Last April, Stanford University Press hosted an unusually stellar event for an academic publisher: a two-day international conference featuring renowned French thinker Jacques Derrida. The occasion was billed as a celebration of the press’s authors, Derrida among them, and their contributions to the humanities.
Before the year was out, triumph turned to trauma when the press announced cost-cutting measures in the face of a projected $1.34 million deficit. A new five-year plan would slice the widely respected humanities list, especially translations. At the same time, the plan would beef up business, economics, law and public policy titles to boost revenues and create “a list more reflective of Stanford’s faculties,” said Geoffrey Burn, press director. Burn promised to produce books more quickly and cheaply and to cut overheads “to the bone.” Further, humanities acquisitions editor Helen Tartar, a mainstay at the press for more than two decades, was being let go.
“As a small, nonprofit press, we have very limited resources, and we simply cannot afford to have two editors doing the work of one if we are to survive the difficult times ahead,” Burn told the Stanford Report in October. (Executive editor Norris Pope, ’68, will assume Tartar’s responsibilities.) He added that the changes weren’t an abandonment of humanities but an attempt to underwrite them better.
Within minutes of Burn’s September e-mail announcement to some 50 or 60 interested parties, scholars from as far away as Cambridge University, Paris, Berlin, Hong Kong and Australia reacted in scores of letters and e-mails. For many, Tartar’s departure was the biggest bombshell. “Helen Tartar has transformed what was once no more than a moderately respectable academic press into a luminous beacon of intellectual creation,” wrote UCLA French professor Peter Haidu. “Her unique combination of talents has built an institution of importance, eminence, and authority without equal in America.” A message from Michael Puett, assistant professor of early Chinese history at Harvard, stated that Tartar had “built up the Press as a community.”
Some authors bowed out. Professor Daniel Boyarin of UC-Berkeley withdrew a book and, with his co-editors, cancelled a series on ancient religions, taking both to the University of Pennsylvania Press. UC-Santa Barbara English professor Alan Liu, MA ’79, PhD ’80, gave his most recent manuscript to the University of Chicago Press and wrote: “The intellectual chemistry between an author and an editor of [Tartar’s] unique sensibility and long-standing commitment to her authors is a deep yet fragile thing. It cannot be turned on or off on a dime.”
Haun Saussy, professor of comparative literature and Asian languages at Stanford, contends that the measures amount to a discarding of the “cultural capital” the press built up over the years by publishing authors at the forefront of interdisciplinary humanistic research.
In response to critics, Burn says the changes are a byproduct of the times, pointing to budget-cuts and layoffs at other university presses, including SUNY, Duke and especially UC Press, which laid off 10 staff in the last fiscal year. Moreover, Burn says, reactions to Stanford’s cutbacks are partly a cumulative lament, as the news pours in from around the country. “Market conditions worsen and worsen and worsen; people are getting more and more and more concerned. I’m not sure overall we’ve had more attention than anyone else,” he says.
Indeed, times are tough for academic presses, given cutbacks in library spending, increased photocopying of books for “course readers” and reduced subsidies from universities’ stretched budgets. Provost John Etchemendy, PhD ’82, told the Faculty Senate in October that Stanford’s subsidy of the press in fiscal 2002-03—upward of a half-million dollars out of some $3.78 million in total press revenues—couldn’t continue at that level.
In addition, growth is weak in major bookstore chains, independents are disappearing, and stores are tightening stock control. Unsold books bounce back to publishers in record time, and retailers’ discounts are rising. Burn says there’s less shelf space than ever for academic books.
“Every quarter, university presses are facing a major decision,” says Burn. “To a large extent, it was our turn.” Nevertheless, he remains hopeful of a recovery: “I don’t think this is because I am pathologically optimistic . . . [but I believe] the economic downtown will not last forever.”
Cynthia Haven is a Northern California writer and frequent Stanford contributor.
