As part of the University Press Week blog tour, we have a post today from UMP author Ned Stuckey-French and sales representative Bruce Miller. Ned and Bruce have collaborated often over the past several months, mobilizing the campaign to save the University of Missouri Press after the announcement of a phase out. Those plans have been superseded by a transition from the University of Missouri system to the University of Missouri's Columbia campus.
The tour continues tomorrow at the MIT Press blog with a post from editorial director Gita Manaktala. A complete blog tour schedule is also available here.
Why Do We Need University Presses?
by Ned Stuckey-French and Bruce Miller
Over the
last five months we have learned a lot about what people don’t know about
university presses. Sometimes, even the people who are charged with the job of
promoting scholarship, disseminating research, and protecting academic freedom
don’t understand the importance of an academic press.
We don’t
mean to posture here. Our campaign to educate administrators, faculty, readers,
and potential supporters taught us a lot about university presses as well. Just
as teaching a book helps a teacher understand that book all that much more
clearly, so does organizing a campaign help one clarify the issues in one’s own
mind. Here are some reasons we need university presses.
1. University presses preserve and disseminate
knowledge. They publish books and journals that are read by other scholars
and by general readers. These books are held in libraries and archives so other
scholars can access them and build on the understandings they contain. Many are
taught in classrooms where they help preserve and shape our culture. Last June,
ten of the editors of the 16-volume Collected
Works of Langston Hughes
explained that their work on that the leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance
(who was born in Joplin) “contributes
to the larger, ongoing project among scholars of African American literature to
recover texts by black American writers that have been historically
marginalized from the American literary canon. This large-scale process of
textual recovery and publication, begun on the heels of the Civil Rights
Movement when students and scholars were advocating for representation of
African American literature, history, and culture in American universities, is
truly one of academe’s most important success stories. Without the work of
scholars engaged in this project, African American literary studies in the
academy simply would not exist.”
2. University presses are
defenders of free speech, academic freedom, and spirited discussion. A vibrant, healthy democracy
thrives on debate and the free exchange of ideas. Readers and scholars of all
political persuasions have supported the University of Missouri Press because
they know that its catalog is diverse and its books are an essential part of
the public sphere. The Press has published books about everyone from Satchel Paige to Laura Ingalls Wilder, from Democratic President Harry Truman to Mary Louise Smith, the first and only woman
chair of the Republican National Committee.
3. University presses serve a
readership outside the university. University
presses are committed first to scholarship, but they reach out to a wider audience
as well. Certainly, the UMP does this, for example, with series that focus on
the American Military Experience or Sports and American Culture, but they also publish local
history, memoirs, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Blue Highways Revisited,
Edgar I. Ailor III’s mix of photography and text that retraces William Least
Heat-Moon’s famous drive across America, is an example of a book with a more
general readership.
4. University presses have a
special role in land-grant institutions. The UMP has a special responsibility to preserve and
celebrate the people, history, and culture of the Show-Me State. The Missouri Biography Series, edited by William Foley,
publishes biographies of important and famous Missourians–everyone from
baseball great Stan Musial to the notorious political boss Tom Pendergast. Tens of thousands of Missouri children
and adults have learned about their state’s places, folklore, food, land, and
culture by reading the Missouri Heritage Readers, which are adopted by schools
and available in local libraries across the state. And finally, the UMP is
rightfully the center for the study of our country’s greatest writer—Mark
Twain. Under the expert editorship of Tom Quirk, the Mark Twain and His Circle Series has become the undisputed leader
in the field.
5. University presses play an
essential role in developing and evaluating faculty. At university
presses, professional acquisitions editors review manuscripts, decide whether
they are worthy of consideration, find the best outside reviewers for those
manuscripts, evaluate the responses of the outside reviewers, work with the
author to revise the manuscript incorporating the reviewers’ suggestions, and
present the reviewed manuscripts to the Press’s Editorial Board for final
approval. This process is absolutely essential not only to make sure that the
Press is publishing the best books possible, but also to help universities
nationwide evaluate faculty.
If poets are the unacknowledged
legislators of the world, university presses are the uncelebrated
record-keepers of world history and culture. Just as the journalism business
has always been extremely competitive, from the days of the first penny
newspapers to the present, university presses vie with each other to find
path-breaking works of scholarship and books that do a double duty, educating
the lay reader while contributing to scholarly discourse.
University press books are not
usually bestsellers. Book publishing is roughly a $27 billion a year industry,
and university presses account for just one percent of that, but the influence
of books published by university presses is deep and long lasting. These books
do not have midnight launches at chain stores where tens of thousands of
teenagers show up in costume, and they are rarely optioned by Hollywood, but
they do stay on shelves for years, get taught in our schools, and change the
way we think.
The celebration of University Press
Week is especially apt in 2012, as we honor the role of university presses in
our culture and offer thanksgiving with cheers for the resurgence of the
University of Missouri Press.
