Lessons about publishing from West Virginia

I resigned from West Virginia University, where I directed the university press, in spring, and several days later I heard through an intermediary that the university might be interested in retaining me. I responded by proposing half a dozen measures in areas like staffing that would, I hoped, ensure continuity and support for WVU Press’s authors. In exchange for allowing WVU Press to avoid the uncertainty and tumult of the university’s looming “academic transformation”—which didn’t strike me as healthy for authors or anyone else—I offered to stay on and consider a pay cut.

(It’s worth noting that many insiders came to the same early realization about the ugliness of WVU’s pending transformation. To pick just one example: The renowned writer Ann Pancake also chose to leave WVU this spring, and she agreed with my characterization of the university’s transformation process—which I shared in an email exchange—as “a demoralizing gamut of ever-shifting tests designed to eventually find something wrong with us.” Ann gave me permission to mention the news of her own departure, which hasn’t been publicized.)

My suggestions about possible retention never received a response, and I left at the end of May. Four months later, WVU Press has been kept open, but with (as of this writing) a staff reduced by forty percent, from five workers to three, as a result of voluntary departures during the bruising transformation.

Over the four-month span since my resignation, I’ve undertaken small jobs for a couple of university presses, and I recently signed on as editor-at-large with the great team at the University of Oklahoma Press, where I’ll be acquiring two or three books a year in higher education. (I should mention that I’m available to talk with authors and publishers about other consulting work.) But I am, for the first time since 2005, not a full-time university-press employee. It’s a position that should liberate me to make all sorts of provocative points about the field I’ve watched closely for so many years—but which has so far resulted mostly in failed essays languishing in my drafts folder.

This month’s news about the closure of the Gettysburg Review helps clarify some of what I’ve been trying to think and write about. At Gettysburg, the college president was explicit that the journal was being cut because its “external” mission was assumed not to matter internally, to students. The uproar over the closure is evidence, I think, that higher ed leadership often fails to consider the public dimensions of decisions generated by insular administrative networks. And at institutions where knowledge of publishing may be limited to those working at the very publishing units placed under review, the problem may extend even deeper—with the practical mechanics of the publishing industry poorly understood by decision-makers determining publishers’ fate. Lauren Hohle, editor of the Gettysburg Review, noted on Twitter: “They didn't seem to realize we had interns taking it for credit to graduate or that they would need to refund subscribers. They expected us to just walk away.”

I detect similar dynamics at university presses and perhaps higher education’s other public-facing cultural entities. Which is to say: I think that university presses’ outward orientation can mesh poorly with their host universities’ procedures for self-evaluation, a mismatch with all sorts of consequences, including lost opportunities for productive communication.

I saw this shaping up in spring. When I asked an administrator why WVU Press was suddenly under review, only a couple of weeks after being told we were in great shape and could even consider hiring more staff, I was sent a link to a YouTube video. At another point I was told, bizarrely, that our sales-oriented unit had been placed in a “bucket” for parts of the university that couldn’t bring in revenue. I could go on. But the broader point is simply that if universities are going to judge units like university presses according to the same processes built to evaluate, say, university tutoring centers, then misalignment is built into the venture. Conversations are poorer for it, and frustrations over this kind of structural mismatch may help drive voluntary departures like those at WVU.

University administrators’ inward-looking orientation can, I think, go hand in hand with the illegibility of university-press success. It may sound immodest, but success itself may pose a challenge to an institution like WVU that’s intent on proving things are broken and in need of being fixed. (West Virginia’s president: "I want to be clear that West Virginia University is not dismantling higher education—but we are disrupting it.") WVU Press’s narrative—independent, outward facing, and loudly championed as itself a solution to publishing’s problems—didn’t fit, and the unit came through the academic transformation significantly reduced in size. In a landscape that rewards disruption, I suspect other university presses may find themselves in similar situations.

All of the above occurs against a background noise that too often facilitates, rather than challenges, dominant tendencies toward insularity, provincialism, and erasure. Decisions about WVU Press, the Gettysburg Review, and similar entities are being made by higher ed administrators who may hear a drumbeat of critique instead of, for example, the idea that university presses are “keeping American literature alive.” (And if you haven’t encountered wide amplification of that opinion, articulated last year in the New York Times, then my point seems pretty sound.)

There are other lessons about publishing in the mix at West Virginia, and I may return to some in another essay. To pick one example—I’d love to talk about the invisibility of university staff. WVU has fired at least 130 staff (as opposed to faculty) as part of its transformation so far, with almost no public notice.

But for now I’ll wrap up with some links to further reading. If you’re looking for more general perspective on university presses, I think my guest piece at Inside Higher Ed holds up well, and I’m pleased with my interview a couple of years back at the Chronicle of Higher Education. Doug Armato’s “What Was a University Press” remains a go-to. And don’t miss Rebecca Colesworthy’s excellent Public Books essay, or her new Chronicle column. Feel free to add your favorites (or share thoughts) in comments.