"Ronald Reagan vs. the University Press"
From Inside Higher Ed:
... Those of us who work in books tend to see the early years of scholarly publishing as a kind of intellectual utopia. Universities subsidized not only the research and writing of books, but their publication, marketing, and — through library budgets — their purchase. Indeed, the viability of most university press books was largely assured on the basis of their library sales alone. It was an almost perfectly closed economic circle.
This benign socialist cycle functioned more or less unhindered from the creation of university presses around the turn of the 20th century until it was eroded by the flood of federal education dollars loosed by World War II. The influx of wartime cash accelerated the growth of existing fields and sparked the equally swift development of new ones. The cumulative result was the mega-university, with its sprawling campuses, big-budget research projects, and close ties to government agencies and corporate R&D units. Meanwhile, the G.I. Bill fueled enormous increases in student enrollments.
This convergence of forces taxed the capacity of the higher-education system as a whole, and the publication system in particular: Although presses flourished during the 1950s and ‘60s, the effort required to accommodate such rapid growth was quietly taking its toll. The strain of publishing the system’s vastly-increased output was compounded by a variety of wider social stresses: campus integration; anti-war protests; the emergence of new constituencies and consequent calls for curricular relevance. The 1970s piled on rising oil prices, historic rates of inflation, and growing unemployment. By the mid-1970s, the edifice was collapsing under its own weight. The volume of published output had increased beyond the absorptive capacity of publishers’ scholarly readership; while at the same time the market itself was shrinking, the result of severe cuts to university library budgets — historically a significant consumer of academic books.
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And then there was Reagan. With his election to the White House in 1980, Ronald Reagan — who as governor of California had led the charge against his own state university system — ushered in an ideology of tax cuts, reductions to government programs and private-sector gimmes that proved absolutely toxic to public universities. Some of the programmatic cuts came at the federal level: the research budgets of NOAA, NIST and the Department of Energy were slashed during his administration, for example, But these were hardly the main sources of government spending on higher education. The worse damage resulted from Reagan’s “federalist” devolution of spending burdens onto the states, the universities’ primary source of support. Program cuts and tuition increases became the norm — and continue to be so to this day. ...
Read the whole thing here.
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