Harvard University Press Blog

Who Pays the Price for the College Party Scene?

After a five-year study of a flagship Midwestern public university, sociologists Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Laura T. Hamilton found that the social and academic infrastructure of the school seemed to prioritize a particular type of affluent, socially oriented student. A “party pathway”—built around an implicit agreement between the university and students to demand little of each other—was impossible to avoid, and for students who couldn’t or wouldn’t join the fun it served as a constant reminder of their place as outsiders. Armstrong and Hamilton’s Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality exposes the unmet obligations and misplaced priorities of public universities whose students leave college with so little to show for it. Below, the authors contrast the experience of thriving on the party pathway with the far more common experience of being failed by it.

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Naomi and Karen started college the same year at a mid-tier public university in the Midwest. They lived on the same residence hall floor and shared a taste for partying. Both majored in sports broadcasting. Neither performed well academically, earning GPAs below 3.0. Yet Naomi graduated in four years, moved to New York City, and quickly secured a desirable entry-level job in a media firm. Karen, on the other hand, had changed her major to education, transferred to a regional branch campus, and was struggling to graduate within six years.

In an era of skyrocketing tuition and concern over the value of college, these divergent outcomes matter. In Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality, we trace a dormitory floor of fifty-three women, including Naomi and Karen, from the day they arrived on campus to a year after they were slated to graduate. The women were similar in many respects; however, they came from a wide range of social class backgrounds.

Based on this research we argue that how this university—and many other large state schools—organizes the college experience systematically disadvantages all but the affluent. The university supported a robust “party pathway”—a social and academic infrastructure with a powerful Greek system at its heart, and an array of easy majors on offer. Naomi—an out-of-state student whose father owned a successful business—was well served by the party pathway. Karen—a middle-class woman from in-state—was not.

Naomi and Karen—like one third of the incoming freshman class—were assigned to a “party dorm.” Little partying took place in the heavily-policed residence halls, but party dorms served as a pipeline into the under-aged party scene housed in the Greek system, which both women joined.

Launch of the Digital Public Library of America

The Digital Public Library of America launches today, having gone from concept to concrete more swiftly than anyone could have hoped. As has been envisioned from the beginning, the DPLA is “an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources that draws on the nation’s living heritage from libraries, universities, archives, and museums in order to educate, inform, and empower everyone in the current and future generations.” The DPLA begins with an already-impressive array of materials, but has even bolder ambitions, along with an encouraging concern with sustainability.

No individual has been as important to the DPLA’s trajectory as Harvard’s University Librarian (and many-time HUP author) Robert Darnton, who has tracked the project’s progress in a series of articles for the New York Review of Books. In his most recent, he recaps the initiative’s brief history and explains its intentions:

How to think of it? Not as a great edifice topped with a dome and standing on a gigantic database. The DPLA will be a distributed system of electronic content that will make the holdings of public and research libraries, archives, museums, and historical societies available, effortlessly and free of charge, to readers located at every connecting point of the Web. To make it work, we must think big and begin small. At first, the DPLA’s offering will be limited to a rich variety of collections—books, manuscripts, and works of art—that have already been digitized in cultural institutions throughout the country. Around this core it will grow, gradually accumulating material of all kinds until it will function as a national digital library.

Darnton goes on to detail a DPLA-affiliated project that is particularly exciting for us here at the Press:

At one time or other, nearly every student comes in contact with a poem by Emily Dickinson, who probably qualifies as America’s favorite poet. But Dickinson’s poems are especially problematic. Only a few of them, horribly mangled, were published in her lifetime.

As Darnton notes, the manuscript copies of Dickinson’s poems “pose important puzzles, because they contain quirky punctuation, capitalization, spacing, and other touches that have profound implications for their meaning.” The originals, which are held in a few invaluable collections—notably at Amherst College Library, the Boston Public Library, and Harvard’s Houghton Library—have now been digitized and combined with printed editions edited by Thomas H. Johnson in 1955 and by Ralph W. Franklin in 1981, both of which are jewels of HUP’s own catalog. The manuscripts and printed poems will be brought together with a wealth of other supplementary documentation to create an Emily Dickinson Archive. Brigham Young University has also partnered with Amherst College, the BPL, Harvard, HUP, and the DPLA in this project that will greatly expand access to our collective knowledge of one of the country’s great literary icons while also inspiring new scholarship and discourse on her life and work.

The Copley branch of the BPL—the first large free municipal library in the United States—was to host a gala launch for the DPLA today. The Copley library is now at the center of a crime scene, though, directly beside the terrible and tragic Boston Marathon explosions, and so today’s events have been cancelled. In his statement on the cancellation, DPLA Executive Director Dan Cohen called the building of a new library “one of the greatest examples of what humans can do together to extend the light against darkness,” and the site’s launch will proceed today as planned. An even larger event to properly celebrate the creation of the DPLA is now in the works for this fall.

The Historiography of Capitalism

This Sunday the New York Times offered up that rarest of birds: front page coverage of historiography. The piece, by Jennifer Schuessler, looks at historians’ growing study of the history of capitalism, a pursuit that predates but has been invigorated by the global financial crisis. Since Harvard’s Sven Beckert taught what’s believed to be the first seminar on the subject in 1996, courses and programs on the study of U.S. capitalism have been developed across the country.

Well, as the scholars go, so go the books, and Schuessler highlights a nice group of ours in her story, all of which were brought to HUP by Joyce Seltzer, our Senior Executive Editor for History and Contemporary Affairs. Among them is 2007’s A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States, by Stephen Mihm, who explains that respect for these areas of inquiry has grown greatly since the crisis left people asking “Oh my God, what has Wall Street been doing for the last 100 years?”

Another scholar whose work speaks directly to that question is Julia Ott, whose position at the New School is thought to be the academy’s first professorship in the history of capitalism. Ott, author of When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for an Investors’ Democracy, calls attention to the often overlooked truth that markets and financial institutions “were created by people making particular choices at particular historical moments.” Her work has the effect of denaturalizing economic conditions that are usually taken for granted, such as when she took to our blog to explain that, despite today’s politicized panic over government deficits, during WWI many Americans welcomed the vastly enlarged national debt, believing that federally-issued war bonds would lead to a better postwar society in which all had a “stake” in the nation. As such, Ott argues, the War Loan programs “invited Americans to imagine the nation as a financial market,” which in turn fundamentally altered the common citizen’s conception of and engagement with financial instruments.

Study of the history of capitalism incorporates the concern with race and gender that has driven so much of the work of historians in recent decades, and Schuessler points to Bethany Moreton’s award-winning To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise as an example of a work that focuses on gender.

Whether they come from HUP or our sister university presses, many of the books considered in the piece are their author’s first, which serves to highlight the persistent value of UPs in our commitment to young scholars and emerging disciplines. We’ll leave you, then, with a deeper look at one of those first books the piece mentions, Jonathan Levy’s Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America. Levy spoke with us last year for an episode of the HUP podcast, which you can listen to via the player below.

 

Historians as Storytellers

The opening-night plenary of this month’s American Historical Association conference focused, as such sessions often do, on how professional historians can bring their work to a wider audience. Titled “The Public Practice of History in and for a Digital Age” and chaired by AHA President William Cronon, the session featured food writer Michael Pollan, who urged historians to turn to more journalistic storytelling techniques. “Why,” he asked, “do people like me who use your work end up selling more books than you do?”

As reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Mr. Pollan, a journalism professor and author of best sellers like The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, pointed out that works of history often end up on best-seller lists. But much of the time those best sellers are not written by professional historians. And when it comes to important questions about how things came to be the way they are, he said, historians have ceded territory to other disciplines, like behavioral economics and social psychology… Write in a human voice, he encouraged. Embrace storytelling techniques like scene-setting, suspense, and personification. Pose questions of current interest, and answer them. “We need that now as a society more than ever before,” he said. “We live in this fog of presentness. Every politician would have us forget what they said yesterday.”

Now, it’s not as if legions of historians are intentionally denying us page-turners. The structural dictates of academic writing don’t always lend themselves to gripping narrative, and we shouldn’t imagine that what someone like Pollan does isn’t a distinct skill of its own. Even still, says the NYT, Pollan’s challenge struck a chord.

Of course, it’s not just best-selling books that are built on the work of professional historians; Hollywood films, too, can sport lengthy bibliographies full of academic history. Spielberg’s Lincoln, with its attendant debates, is but the most recent example. And, in fact, last week The New Republic’s Timothy Noah offered a list of the books upon which Lincoln screenwriter Tony Kushner says he most relied. Though Noah is oddly skeptical of Kushner’s professed collection, it’s a great bunch of books. Many of them come from university presses, and even a couple from us.

Cronon, whose essay “The Public Practice of History in and for a Digital Age” ran in the January 2012 issue of Perspectives on History, titled his presidential address “Storytelling.” “We need to remember the roots of our discipline,” he said, “and be sure to keep telling stories that matter as much to our students and to the public as they do to ourselves.” You can watch the full address below.

 

UP Week Blog Tour Round-Up

All this week the Association of American University Presses has been marking its 75th anniversary by highlighting the work of university presses and their many contributions to culture, the academy, and society. One really wonderful element of the celebration was the unveiling of “Fine Print*,” an online gallery presenting a single representative work from each of scores of American university presses. Do go have a look.

The week also featured a tour of university press blogs, with each stop along the way drawing out another element of the importance of the work we do. We were lucky to serve as the tour’s trailhead on Monday, when we heard from Anthony Grafton on the role that UPs have—and will keep—in the process of “dazzling and seducing” new generations of thinkers, scholars, and writers.

Below, we’ve collected short excerpts from just a handful of the many other terrific stops on the tour.

Doug Armato, Director of the University of Minnesota Press:

Over the past decades, university presses have sponsored scholarly work in areas that in many cases were discouraged or actively disparaged by university departments themselves—areas such as feminist studies, Chicano Studies, GLBT Studies, emerging areas of inquiry such as work on tourism, sports, and video games. Literary theory as a method flourished on the lists of university presses long before it had more than a toe-hold in language departments, presses focused on African-American history while vestiges of segregation still existed in universities themselves, even areas of science such as human genetics and cognitive science, once both thought of as marginal, were aided by the recognition provided by the presses at Johns Hopkins and MIT. Sometimes accused of rushing to "trendy" areas of scholarship, university presses at their best provide an alternate locus of accreditation for emerging areas of scholarship and scholarly method and, by working across institutional boundaries, help to correct for localized pockets of conservatism. As universities now address their budget crises by combining departments, shuttering interdisciplinary centers, and tightening tenure opportunities, university press imprints will be even more important to innovative and boundary-challenging scholars.

Judith “Jack” Halberstam, Professor of English and Director of The Center for Feminist Research at USC, and many-time Duke University Press author:

If we are living at a time of crisis, and we obviously are, a crisis that has been manufactured by the overwhelming emphasis placed in our culture on money, the economy, work and business, then this is not the time to mount an elite defense of learning, genius and expertise, nor is it a time to emphasize a canon or to dig into idealizations of the book and print culture and excoriations of the screen and digital culture. Instead, our current crisis affords an opportunity to rethink the ways in which all of our forms of cultural media—print, visual and digital—work together and are interdependent. As books go electronic and can be carried around as part of a massive archive on a hand held device, new understandings of the library, of reading and of researching emerge. Now is the time for more not less products, more not fewer ideas, more range, more depth, more clarity and higher degrees of difficulty.

R. Bruce Elder, filmmaker, critic, Ryerson University professor, and Wilfrid Laurier University Press author:

Until recently, reality was understood through the model of the book, which provided a template for understanding government, politics, industry, and the academy as integrated, top-down assemblies of isolatable elements, as managerially hierarchical, conceptually compartmentalized, and stable. The model the new technical system has generated is heterogeneous and mutable institution, where meaning is continually novel, created through the interaction between an individual and the protean institution with which he or she has a fleeting relation. Under this model, standards of scholarship that were once universally endorsed (the notion of objectivity and the concomitant separation of facts and values) are abjured in favour of a more ecological conception of learning. In the midst of this transition, history has dispossessed us of the means for finding our bearings, and the resulting alarm has hardly been helpful.

The Bain Ubiquity

As we welcome fall, we leave behind a summer that’s been the season of Bain. From the ongoing consideration of Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital, to the big-screen-dominance of The Dark Knight Rises and its homophonic and horrifying Bane, there’s been just no hiding.

But while Bain Capital lingers, and Bane the villain mostly gives way, we enter the moment of a Bain far closer to our hearts. That’s Ken Bain, of course, whose 2004 book What the Best College Teachers Do continues to help countless educators prepare themselves each fall. Whether they’re tried and tenured or still all splashy behind the ears, Bain’s book has served as a peerless guide for college teachers who’re dedicated to helping their students get the most of their time together.

And now Bain’s turned his attention to the other side of that classroom relationship. His broadly-conceived (even if narrowly-titled) new book, What the Best College Students Do, is at base a book about creative people and how they became that way:

These creative people went to college and emerged from that experience as dynamic and innovative men and women who changed the world in which they lived. How did their college experiences, particularly their interactions with professors, change their patterns of thinking?

Among the most critical traits found in those whom Bain terms “deep learners” is a willingness to confront failure. An approach to as-yet unmastered material or skills that deems them out of reach leaves people with little room to grow. Deep learners, by contrast, are far more likely to take on topics or tools that they don’t yet grasp than to write them off as things they can’t achieve. This distinction, Bain writes, is one of the most telltale differences between highly successful students and mediocre ones:

(A)verage students think they can tell right away if they are going to be good at something. If they don’t get it immediately, they throw up their hands and say, “I can’t do it.” Their more accomplished classmates have a completely different attitude—and it is largely a matter of attitude rather than ability. They stick with assignments much longer and are reluctant to give it up. “I haven’t learned it yet,” they might say, while others would cry, “I’m not good at” history, music, math, writing, or whatever. Traditional schooling rewards quick answers—the person with the hand up first. But an innovative work of the mind, something that lasts and changes the world, demands slow and steady progress. It requires time and devotion. You can’t tell what you can do until you struggle with something over and over.

Though Bain’s book will help students get As if that’s their goal, he argues strongly that it shouldn’t be. He shows that long-term success and contentment with one’s career depend far more on developing the ability to really learn, which is a skill quite distinct from the ability to ace tests. Becoming a Bain-style deep learner has a far broader applicability to one’s life than learning to make Dean’s list, and, as such, this book and its lessons actually have much to offer even to those well beyond their college years. Yes, you can learn new tricks. And the best trick on offer is learning itself.

Tracking Track Changes

In January, amidst a fairly widespread rush of media interest in the project, we took a look at Matthew Kirschenbaum’s Track Changes, a forthcoming study of how word processing software has affected the act and practice of composition. As we noted at the time, it’s a bit out of the ordinary for us to shine a spotlight on a book coming far enough in the future that we’d not yet even announced it in any of the traditional ways that publishers make things official. But this is a project that’s progressing in a more public manner than we’re accustomed to, at least at HUP.

It’s not as if scholarly projects are typically unknown prior to publication. In most cases, the work they present is the product of years of labor and countless discussions, conference papers, articles, seminars, etc. And it’s also not so out of the ordinary for a forthcoming book to be widely and eagerly anticipated well before we—the publisher—have offered details. Walter Johnson’s forthcoming study of Mississippi Valley slavery in the context of the histories of Atlantic capitalism and U.S. imperialism is likely as anticipated as anything we’ve ever had on the docket, for instance, and that’s despite our having made no public statement on the project thus far.

In the case of Johnson, though, the foreknowledge and early anticipation are largely within the academy. What’s different about Kirschenbaum’s book is the very public nature of the awareness, which, while surely a testament to his topic’s broad appeal, is mostly due to the open manner in which he’s conducting his work. In some respects this, too, is a function of the nature of the project, as when you’re seeking to answer questions about early users of word processing software it helps to have a megaphone making those users aware of your interest. But Kirschenbaum’s unveiled approach to scholarly production is also a hallmark of social-media-age academe, particularly within the digital humanities.

And, on that front, you don’t even need much personal interest in Kirschenbaum’s research project in order to benefit from his progress reports. In his latest, which you can read in full on his website, he contrasts the process of researching and writing his first book, 2008’s Mechanisms, with his approach this time through:

The backend of the [Mechanisms] project, meanwhile, was a mess. I wasn’t using citation management software. I kept drafts in bloated Word files with titles like “chapt 3 notes and fragments” that I would occasionally pick through to make sure I wasn’t overlooking anything worthwhile. I didn’t use an outliner. I didn’t use Zotero or EverNote. Online sources? PDFs sat in folders alongside of HTML scraped from the Web using my browser’s Save As function. Somehow, though, I found my footing along the way and worked through to completing the text as a manuscript (which subsequently underwent review, revision, and copy-editing). At the last minute I sent frantic emails soliciting permissions for images. Luckily my publisher took care of the index.

For this new book, on the other hand:

Everything went into EverNote: PDFs, images, Web clippings, stray URLS, notes to myself, audio files, interview transcripts, email (which EverNote can ingest automatically upon forwarding to a dedicated address)—everything. The great power of the software is, of course, that it is searchable, and so a simple string search on, say, “Asimov” (he has a particularly interesting word processing story) instantly put dozens of entries at my fingertips. I also made sure to keep up with another resource I had begun early on, a spreadsheet documenting information about individual writers and their first computer or word processing systems. For well over one hundred authors I now have data as to when they got their first computer, what it was, and what was the first thing they wrote and published on it (this will go into the book as an appendix). In LibraryThing I created a dedicated tag for trackchanges, allowing me to browse a virtual bookshelf of titles in my collection related to the project, as well as export a catalog (which subsequently went into EverNote). I started to regularly use the #trackchanges tag on Twitter, and also began a Tumblr blog (which I’ve kept up with in fits and spurts—something I wish I could be more diligent about).

The post in which he shares these details takes off from the observation that “nobody teaches you how to write a book,” even in grad school, where the task is usually presumed to be in your future. So in sharing his process and pointing out what he knows this time that he didn’t know the first—and in encouraging others to do the same—Kirschenbaum is offering a resource that could very well help young scholars plan their own projects. And he goes well beyond the nuts and bolts to also detail the freedom to more fully conceptualize an academic book when not racing against a tenure clock.

And, of course, even as he’s working on this literary history of the earliest generations of writing software, he’s producing the kind of documentation likely to be of great interest to whomever tackles a project on their descendants: the Zoteros, Scriveners, and Evernotes that are revolutionizing the way scholarly books are written.

The Jefferson "Lies"

Last week the Christian publishing house Thomas Nelson opted to cease publication and distribution of The Jefferson Lies, by Christian historian David Barton. A Thomas Nelson statement cites a loss of confidence in the accuracy of materials employed by Barton in his attempt to prove that Jefferson was an evangelical Christian whose faith has been systematically written out of American history. But Barton is no stranger to factual inaccuracy, and he’s one of a cadre of evangelical leaders who have challenged secular knowledge and undermined academic consensus on issues from psychology to evolution to climate change to history.

These leaders and their millions-strong community were chronicled by Randall J. Stephens and Karl W. Giberson in The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age, a book we published last year. The following excerpt from The Anointed presents Stephens and Giberson’s account of Barton’s rise from evangelical luminary to nationally recognized and highly controversial figure.

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By the 1990s Barton was the premier Christian historian. He was also leading the assault on the separation of church and state. Though [Peter J.] Marshall and [Francis] Schaeffer sold more books, Barton more than matched them as a tireless lecturer, conservative advocate, and media personality. With a B.A. in religious education from Oral Roberts University, an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Pensacola Christian College, and a winsome Southern charm, Barton rose to prominence out of relative obscurity. In the 1980s he taught and coached at a fundamentalist K–12 school in Aledo, Texas. He later became its principal. WallBuilders, his grassroots organization, now shapes public and private school curricula and educates Americans about the nation’s righteous heritage. WallBuilders is a reference to Israel’s rebuilding of its walls in the Old Testament book of Nehemiah. Just as the wayward Israelites reconstructed the walls of Jerusalem and returned to the faith of their fathers, Barton said, modern believers could rebuild on the foundations of America’s Christian past.

Barton’s message falls on welcome ears, and his close ties to the nation’s conservative political establishment make him well-placed to deliver it. For many years he was cochair of the Texas Republican party, and in 2004 the GOP enlisted him to speak to church groups in Ohio about the upcoming election. Averaging 250 public lectures each year, he has spoken about America’s Christian roots to thousands of children, pastors, politicians, and housewives. Many of his lectures are flawlessly delivered verbatim from memory, and his encyclopedic recall dazzles his audiences. With a perpetually young, boyish face looking out from under a trademark cowboy hat, and sporting an American-flag shirt, the articulate Barton inspires churchgoers around the country.

Despite his amateur status and marginal credentials, Barton has served as an expert witness for Supreme Court cases, spoken to U.S. lawmakers on the divine presence in history, and helped develop public school curricula for several states. In 2005, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist invited Barton to lead a spiritual heritage tour. One hundred senators and their families were promised “a Fresh Perspective on Our Nation’s Capitol” by “a historian noted for his detailed research.” The project made no sense to Senate Minority Leader Dick Durbin. “I would have to ask Sen. Frist why he feels this man has any professional expertise explaining what the U.S. Capitol is all about,” said the skeptical Durbin. Rob Boston of Americans United for Separation of Church and State considered Barton a poor choice for Frist’s tour. Barton “is to American history what the fundamentalist creationist is to science,” claimed Boston.

Others shared that disdain. Barton and his organization wielded too much influence and misinformed Americans, they thought. WallBuilders sold over 100,000 videotapes on America’s Christian heritage by 1994. At $19 apiece, they helped build the organization. A disturbed American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) responded with a video of its own. A Virginia ACLU director lamented that Barton sent “a misleading message, ringing throughout the religious right, that seek[s] to create a state religion.”

In the eyes of his supporters, of course, Barton’s enthusiasm for spreading the good news about the religiosity of the Revolutionary generation was warranted. Public school and college textbooks did, even in the eyes of secular historians, downplay religion or treat it episodically. Rarely was it related to the larger national narrative. Yet in his rush to make his case, Barton consistently stumbled. He employed secondary and tertiary sources to mine key quotes, to take one example. Critics from Americans United for Separation of Church and State dogged Barton for using a dozen unverified quotations. WallBuilders eventually published a list of “Unconfirmed Quotations” on its website and Barton had to revise his publications accordingly. Still, he argued that WallBuilders’ standards for scholarship were actually higher than those of the academy. A James Madison scholar from the University of Richmond could not have disagreed more, upbraiding Barton for using unconfirmed quotes and for misrepresenting evidence. “Barton’s claims have no relationship to truth,” he wrote, “but can be floated easily to support political agendas concerning school prayer.”

Tempting Titles for Stylish Academic Writing

We’re at the point now in our twice-yearly publishing cycle when the editorial types sit down with the othertorial types to work with authors on deciding the most appropriate titles for their forthcoming books. There’s much to consider in each case: What’s the book about? How well known is the topic? Who is the audience for the book? What’s the author’s reputation? What’s his or her writing style? And so on. In the following excerpt from Stylish Academic Writing, which we published this Spring, Helen Sword explains the importance of considering “paratext” and “subtext” in academic titling.

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Like a hat on a head or the front door to a house, the title of an academic article offers a powerful first impression. Is the title dry, technical, straightforward? Most likely, the author’s main goal is to transmit research data as efficiently as possible. Does the title contain opaque disciplinary jargon? Perhaps the author unconsciously hopes to impress us, whether by appealing to a shared expertise (“You and I are members of an exclusive club”) or by reminding us of our ignorance (“If you can’t even understand my title, don’t bother reading any further”). Is the title amusing, intriguing, provocative? Here is an author who is working hard to catch our gaze, engage our interest, and draw us in. In many disciplines, however, such a move goes against the academic grain and even contains a significant element of risk: a “catchy” title might well be regarded by colleagues as frivolous and unscholarly.

Several years ago, I attended a higher education research conference at which a presentation titled “Evaluating the E-learning Guidelines Implementation Project: Formative and Process Evaluations” was offered at the same time as one called “ ‘Throwing a Sheep’ at Marshall McLuhan.” Guess which session drew the bigger audience? “Throwing a sheep” is a method of getting someone’s attention on the popular social-networking Web site Facebook; Marshall McLuhan is the educator and media theorist who famously coined the phrases “global village” and “the medium is the message.” A delegate at a conference on higher education research could thus reasonably surmise that a presentation containing the phrases “throwing a sheep” and “Marshall McLuhan” would explore the role of social-networking Web sites in university teaching and learning. That expectation was confirmed in the conference program, in which a lively abstract spelled out the main argument of the presentation, gave further hints of the author’s penchant for quoting colorful student argot (“pinch, moon, drop kick, spank, poke, b#%*! slap, drunk dial”), and asked a series of questions aimed at the expected audience of educators and educational theorists.

AAUP Statement on the University of Missouri Press

In response to the planned closure and proposed reorganization of the University of Missouri Press, the Association of American University Presses yesterday issued the following statement:

In an op-ed article published in the July 15 edition of the Columbia Daily Tribune (“Fit for Print”), author and Missouri native William Least Heat-Moon has made a serious proposal to ensure the future of the University of Missouri Press. He calls on the President of the University of Missouri System, Timothy Wolfe, to rescind his decision, announced on May 24, to close the Press, and pledges that if he does so, Mr. Heat-Moon will give a “five-figure, initial donation for the establishment of an endowment to continue the Press in its present form.” His essay concludes, “I hope other people disturbed by the shuttering will join me with a contribution appropriate to their means. Mr. President, call me.”

In the article, Mr. Heat-Moon criticizes two proposals apparently being considered by the System administration. Under one, another university press would take over all the publishing activities of the University of Missouri Press except acquisitions in exchange for 85% of the sales revenue; it would return 15% to Missouri. Under the other, the Press would come under the management of the Missouri Review, which is published out of the School of Arts and Science on the Columbia campus, and largely staffed by students.

Whatever the merits of these plans, neither seems likely to inspire a renewed sense of intellectual vigor and grand purpose. What they have in common is the dismantling of an enterprise that has served the University and citizens of Missouri with distinction since 1958—and dismantling it, as Mr. Heat-Moon’s article points out, at the very moment it had achieved the financial goals previously approved by the System administration.

Surely the University and the state deserve better. We applaud Mr. Heat-Moon’s willingness, as the saying goes, to put his money where his mouth is. The Association of American University Presses doesn't have the financial resources to contribute to a fundraising campaign for the Press, but we do have other resources, including a wealth of information and professional experience, that we would be more than happy to contribute. Mr. President, call us.

Later in the day yesterday, the University of Missouri administration announced its plan for integrating the Press into a “campuswide model” dependent on student and faculty labor. The Columbia Daily Tribune reports that a number of authors have moved to pull their work from the Press in response.