In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • "Oy Vey! Is It a Crisis or Is It Just Me?"
  • Leslie Mitchner (bio)

I chose my title in the hope of getting someone's, anyone's, attention. The story of university press publishing right now is a bit like a Woody Allen movie—once it was good, but now you hate to look. Just imagine me as a standup comic, wringing my hands as I go through my routine, hoping to make you laugh even as I tell you one horror story after another. You would hardly believe that things could be so awful. Right? Are you the one who is neurotic and paranoid, or am I? Is it really this bad? And in film studies too?

Let me start by telling you a story. Once upon a time in a land far, far away, let's say Manhattan thirty-five years ago or more, there were still used bookstores lining Fourth Avenue and their wares spilled over into bins along the sidewalks. [End Page 82] Allen lovingly pays tribute to them in Hannah and Her Sisters. There were dozens of independent bookstores all over the city. There were real coffeehouses, no Starbucks; and although there was a Barnes & Noble store, there was no chain of the same name taking over the city and the country, selling Godiva chocolates, coffee mugs, glossy calendars, or peddling its own line of books and pushing other publishers' offerings off the shelves. There was no World Wide Web, unless it was an evil Cold War conspiracy. No one knew what a course pack was. Academics and the vanished species "general reader" bought lots of books. There was some crazy idea, nearly unfathomable now, that the humanities had intrinsic value, that art mattered, and that the way to rise in that exciting world was through reading.

Folks wandered around in labyrinthine library stacks and quirky bookshops, discovering riches they could not "google" or otherwise find as isolated units on a Web site. Students actually read the books assigned to them, and—you'll scarcely believe it—many that were not. They marked them up, making it difficult to sell them in the used book market. They certainly could not sell them to Amazon.com, enabling other students anywhere in the country to purchase the same books at a fraction of their original prices. Journals had not yet raised their prices to such astronomical figures that libraries and scholars had scarcely any money left for book purchases. The so-called gypsy scholar had not yet been invented. Some people may have dressed like gypsies, but that was only because Banana Republic, Ann Taylor, Barney's, and Giorgio Armani had not yet taken them in hand.

And it was still possible to keep up with what was written in any given academic field. Imagine! Was it a perfect world? No, but in terms of what concerns us here, it was a different world and one that was more hospitable to university presses and to young scholars making their way. This was also Woody Allen's better period, when he passed as an intellectual filmmaker—orauteur—in some circles, including among directors in France.

During the ensuing decades, lots of changes occurred. Fast forward to Superstar Scholars, the conglomeratization of commercial presses and of some large academic publishing houses as well. I have always thought of this era as the "Hollywoodization" of the academy. Remember those big posters, plastered with the faces of colleagues or professors, at the Routledge booth at the MLA? You, too, wanted to see your name on the marquee. University presses published record numbers of titles and grew fat on sales for a brief period of time. But then support declined for education from the federal government to the states and, in turn, from state legislatures to universities. Rapidly and steeply rising tuition costs for students followed, then cutbacks in funding by universities to their libraries—even as the libraries had to invest in new technologies. First a boon and then a boondoggle, theory took over, fragmenting academic audiences. And on and on. Just run the film (or story in that first paragraph) backward and you'll get the idea.

What we find...

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