houses and bookstores, the difficulty of competing in an increasingly monopolistic market, the pressures from chain stores for higher and higher discounts. However, almost all of the presses are grappling with the same questions Oxford is addressing: What is changing in the relationship between a university press and its host university? And what will be sacrificed by the changes?
Like Oxford, American university presses are suffering from the increasing cost of publishing monographs, traditionally their major output, and are trying to decide how many such books they can continue to produce. But at the same time that their principal “product” is proving more and more expensive to publish, support from their parent universities has diminished. A recent study of 49 university presses that was circulated privately among the presses showed that, over the past four years, subsidies from universities have decreased by an average of 8 per cent in real dollars; 12 presses lost over 10 per cent of their support.
Indeed, as Peter Givler, executive director of the Association of American University Presses, elegantly phrased it to me, many universities can be said to be offering “negative support.” In other words, they have decided that their presses should be treated as profit centers, and have asked them to pay back to the university a percentage of their sales.
Some years ago, for instance, the Ohio State University demanded 7 per cent of its press’s sales, although that proportion was negotiated down somewhat. After a recent singularly successful year, the University of New Mexico Press, I am told, found itself hit with a 10-per-cent “tax” by its university. The University of Chicago, true to its tradition of laissez-faire economics, has begun to consider the whole university a profit center, and is now demanding that each of its departments -- including the press -- show an annual increase in profitability. I have been told that young accountants scurry about the campus every quarter, asking department heads whether they have made the progress expected in their business plans, a ritual that can be recalled with fond nostalgia by anyone who has worked in corporate America.
Presumably, given the level of book sales at university presses, the amounts involved in most of those “taxes” are relatively small. What is worrisome is that administrators are applying business ideology to academic publishing, which until now, for the most part, at least, has been considered more a part of scholarship than of corporate life. Princeton University Press is an interesting example. Despite its wealth -- it is the best-endowed press in the country -- it has been aggressive in trying to replace traditional monographs with commercially attractive books.
What struck me when I tried to gather statistics about what is happening to press subsidies was the reluctance of university-press directors to speak for attribution. People were most willing to discuss what was happening at other presses, but wary of being quoted directly. It seemed to me that I felt the chilly climate of a large corporation, rather than the spirit of open inquiry that theoretically characterizes academic dealings.
If university presses are to publish fewer monographs in the coming years, if their university support is to continue to decline, and if the corporate ethos continues to spread, where are the presses to turn? Some of the larger presses, such as those of Yale and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have established successful lines in art history, architecture, and design. And for some time now, a number of smaller presses have tried to become regional publishers. Those such as Nebraska and Oklahoma have developed impressive lines of books on local history, local sites, and so on. Where no other independent local publisher exists, as in Oklahoma or Nebraska, that clearly renders a valuable service. In other parts of the country, however, one could wonder whether numerous local publishers could as easily take on some of the non-scholarly regional books that university presses such as New Mexico and Harvard have brought out.
It would be better for university presses to focus on those regional books that have scholarly interest and that are unlikely to be taken on by independent publishers. For example, the guides to each of the states written for the Work Projects Administration during the New Deal are invaluable sources for scholars, but many of them are out of print. Only a handful of university presses have jumped in to reissue them.
A recent look that I took at university-press catalogues (“Publishers’ Spring Catalogues Offer Compelling Reading About the Market for Ideas,” Opinion, The Chronicle, March 19) suggested another strategy pursued by university presses: A large number of them are devoting a substantial part of their lists to “midlist” titles that might formerly have been published by commercial publishers. A surprising number of the university presses have turned to baseball, and others to books about films and movie stars.
Two questions, however, must be raised about reliance on such books. First, if commercial publishers have abandoned them, are they sufficiently profitable for university presses to bother with? As many presses discovered more than a decade ago, when they turned to publishing trade-paperback editions of books originally produced by the commercial presses, the market for those titles was not always as substantial as hoped.
But even if the books are profitable, one might well ask whether this is an appropriate role for a university press. Hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars have been spent on university presses over the years, either directly or indirectly, through alumni contributions. The presses are meant to be one of the few alternative sources of scholarship and information available in the United States as a whole. Does the bargain involved in publishing commercial titles compromise that role?
Still, given the dwindling base of institutional support, a diminishing audience for scholarly work, and an increasing reliance on books that will appeal to the market, the handwriting is on the wall. I think I can make out the letters “PBS.” The decline in the Public Broadcasting Service after the Reagan and Bush Administrations cut its government support and forced the network to look for private funds has recently been studied in several excellent books, like James Ledbetter’s Made Possible By . ... It is the story of what happens when the market becomes the arbiter of what is to be made available. The search for wider audiences diluted the educational content of PBS programming and the independent journalism of people like Bill Moyers, in favor of the charms of antiques, nostalgic celebrations of local history, and foreign cooking.
Are there any realistic alternatives to such a gloomy scenario for university presses? If monographs are disappearing at one end of the spectrum and commercial titles are a questionable alternative at the other end, what is left for university presses to publish? That was the question asked in a trenchant -- hence controversial -- article published two years ago in The Nation by Philip Pochoda, editorial director of the University Press of New England, who criticized press directors for their timidity in avoiding burning local or national issues.
Allow me a personal footnote at this point. More than a decade ago, while I was still director of Pantheon Books, I was asked if I would appear before the search committee for the directorship of the Harvard University Press and discuss what I thought the press should do in the future. While my family and I didn’t see ourselves moving to Cambridge, it was an invitation not to be refused, and I prepared a long and detailed memo. (As it turned out, the memo became the basis for the prospectus for the New Press, the independent publishing house that I founded shortly thereafter.)
Acknowledging that Harvard was already pre-eminent in publishing scholarly monographs in many fields, I suggested that the press might devote some of its efforts -- and profits -- to other areas. Noting that John Silber, then president of Boston University, was making energetic attempts to take over the Boston city schools, I suggested that Harvard might consider using some of its expertise in the field of education to publish materials for teachers and students in the Boston area. I also suggested that Harvard might pay more attention to scholarly publishing overseas, both in helping fledgling university presses in Eastern Europe and the third world, and in co-commissioning and translating into English the works of scholars abroad.
Had I suggested to the distinguished committee that we march down to Harvard Yard and set Widener Library ablaze, I would have made a better impression. It was clear that the search committee saw expanding into secondary education, and dealing with the needs of the local school population, as beneath the concerns of a great university. (I am sure the committee did not represent the feelings of press staff members, then or now.)
Nor did the committee seem interested in translations. Each year, a large number of books published overseas are worthy of translation, but they will never appear in English. They are important contributions to knowledge -- especially needed at a time when few U.S. scholars have a reading knowledge of several foreign tongues -- but they are expensive undertakings, with limited markets. So while some university presses, such as Nebraska and Northwestern, have done a remarkable job of taking on foreign fiction, most have kept away from translated nonfiction.
Indeed, there are very few areas -- publishing titles about politics may be one of them, even though university presses seem afraid of irritating state and local officials with the controversy involved -- where serious publishing can be expected to make money.
In other words, clear conflict exists between carrying out a bold and imaginative university-press program and making money. The real question is not what university presses will do, but what the universities that sponsor them will do. There are exciting new areas into which university presses could move -- many more than the few mentioned above -- but they would all involve financial risk and might well prove to be money losers. The question is whether universities will choose to use their resources to help presses develop books that can serve their constituencies in intellectually exciting ways -- or whether universities will continue to reduce financial support to presses, and even, in some cases, demand payments from them.
Clearly, the ultimate decisions about the future of university presses -- among the few intellectually independent institutions in the United States -- do not lie simply in their own hands. It is the universities that have to decide what use they will make of the presses that are in their trust. Not only scholars, but the country as a whole, should be watching.
Andre Schiffrin is director of the New Press.
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