Press closure

Bucknell University has announced that it will close its university press at the end of this fiscal year. University President Wendy F. Sternberg cited as justification for the decision “the need to focus university resources on our student-centered mission.”

Many teachers hope to be able to reverse the decision, as has happened in a few recent closure announcements. Faculty and other scholars say the press has long been “a part of the value proposition at a student-centered university”. My feelings are conflicted: of course I never want to see a publishing house disappear. However arguments about how essential the press is to the intellectual life of the university have surely got to be exaggerated. Outsiders may think that a university’s press carries some obligation to publish works by that university’s staff — but this is not the case. Every university press competes in the world-wide market for academic books with every other university press, and indeed with every other publisher. If you did guarantee to publish stuff by local teachers, you’d be guaranteeing to publish books over which you’d have no quality control. Every press specializes to some extent: Bucknell’s strengths were in 18th-century studies and Latin American literature.

I have of course no idea why Bucknell University Press’s return on investment is too low for university administrators. Publishing, I keep on insisting, is quite a simple proposition: pick good manuscripts, print the right number, and price high enough to guarantee that you cover your costs — dead easy, eh? Print on demand now provides a royal road to the avoidance of the main route to insolvency, overprinting, and in theory every university could run its own little press — apparently only 3% do. Let us keep fingers crossed for changes and reprieve.

Following closely on the heels of this news comes the revelation by Oxford University Press that they plan to lay off 113 workers. How many people are working there was my first reaction on reading this news! (Apparently 5,000 world-wide!) OUP had enough trouble last year over many fewer redundancies. This round of layoffs affects mainly people in the Education and English Language Teaching divisions. These are currently tough areas for publishers — by coincidence I was writing just yesterday about how college students appear to have stopped buying course books. Maybe Oxford has over recent years been slow to reduce staff gradually as the market has been declining.

An OUP representative stated “Like any organisation, we constantly adapt to changes within our markets. We have proposed some organizational changes which affect a small proportion of our overall workforce.” Constantly may be the wrong word here: this is sudden. Though these reductions in staff seem to be mainly in UK, can we expect a response from the Oxford University Press USA Guild?

Thanks to John Samples for the link to the Bucknell announcement.

Attention, reading, smartphones

This is a leader from The Economist of September 6th, 2025.

Back in the 20th century, bored scholars had to make do with flicking rubber bands at their classmates, doodling in their textbooks or staring out of the window. Modern technology has revolutionised slacking. Most teenagers in the rich world own smartphones. Many are allowed to bring them into classrooms, where each provides a bottomless source of apps designed to be as compelling — and distracting — as possible.

A backlash is under way, as parents and teachers worry about the effects on classroom performance. On August 27th South Korea passed a ban on smartphones in classrooms. Governments from China to Finland, as well as dozens of American states, have introduced bans and restrictions of varying severity. The Economist is queasy about micromanaging the job of head teachers to such a degree — but schools that still welcome smartphones would be wise to think again.

This may seem fusty and technophobic. It is not. Even diehard libertarians agree that children do not always know what is in their own interests. Nor does banishing phones from maths lessons mean depriving children of experience with modern technology. They get plenty of that outside school; gaps can be patched up in dedicated lessons.

Technophiles like to point to a long history of misplaced scepticism about technology and its impact on education. A favourite example is Plato, who complained about the baleful effects of writing on the grounds that storing facts and arguments on scrolls would erode pupils’ ability to remember them. But just because Plato was wrong two thousand years ago does not mean that today’s worries are misguided.

Plato never put his claims to the test — whereas a growing body of research suggests that phones are indeed bad for schoolchildren. A recent study, run by an international team of academics and conducted in India, was a randomised controlled trial, the gold standard. As we report this week, it followed 17,000 higher-education students for three years. It concluded that requiring phones to be left outside classrooms led to a small but measurable improvement in grades. The weakest students benefited most of all.

Admittedly, the evidence is not yet overwhelming. The Indian study found only small gains. Its results contain quirks (they suggest, for instance, that bans lift performance in the first and third years of a degree but not in the second, which is odd). Although its conclusions match those of studies in England and Spain, one in Sweden found that bans had no effect.

Yet most educational interventions have only a small effect on grades. Scientists and researchers can afford to wait for the evidence to improve before issuing a final verdict, but teachers cannot. They must do the best they can for children in their classrooms with whatever evidence is available today.

— — — — —

We are now a few weeks into New York State’s ban on smartphones in school classrooms. Of course lots of other stuff goes on in the world, but thus far we’ve heard little reaction. It doesn’t seem anyone’s too bent out of shape. A brief item on WNYC radio yesterday morning brought ringing endorsement of the cell-phone ban from the few school teachers who responded. They reported that the removal of cell-phones had led to much improved interaction between students, both in class and out. Most vociferous objectors in the build-up were those parents who had worked themselves into a panic over the fact that their children could not call them (or 911) at any moment if they didn’t constantly have their iPhones in their pockets — can’t they remember that they themselves managed to survive this dire condition when they were in school?

I heard the other day of a senior teacher at an English regional university who was going to retire because his students wouldn’t pay attention any more and just turned in papers generated by AI most of them unedited. When I mentioned this to a current student, her reaction was “These old men shouldn’t be teaching us anyway”! Perhaps a bit harsh, but it is of course the teacher’s job to adapt to current conditions and to figure out how best to teach pupils. Teachers are being paid to do this, and the students deserve value for the money they are paying, not just an abdication of responsibility in the face of a difficult new problem. Smartphones exist, and college students have access to them, to AI, and to all the facts that can be looked up in an instant. Facts are no longer something that need be remembered: it’s almost a waste of brain space to fill it with dates of battles, lists of kings, and all those facts, when they can be instantly accessed via that brain-backup harddrive in our pocket. There are no longer many facts that we don’t all “know” almost immediately: an amazing development when you think about it. Educators who worry that their student’s heads, absent “facts”, will just be an empty void are simply being offensively condescending. It’s up to them to figure out how to teach in the modern world: that’s the job. That same student mentioned above is currently doing exams (at the University of Sussex) which allow the students to take books and smartphones into the exam hall, but make them turn in their answers in handwritten form. Invigilators walk around to see that AI’s not being used — but even if it did sneak by, having to write out the answer by hand seems to guarantee that the unthinking acceptance of its output is not very likely. It’s a test of their skills in presentation of facts not of their knowledge of facts. Nobody promised university teachers when they got the job that nothing would ever change, and that they could just coast through life doing over and over again exactly what they had done the year before. If they really find the situation unbearable, then retirement seems like a good idea.

An interesting side effect of all these digital developments is the fact that students are not buying printed books any more — or at least are not buying books for course work any more. (Most of them do seem quite happy to read books for pleasure.) Everything the university student is expected to have read is provided online: no doubt we’ve all decided that this appropriation of content is covered by the fair use exemption to the copyright law. The University of Sussex no longer has a campus bookstore: John Smith’s Bookshop, next to the library, appears to have shut down in 2019.

Pressure on presses

As I’ve written before I am rather skeptical of public funding of the arts. Under this rubric I have to include small publishers. The Bookseller publishes an open letter from twenty three British publishers telling us that they are in dire straits.

They tell us that their problems include inflation, increased production costs, and competition from the big boys which means they feel compelled to offer expensive shipping options.

They write of government funding as if it were a right: “UK independent presses have largely relied on government funding, particularly Arts Council England’s (ACE) National Lottery Project Grants (NLPG) and National Portfolio Organisation (NPO) grant programmes, the latter of which is the only grant programme to offer multi-year core funding. In 2024 and 2025, ACE delayed any new applications for NPO funding, which means that any new grantees won’t receive funding until 2028.” 

Inflation and production costs are irrelevant to the discussion. It matters little precisely how much the cost of printing may have gone up (and of course they exaggerate) — because so too has the retail price people expect to pay for a book. It may not be a smooth slope, so some of these publishers may be half a step behind, but if the price of paper, printing, binding, shipping, wages etc., etc. rises 10%, so amazingly enough will book prices. It was never easy to balance the costs of making books with the receipts available from selling them, but apart from timing, inflation isn’t part of the problem.*

The problem, all too often, is an almost ideological fixation on publishing books in small demand at prices which match those much more salable books. And of course, if you’re going to let ideology get to you, while you’re at it you are probably going to over-design your books. People continue to read books: but by and large they don’t buy them because their format is unusual, because they have an elaborate cover design, because they’re printed in six colors, because the paper they’re printed on is the very best available. They buy them because of what they contain. Fitzcarraldo Editions (perhaps no longer a “small press”) shows the way on this — fiction in a plain blue cover with author and title dropped out to white.

Detail on art subsidization comes by chance from Canada. According to The Walrus “there are now roughly 200,000 people [in Canada], according to government employment surveys, who primarily spend their time making some form of art.” However, they continue “The Canada Council funded only 1,125 major projects last year, so it’s fair to assume that a pretty good number of those people have found some way to do it without cashing government cheques or, anyway, without only cashing government cheques.” I don’t know what a “major project” might be, but it obviously can’t be a starving linocut artist languishing in a garret. I think 200,000 people actively engaged in making art is absolutely wonderful. They must be having such fun. But just as I don’t think the government should subsidize pickle-ball playing or ballroom dancing, I don’t see fun as a condition for which the taxpayer should be expected to pay an individual.

Publishing is a pretty straightforward process. It’s rather easy to get started, and even more so now we have developed a self-publishing business model, but it’s also trade which calls for restraint and self-discipline — as no doubt any business does. If it’s easy to get started, it’s even easier to fail. Printing too many copies is perhaps the simplest way to go bust. Obviously if you overprint to the extent that your payments to printers exceed your receipts from sales, your enterprise will not be long for this world. Just why government should be expected to subsidize small publishers, but not, say, small butchers, is a bit of a mystery to me.

——————————

* Publishers have always been reluctant to raise prices. This is mainly because books intended for sale in bookstores usually have the price printed on the cover or jacket. Correcting this incurs cost, and a price sticker is bad PR, so you keep fingers crossed that you’ll be able to postpone any price increase until you come to reprint the book. Now that more and more books are being printed on-demand, or at least in ultra short runs, the salience of this problem has been reduced. Now there’s almost no excuse for delay.