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Academic

: The Faculty Lounge

RIP HUP Display Room

By Alfred Brophy

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My friend (and co-editor) Sally Hadden gave me a report from the ground last week that Harvard University Press has closed its display room. Amidst all the dire news in publishing this is perhaps not shocking -- though I did find it surprising and distressing. Here's HUP's statement about the move, apparently motivated by increasing rents and decreasing revenues.

Here we see the combination of the crisis in publishing and the crisis in higher education--both of which Judge Posner's wrote about this weekend. He says, "The current crisis ... will not do in the colleges and universities, but it may have a lingering adverse effect on them that may explain and justify immediate measures to reduce expenditures." I wish I had his confidence that it won't do us in -- and I believe it's more than likely going to have a lingering effect. Part of what we're going to see (increased teaching loads, decreased percentage of faculty in tenure or tenure-track positions) has been coming for a while; the recession is just speeding that up, I suspect.

As I've said before, I think this that HUP editor Lindsay Water's apt call for a return to slow writing will likely come about -- but for economic reasons, rather than the intellectual ones that Waters points to. Tough times for university presses are further signals that the age of slow writing is descending upon us. (Tough times for presses -- and also what I'm sure will be rising teaching requirements. The squeeze will come in two directions.)

Time was when I'd walk into Harvard Square, book up a book from the press room's remaindered and damaged books alcove and take it to lunch with me. Never knew what kind of great finds there'd be. Add another tombstone for a cultural icon -- and chisel out on the tombstone, died of the recession.

The illustration is the jacket of Max Hall's 1986 history of HUP.

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on July 20, 2009 (boomark / email).