From the Crisis to the Commons

I want to get the personal stuff out of the way as quickly as possible, and thus I begin with a bit of whining: last December, seventy-two hours after my tenure decision became final, I received a rejection from a press that had had my book manuscript under review for ten months. The note, as encouraging as rejections can be, emphasized that the fault, if fault there were, lay not with the manuscript but with the climate; the press had received two positive readers' reports, and the editor was enthusiastic about the project. The marketing people, however, had declared the book "a bad financial risk in the current economy."

I am writing in a dying field. Or so it seems given the way academic presses treat that field of late. What is interesting about this statement, though, is that my field is not hidebound or traditional. Nor, for that matter, is my field so ruthlessly cutting edge or so radically interdisciplinary that integrating it into current academic categories is difficult. My manuscript focuses on the relationship between contemporary literary fiction and television. More specifically, it focuses on recent novels that suggest that new media are driving literature out of the central cultural position it once inhabited.

In other words, I have written a book that argues that the book is not dying. If ever there were an argument that presses might have a vested interest in publishing, it strikes me that this might be it. This is not to suggest that my work is so stellar that it is impossible to fathom its getting rejected, but one would think it would be in the best interest of academic presses to promote texts that argue for the continued relevance of print in the digital age. Nonetheless, there is a profound crisis in university press publishing largely revolving around the insupportable economics of the current publishing system. As Patrice Petro notes, in his May 2002 letter to the membership of the MLA, Stephen Greenblatt made many of these issues public, including that presses have radically cut back the number of books published in "certain fields." These fields are primarily in the humanities; numerous presses have ceased acquiring new manuscripts in literature altogether, and many others require hefty subventions from their authors. But the danger presented by this crisis is not simply that fewer books will be published; the crisis is rather, as Greenblatt goes on to suggest, one that directly threatens the futures of many potentially successful academics:

Some junior faculty members who will be reviewed for tenure in this academic year are anxiously waiting to hear from various university presses. These faculty members find themselves in a maddening double bind. They face a challenge—under inflexible time constraints and with very high stakes—that many of them may be unable to meet successfully, no matter how strong or serious their scholarly achievement, because academic presses simply cannot afford to publish their books. The situation is difficult for those in English and even more difficult for those in foreign languages.

We are concerned because people who have spent years of professional training—our students, our colleagues—are at risk. Their careers are in jeopardy, and higher education stands to lose, or at least severely to damage, a generation of young scholars.

Greenblatt's suggestions for ameliorating the situation focus on separating tenure decisions from the book standard, by diversifying the ways that scholars can demonstrate active, successful research agendas and by paying more careful attention to the quality of work (rather than relying on press readers to do so). This is an important topic of discussion, and one I am fortunate my department has paid close attention to.

I want to take a different turn, however, in considering possible solutions to the crisis in publishing. Suppose that instead of abandoning the monograph we make the monograph economically viable. Thus, here, I must reverse the argument of my manuscript: print publishing, at least of scholarly texts, may indeed be dying, crushed under the weight of its institutional production apparatus. The declining viability of print has been highlighted (though not caused...