BY HANK REICHMAN

Illustration by Stanford professor Ge Wang, adapted from a book published by Stanford University Press

In the face of an avalanche of criticism, Stanford University provost Persis Drell has stepped back from a plan revealed last week to end university financial support for the highly esteemed Stanford University Press.  But the reprieve may just be temporary, as Drell agreed only to provide funds for one year.  The university has been giving the press $1.7 million a year, while the press brings in $5 million a year in book sales.  The press had requested a five-year extension of that practice.  Ending the support could effectively doom the press, critics of the decision say.

The subsidy amounts to a mere 0.027% of the university’s $6.3 billion budget.  Stanford also has the world’s fourth largest endowment of $26.5 billion.  Founded in 1892, Stanford University Press (SUP) is as old as the university itself.  Elena Danielson, Archivist Emerita and retired associate director of the Hoover Institution, which is located on the Stanford campus, said that one of David Starr Jordan’s requirements when he accepted the inaugural position of Stanford president was to have a university press.  According to Greg Britton, director of the Johns Hopkins University Press, SUP is “among the very best university presses in America” and “an incredible jewel.  It’s every bit the equal of its institution.”

The provost’s retreat came in response to widespread protest and anger from Stanford faculty members, the publishing community, and scholars nationwide.  Several university departments issued statements of protest.  An open letter from Stanford faculty, students, staff and alumni collected over 700 signatures.  It asked that “any decision about drastic restructuring at the Press be made only after full consultation and well-prepared discussion in the Academic Senate” and be based on the careful examinations of an “external committee of experts with experience in academic publishing.”

“If we use a purely financial metric to assess the value of academic books, the scholarly mission of the academy will be lost,” the petition read.  “Now more than ever, we should be sending the opposite message: That scholarly research is essential to a thriving society and that we will never waver in our commitment to producing and disseminating it.”

In an email to the faculty, Drell said she “did not anticipate [the decision] would touch such a deep nerve in the community of our humanities and social sciences colleagues.”  One would think that a provost — even one like Drell, a physicist perhaps less familiar with these disciplines — would be cognizant of the support enjoyed by her own university press, especially one that annually publishes over 130 books, which win numerous prestigious awards.  But I suspect Drell did know that the press enjoyed widespread support, which explains why her attempt to withdraw funding was shrouded in secrecy.

According to an email from Stanford literature professor and AAUP member David Palumbo-Liu, “The Provost did not consult with the Committee on Libraries, which is the Senate committee in charge of the Press; she did not consult with the Editorial Board of SUP, which is appointed by the President and consists of Stanford faculty; she did not consult with the Faculty Senate. The only faculty she consulted with was the Budget Group.”  Instead, on April 19, “she convened a secret meeting of chairs of humanities and social sciences departments to inform them of her decision not to grant SUP the funds they requested.”  That group was told the money could go to graduate fellowships, although the amount would fund only about three of these.

It was only after some of those chairs protested and leaked the news to members of the Academic Senate that Drell was compelled publicly to acknowledge the move.  At a regularly scheduled meeting of the Academic Senate April 25, Drell presented the cut as part of a general budget tightening.  Palumbo-Liu submitted several written questions about the press.  Here are those questions:

Why weren’t the faculty consulted before you made your decision—you did not consult with either Editorial Board of the Press (which is a Presidentially appointed committee) or the Faculty Senate?  You recognize that this is not simply a fiscal decision, and that a university press is an intrinsic part of any great university’s intellectual identity.

It is reported that you said to a gathering of chairs that SUP is a “second-rate press.”  Did you say that, and if you did, upon what empirical evidence or studies, besides sales figures, did you base that judgment?

I understand that the only information you requested from the Press were its financial figures.  If this is true, why did you not also ask for their list of authors, the list of prizes they have won, or the lists of their reviews and media appearances?  That is, information that would have given you a sense of the impact and value of the press, not just its cost?

No university press in the country is solvent, unless it has a major endowment.  Stanford has not allowed SUP to raise an endowment—it is not a fundraising priority for Stanford.  So this is a Catch-22 situation.  What are your thoughts on this?

According to Palumbo-Liu, Drell answered none of these questions.

Jessica Riskin, Vice Chair of the History Department and Chair of the Academic Senate’s Library Committee, said the Senate discussion was “cut short,” as it was “not on the official agenda.”  But Palumbo-Liu and other senators are working to place a resolution on the agenda of the next Senate meeting, May 9.

Whatever the final outcome and whatever the merits, the Stanford administration’s move highlights a growing problem throughout U.S. higher education: the failure of administrations to respect the principles of shared governance and, in particular, the critical role of the faculty in decisions that affect teaching, research, and academic standards.  In a letter to Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Provost Drell, members of the SUP advisory board wrote:

Our understanding of how this decision came about is still spotty at best – and that’s the first problem. We know the program, vision, and range of SUP better than most Stanford faculty, and yet we were never consulted.  Whatever the specific problems are that this administration has with SUP remain murky to us, and certainly arose without ever speaking to us.  From colleagues we have learned that a certain number of department chairs were informed about the planned cuts last Monday, and that they are to form a committee to implement them.  We do not understand why it should be H&S departments being made to face this choice – the University Press after all publishes widely in fields such as Law and Business.  We also don’t understand why the department chairs should be asked to make these vital decisions, rather than, say, members of this committee or others who have greater familiarity with the programs, series and editors involved.

We further object to the speed, even haste with which this decision appears to have been made.  We have been impressed with the deliberateness with which you both put the long-range planning process into motion, and the patience with which you are letting it play out. It would make perfect sense that the University Press come up in connection with the issues raised in long range planning – it is a vital part of the question of what kind of university we want to be, what our scholarship should look like, and who our public is.  But this makes it all the more disturbing that in the midst of all this careful deliberation, this decision has the appearance of being rushed through. . . .

. . . Given these stakes, careful deliberation and transparent decision making would have been all the more essential.

And thirty members of the Stanford Law School faculty wrote:

Such a momentous decision should be made only after full discussion in the academic Senate, with a chance for all members of the university community to be heard. Moreover, we urge that any decision be based on a careful examination of the Press’s operations by experts with experience in academic publishing who can offer an assessment of the Stanford University Press and suggestions for improvement. . . .

We hope you will reconsider any decision to eliminate the subsidy to Stanford University Press and urge you to, at the very least, present any such decision to the academic Senate for discussion to ensure you have a complete picture of the value of the Press.

As the AAUP put it in the 1994 statement On the Relationship of Faculty Governance to Academic Freedom, “A sound system of institutional governance is a necessary condition for the protection of faculty rights and thereby for the most productive exercise of essential faculty freedoms.  Correspondingly, the protection of the academic freedom of faculty members in addressing issues of institutional governance is a prerequisite for the practice of governance unhampered by fear of retribution.”

Unfortunately, at both private and public institutions shared governance has come increasingly under siege. The poisonous notion that colleges and universities should be run more like business enterprises has empowered authoritarian administrators and out-of-touch governing boards at the expense of faculty.  The high-handed behavior of Stanford’s administration is, sadly, only the most recent example.