Statement in Support of University Presses
The Executive Council approved the following statement in July 2019. It replaces the council’s May 2013 statement on the same subject.
The MLA regards university presses as vital to the dissemination of scholarship on languages and literatures and to the scholarly accreditation process, which is indispensable to the academic community. The defunding of university presses puts an inordinate strain on humanities scholars who depend on presses at all stages of their careers for the publication and circulation of their work for their professional livelihood. University presses play a key role in encouraging and refining the work of new scholars through the publication of journal articles and first books that establish credentials, develop authorial careers in the field, and challenge staid intellectual conventions. Through a rigorous peer-review process and a faculty publication-committee review, university presses are charged with evaluating the validity and soundness of scholarship and so embody the highest standards for academic publication. They are standard-bearers for the disciplines and interdisciplinary scholarship, which is why their judgments are relied upon when departments and divisions within the university conduct personnel reviews. These presses cultivate authors at every stage of their careers, working with them to develop their ideas into books that are presented in a clear and persuasive manner in order to reach the widest readership possible, without sacrificing intellectual rigor or richness of ideas. University press editors also track trends and support emerging areas of research, often publishing pathbreaking work with the power to establish new fields or introducing important topics before anyone can know their importance for the general academic and public conversation. With the proliferation of low-cost digital publications available to a range of authors and disseminators, advertising, propaganda, and misinformation are often juxtaposed with scholarly sites. University presses are not driven to produce “clickbait” but are instead tasked with disseminating carefully researched and peer-reviewed material. As a result, they are crucial to cultivating public culture and to debates on values, and they will continue to exercise this leadership role in both their print and online presence.
University presses curate, edit, shape, and design intellectual works; they launch an author’s ideas into the wider academic world and generate conversations throughout public life. The presses enhance the reputation of their universities, not only when their works are used in teaching and research throughout the academy but also when their books and journals are found in libraries and bookstores and on Web sites frequented by readers throughout the world. Finally, and importantly for today’s rapidly changing digital world, university presses innovate and experiment with new formats of publication, most recently with digital-only, short-form writing and enhanced e-books—often undertaken in collaboration with their own research libraries and with scholarly associations to disseminate scholarship forms most suited to the work and its audiences. University presses and research libraries collaborate to facilitate scholarly communication, the lifeblood of every innovative university dedicated to remaining current with new research. Libraries buy and circulate these publications in order to reach student readers. Presses and libraries are to the humanities as laboratories are to the sciences.
We are therefore deeply alarmed when fiscal austerity is invoked to threaten the continued existence of any university press, especially when well-endowed universities demonstrate their willingness to spend large amounts on extracurricular activities that have little to do with supporting and sustaining the academic aims of the university. Moreover, the loss of a university press results in a narrowing of publication options for scholars and the increased likelihood that their work will not be circulated or recognized. Both public and expert opinion on a range of issues that concern our ethical values are shaped by such scholarship in the humanities, which influences writers, teachers, artists, healthcare practitioners, scientists, journalists, lawmakers, politicians, religious leaders, and parents, among others. Presses are partners with their university administrators, faculty members, and libraries; though presses strive to bring in substantial revenue from book sales, they do require financial support from their home institutions, especially at a moment when university libraries are also suffering from austerity measures, making it difficult for them to purchase books published by university presses and to maintain subscriptions to academic journals. Indeed, without support for humanities acquisitions in libraries, these innovative collaborations cannot proceed.
The cost-benefit framework that illuminates the financial costs of university presses to universities cannot measure the scholarly, creative, and intellectual value or the public contribution of university presses to the dissemination of new knowledge. The return on such a relatively small investment is, in fact, both immeasurable and enduring: participation in scholarly communication throughout the world, advancing the best possible research, inciting innovative and creative scholarly work, setting standards for scholarly production, and embodying the defining values of the university. University support of presses and libraries represents an investment in innovative research and creative work that is critical for the development of the humanities, just as university subsidies for laboratories and materials represent investments in the sciences. The humanities give us myriad ways to understand the time and space of humanity, the history and the future of our world, and the values that guide practices of living, thus demonstrating the potentials of cultural production for enhancing public life across languages and regions. The MLA calls on university administrators to maintain, indeed to increase, their support for university presses as they seek to strengthen the value of the university in and for public life.