We are pleased to have former IU Press intern Nico
Perrino blogging for us as part of the University Press Week blog tour! The
tour continues today at Fordham
University Press. A complete blog tour schedule is also available here.
A theater without a stage, a
manufacturing plant without loading docks, a restaurant without take-out
counters or tables: What good are some of our favorite businesses or
institutions without a mechanism for their sharing their products or creations
with us?
Two years ago I had the
pleasure of interning with Indiana University Press. I had just finished my
junior year of college and prior to my time as an intern, I did not know much
about the Press or university presses in general.
College students are
accustomed to sitting in class, listening to their professors discuss the world’s
greatest works of literature, science’s most amazing discoveries, and history’s
most controversial figures and events. What students like myself fail(ed) to
realize is that our professors’ insights into science, literature, and history don’t
occur in a vacuum: They are typically the result of their debating some of our
world’s most significant questions with other scholars, usually within the
numerous journals and books published by university presses every year.
There are over 130
university presses that belong to the Association of American University Presses. Just as actors need a stage to put on a performance
and a factory needs a loading dock to send customers their widgets, scholars
and researchers need these university presses to disseminate their
research to students, politicians, and other scholars and scientists who depend
on their work to innovate and push the endless quest for knowledge forward.
In this way, university
presses are integral to the university’s role as society’s “sophistication
machine.” Without university presses, scholars would lose a crucial means to
communicate with each other, hampering the marketplace of ideas and confining
their knowledge and insights to only those scholars they already know and
communicate with and the students within their classrooms.
The idea that universities
must have a way to deliver the knowledge their faculties create to others
outside their respective institutions is not new. Daniel Coit Gilman, founder
of Johns Hopkins University Press, America’s oldest continually running press, said, "It is one of the noblest duties of a
university to advance knowledge, and to diffuse it not merely among those who
can attend the daily lectures—but far and wide."
Unlike larger presses,
university presses typically serve a mission, not a bottom line. Although still
a consideration, the amount of money a book or journal article can generate is
usually not as important in determining its worthiness of publication as the
contribution the work might make to its field of study.
Indiana University Press’s stated goal
is to “serve the world of scholarship and culture.” For Stanford
University Press it is to “serve the
needs of the scholarly community and society as a whole by disseminating new
knowledge of all types.” And for Northwestern University Press, it is much the same: “to promote the finest works
of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.”
To me, the crucial missions university
presses pursue really hit home when I was conducting research on 20th-century
economic thought for my senior history thesis. Nobel Laureate F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom is one of the most
important books on politics and economics of the past 100 years. By 2007, the
book had sold 350,000 copies and has sold many more since, as it found itself atop
Amazon’s best-seller list just recently in 2010. The book is an essential read
in the grand continuing discussion about the relationship between government
and the individual.
But it almost never came
into existence.
In the early 1940s Hayek and
his associates shopped the book around to many of the bigger, for-profit
presses like Macmillan, Little Brown, and Harper and Brothers (now HarperCollins)
with no success.
The presses cited many of
the reasons big presses usually cite when they explain why they will not accept
a scholarly work. Macmillan said they were “doubtful of the sale which [they]
could secure for it” and Little Brown thought it “too difficult for the general
reader.” But when the manuscript was sent to some economists at the University
of Chicago, they recommended to their university press that they take a look.
When the University of
Chicago Press’s editor asked one university economist what he thought of the
book, he responded, writing, “Hayek's book may start in this country a more
scholarly kind of debate.”
And from appearances, that
was all it took to convince the editor that the Press needed to publish the
book. Hayek received his acceptance letter at the end of 1943 and the book was
published in 1944.
Of course Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom is not the only
important book a university press has published that was turned down by larger
presses. There have been countless others, including undoubtedly many longer-form
encyclopedias and anthologies that are not super profitable but nevertheless
very important to scholars and students.
But through examining the
origins of The Road to Serfdom, the
important role university presses play in contributing to intellectual debate
and discussion, and to the progress of our society and world, is revealed. As
the economist at the University of Chicago wrote, they contribute to “a more
scholarly kind of debate”—something we are always in need of more, not less of.
Nico Perrino was a summer intern at IU Press in 2011. He graduated from IU in 2012 and currently works for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education in Philadelphia, PA.
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