University presses struggle

Chancellor Michael Martin doesn’t question the prestige the Louisiana State University Press brings to his school, with Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction and poetry, tomes on Southern history and culture and other noted works to its credit.

What it doesn’t bring in is revenue, and, like cash-strapped colleges across the country, LSU is getting tired of propping up its press.

The school has said the 74-year-old original publisher of “A Confederacy of Dunces” doesn’t generate enough money to independently function. LSU officials are considering downsizing it or closing it as they face state budget cuts that could surpass $40 million at the Baton Rouge campus alone.

“We allocated $500,000 of university money to the press in the last fiscal year. They spent $1.4 million,” Martin said recently. That type of subsidy cannot continue, Martin said.

Other schools have reached the same conclusion.

Utah State University Press narrowly escaped the chopping block this year. Eastern Washington University Press is being phased out as that school copes with budget cuts.

Even the most prestigious presses are feeling the pinch: Yale University Press reported in March that revenue was down nearly 8%, and the State University of New York Press announced five layoffs in December.

“They’re all getting hammered,” said Peter Givler, director of the Assn. of American University Presses, which announced this month that it would work with the heads of LSU’s business, communication and history departments to help develop a business model that could keep the institution alive.

One way or another, university press operations are having to prove their worth to their institutions, said Kate Wittenberg, a former editor in chief of Columbia University Press who is now a project director with Ithaka, a nonprofit group that assists in academic research and archiving.

“I don’t know whether university presses are being used as ‘bargaining chips’ in budget cut battles,” Wittenberg wrote in an e-mail. “However, I will say that it is probably easier for a state legislator to accept cutting a press’ budget than, say, cutting funding for the school’s English department.”

LSU Press director Mary Katherine Callaway said she believes the press’ value to the university is evident in its four Pulitzer-winning works, 240 other awards and in the 75 to 85 new titles it publishes each year.

“It’s really easy, I think, to point at the numbers and get really wrapped up in those, and I’m not saying that numbers are not important,” Callaway said. When it comes to status symbols like having an in-house press, however, sometimes the question isn’t cost but value, she said.

News of LSU Press’ possible demise sparked letters to Martin and Gov. Bobby Jindal from the American Historical Assn. and the Modern Language Assn. And it has fueled long-standing debates over the relative importance universities place on athletics.

Ted Genoways, editor of the University of Virginia’s literary journal, the Virginia Quarterly Review, calls the LSU Press one of the best university publishers in the nation. Losing the press and its literary publication, the Southern Review, would tarnish LSU’s image, he said.

“Do you want to be known as some place that supports the history and culture of your region or some place that has fantastic outside linebackers?” Genoways said.

Martin countered that LSU’s moneymaking athletic program subsidizes some academics.

“In some respects,” Martin said, “the press has been saved by the outside linebackers -- up to this point.”