A response to Paul: Reasons for university presses to stay in the game
By David RobinsonI found Paul’s last post both trenchant and persuasive. It got me thinking about how and why organizations take on new roles, or get rid of old ones. Paul’s post might make one wonder whether it has ever made sense for universities to have presses; in any event, the case for them seems to be getting weaker. Rather than struggle to modernize the operations of their eponymous presses, Paul suggests, universities could voluntarily cede the turf they are losing to other parties and new technologies. Should they? It’s a question that deserves a strong answer, one way or the other.
This question seems to be an instance of a more general phenomenon that frequently follows from technological upheaval: well-established institutions find that the jobs they are geared to do are no longer needed, or else are no longer done in the ways for which these institutions are best prepared. Retail bookstores after Amazon; video rental stores after Netflix and video on demand; newspapers after blogs; and the list could be much further elaborated.
In each case, the established institution struggles to stay relevant, often by making dubious assertions about how bad things will be if it doesn’t continue to perform the threatened functions. Music labels sometimes suggest we won’t find new artists unless they keep acting as middlemen; more than a few newspaper reporters have argued that politics will go to pot if readers, rather than being presented with a front page that forces them to eat their informational vegetables, are able to create a custom-tailored “Daily Me.”
A second strategy these institutions use is to undertake new activities which are, or are hoped to be, more valuable than the outmoded practice. Bookstores don’t just sell books anymore, they sell experiences. The Washington Post is publishing a series of arresting video confessionals by regular people. Music labels and other content middlemen have created branded online communities around their artists. In cases like these, the new activity is often valuable but the institution has to stretch its mission to justify doing something that it would, before the relevant technological shift, have clearly rejected as being beyond its mandate.
The field has a predictable structure: established players conduct a desperate search for new ways of being valuable, while simultaneously trying to fight off new entrants. Americans have special affection for entrepreneurs and underdogs, which tends to manifest itself in part as a visceral chafing at the fight against change that music labels, retail stores, and yes, university presses are apt to wage. I don’t have survey data to back this claim about attitudes-but I suspect that such data could be found (can anyone help me here?).
All that said, it would be easy to underestimate the possible future value of these existing institutions. Descriptions of the bright new future in which the existing, outmoded institutions have vanished tend to have a note of aspiration about them: “Music labels are useless” is as much a claim about where the industry might be heading as a statement about where it is today.
Institutions with the discretionary power to impede change have also got, on the flip side of the coin, a power to help change along. Sometimes, the most helpful thing they can possibly do is to get out of the way. But there are often opportunities to do more. Bookstores that have beefed up their roles as social hubs are one case of this; their shift to a complementary relationship with online book ordering has (arguably) enriched and elevated the cultural status of reading.
What about university presses? Some have personae (or, sometimes, particular imprints with personae) that help link certain editors, writers and readers together-I’m thinking in particular of MIT Press’s many books on the social impact of technology, a topic that can be very hard to keep track of. A question for readers and my fellow participants: Are there particular university presses that play a similar role in (some aspect of) your field of specialization? Maybe presses would be better off getting further from their respective universities, and instead staking out topic areas in which they can specialize in a way that serves the whole academic community in a given area. That may already be happening to some degree-and it may, to some limited extent, approximate the approach Paul contemplates at the end of his post, without any single collective entity coordinating the switch from institution-based to (effectively) topic-based specialization among presses.
October 29th, 2007 at 4:12 pm
David, there certainly is specialization within university presses that serves the scholarly community in just the ways you mention, and this expertise is crucial if UPs want to continue to play a valuable role in scholarly communication. Think of Princeton’s Economics and Political Science lists, or UNC’s Southern History publishing, or Georgetown’s Arabic Studies program–all tops in their field. I don’t think it is necessary that there is a one-to-one correspopndence between the publishing priorities of the press and the academic priorities of the university, but I do think it helps. You mention MIT. MIT was losing money a couple of decades ago and made the conscious decision to cut back on the many disciplines it published, and concentrate instead on just a few. It chose those areas where it could use the networks of faculty expertise at the university to develop its own expertise, and it has steadily built trusted, programs in those fields (as well as turned around it’s financial profile).
Sometimes it happens that a press is blessed with a great editor who has built a high-profile list in an area that is not aligned with its parent institution. MIT has such a program in philosophy, and I would be the last to say it should pitch it overboard to get complete alignment. But even large presses cannot do everything, and small presses can only do a few things, and in taking a rigorous look at where they can create scholary centers of excellence, it makes sense first to look to where their local expertise, as well as the reputation of their parent institution, can play a role.