In 2008, some graduate students at the University of Minnesota organized a small conference on campus called, “Rethinking the University: Labor, Knowledge, Value.” Part of that conference was a roundtable on “The University and the Public Intellectual,” and somehow I got invited to be a part of the group on the podium for that session. What’s below is the text of my contribution that day . . .

. . . with a quick side note here. The textbook review policy that I ranted about that day eventually fizzled away without much long-term impact. I’d like to think my words had something to do with that, but the crowd in the room that day wasn’t that big, nor (as far as I know) did it include anyone who had the power to change such policies. Lots of administrative efforts to produce metrics and policies that create “accountability” for instructors wither away like that, and I have long suspected that this is actually part of the plan. A consistent set of policies, after all, makes it possible for faculty, staff, and students to settle into comfortable, predictable, manageable routines and to have a clear sense of how the system works. An ever-changing set of policies and initiatives and reviews, on the other hand, keeps everyone below a certain paygrade busy trying to figure out the new conditions of their workplace. And while all that superfluous labor obviously gets in the way of us doing the jobs we were actually hired to do, it also serves as a kind of disruptive friction that gets in the way of us organizing effectively.

I’m afraid that I have a gloomy story to tell, one that matches our gloomy “spring” weather” . . . but then one doesn’t generally need to “rethink” an institution when the skies around it are clear and the forecast for its future is sunny and bright.

What I want to talk about today may, at first glance, seem like an odd topic for this particular panel, as it’s a bit of a shift from the “public intellectual” frame. If you bear with me, though, it will hopefully become apparent how my chosen topic serves as a useful object for helping us rethink at least one form of the “inside/outside” cleavage. What I want to talk about today are textbooks.

A few months ago, the Office of Guaranteed Customer Satisfaction here at the U. [some of us heretical types still call it by its former name, “the Provost’s Office”] sent lengthy, detailed memos to departments that offered courses where the total cost of required textbooks had “substantially outpaced the overall average increase” for the U. over a three-year span. These memos strongly encouraged instructors to adhere to a (helpfully provided) list of “best practices” for textbook selection (it was only a coincidence, I’m sure, that most of these would boost the campus bookstore’s profits), and they required departments to submit written explanations for why the offending courses were so “expensive” — along with a plan for how the department would avoid future repetitions of this grave economic injustice. While the memo paid lip service to the quaint notion that instructors might consider criteria other than “sticker price” when selecting course texts, the underlying message was clear: departments that did not want to fall out of favor with the administration (a significant threat at a time when the administration is playing hide-and-seek games with scarce resources) would be wise to toe the party line, keep the “customers” happy, and use cheaper textbooks.

To be fair, the rising cost of textbooks is a legitimate concern for many students, especially in a climate where ever more of them are paying for their own education, where tuition is also rising, and where student loans are far less helpful than they once were when it comes to helping make ends meet. Nonetheless, the U.’s imagined “solution” to this very real problem is astonishingly short-sighted. Besides privileging the price of a book over its actual intellectual or pedagogical value, it ignores the simple fact that instructors have no power to set book prices. Because it identifies “problem” courses based on percentage increases in textbook costs, the U.’s policy overlooks courses where text prices are excessively high but stable. And a system that requires strict adherence to an average benchmark will, if effective, simply produce consistent and uniform price increases, without necessarily doing anything to save students money. Thinking more broadly, however, the real shortsightedness of this attempt to satisfy our “customers” involves the U.’s failure to look outside (at the dramatic economic shifts that have taken place in academic publishing since the 1980s) and its failure to look inside (at the crucial role that university administrations across the country played in precipitating those shifts).

From the outside, there are a number of complicated, interlocking reasons why textbook prices have risen in recent years, and many of these can’t reasonably be blamed on the machinations of clueless university administrations or greedy publishing houses. The price of paper has gone up. Production costs have gone up. Distribution costs have gone up. And so it’s not exactly surprising that book prices have gone up — for academic and non-academic publishers alike. Such are the glories (or so we’re told) of the free market, especially in a struggling economy.

One of the principal reasons why the price of scholarly books has gone up dramatically has been the increased corporatization and commercialization of academic publishing. I don’t want to romanticize some mythical golden era of the university press as a noble enterprise dedicated to the purity of thought and unsullied by the grubbiness of commerce. But it is worth remembering that university presses were not always expected to be profit-generating businesses: that many universities were happy (or at least willing) to harbor presses that operated at a loss for years on end, under the belief that an active press — even those that were small and marginal — conferred a valuable form of cultural capital to its parent institution.

All this began to change in earnest in the 1980s, partially because of the visible success of a handful of commercial scholarly presses (such as Routledge and Sage), but largely because of the accelerated reconfiguration of The University to fit a more corporate model. At a time when every unit on campus was suddenly under intense pressure to become more “efficient” (read: to generate enough revenue to pay for its continued existence), university presses were particularly vulnerable to the budget-cutting axe. Presses that survived (and not all of them did so) had to dramatically reconfigure their old business models in order to stay in the game.

Significantly, that old business model was largely propped up by university libraries. Scholarly presses could generally afford to sell paperback editions of their books on a razor-thin profit margin (or even at a loss) because they knew they could subsidize those shortfalls with the higher profits generated by guaranteed sales of hardback editions to university libraries. Libraries, however, are not exactly robust profit-generating enterprises, and so they were early to the chopping block when universities began trimming the “fat” from their budgets in the name of efficiency. The systematic defunding of university libraries is, of course, a crisis (or three) worthy of a discussion of its own. For my purposes here, however, this defunding has produced two major shifts in the world of academic publishing. Perhaps most obviously, it drove the cost of scholarly books up, since presses could no longer rely on the institutional largess of university library purchases to cover the shortfalls generated by retail sales.

More subtly, though, the defunding of university libraries forced academic publishers (both university presses and their commercial counterparts) to invent new ways of generating steady, reliable revenue streams. Put simply, the current economic climate has produced the very inversion of priorities within academic publishing that the Provost’s office here at the U. wants to produce by policing instructors’ textbook choices. Scholarly presses can simply no longer afford to vet potential new manuscripts solely on the basis of their intellectual merits: they must now also assess whether a would-be addition to their catalog will be profitable — with “profitability” largely assessed using a simple, cruel formula: will the book be widely adopted as an undergraduate textbook in the US market? If the answer to this question is No, a publisher might still find other reasons to offer a contract to an author. Maybe. But, as various acquisitions editors I’ve talked with in recent years have lamented, the “US undergraduate” litmus test is all too regrettably becoming the “common sense” rule for most English-language academic presses.

In this institutional and economic climate, the textbook boom makes perfect sense: when most (if not quite all) of the books we write are expected to function as required reading for sophomores, it seems inevitable that volumes explicitly tailored to serve that market will be published in greater quantity. Ultimately, what disturbs me most about this trend is not so much that people write (or that publishers commission) introductory textbooks: rather, my discomfort arises from the “one-size-fits-all” impact that the textbook imperative is having on academic publishing as a whole — and the ripple effect that this has on aspects of The University’s mission that those of us gathered here today presumably want to protect. If academic presses merely needed to land two or three “blockbuster” textbooks every year to subsidize the less profitable, but more intellectually adventurous, books that comprised the bulk of their catalogs, I would probably feel less concerned about the recent proliferation of textbooks. Sadly, however, the “textbook test” is being applied up and down the line . . .

. . . which, perhaps obviously, places severe limits on the range and type of scholarship that can be published . . . but that, in turn, has a potentially stifling effect on the future of The University as a site for the production of new knowledge. The problem is magnified by the ever increasing professional pressures on young scholars. In the US, at least, the increasingly corporatized nature of higher education has meant that — in the name of “efficiency” — doctoral students are pressured to finish their degrees in as little as 3-4 years. The seemingly ever-worsening academic job market has meant that all these rapidly minted Ph.D.s are expected to have extensive publication records simply to get interviews. The increasingly rigorous requirements for tenure and promotion — even at institutions that ostensibly emphasize teaching over research — have meant that those Ph.D.s lucky enough to land jobs must immediately transform their dissertations into publishable books. And now, it seems, those publishable books have to simultaneously function as the sort of polished research projects that will impress tenure committees and succeed as profitable textbooks for undergraduates across the US.

This combination of institutional pressures — inside and outside The University — does not add up to a rosy scenario for the future. I fear that the pressures to produce more and more undergraduate-friendly manuscripts — and to do so at an accelerated pace — will ultimately push an entire generation (or two) of scholars in the direction of “safe” research topics that already fit neatly into well-established undergraduate curricula.

I would dearly love to conclude by offering a neat and workable set of strategies that we might use to address the pessimistic scenario I’ve outlined. But, alas, I have no such answers at hand. Though I’m a firm believer in the well-worn Gramscian imperative that we must have “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” my optimism currently rests on nothing more than the hope that we can (and will) eventually find a path out of the current crisis. But what that path actually is, I don’t currently know. Sorry.