As the director of Southern Illinois University Press and a member of the Morris Library Advisory Affairs Committee, I appreciate the coverage the Daily Egyptian has given to the current shortfall in the library monograph budget.

The financial difficulties facing Morris Library continue to be played out in hundreds of university and research libraries all over this country as rapidly escalating subscription costs for science and technology journals, many from large commercial European publishers like Elsevier Science, combine with shrinking budgets across higher education to dramatically reduce the number of scholarly books in the humanities and social sciences that can be purchased by these institutions.

Because university presses such as SIU Press typically publish most scholarly monographs, we and our colleagues at the hundred scholarly publishers, who are members of the Association of American University Presses, have seen our sales revenues drop precipitously as the library market for our books has been decimated.

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While the crisis in university libraries and scholarly publishing has been developing for well over a decade, the very real and very negative implications it has for the tenure and promotion system utilized by virtually every American university have become apparent only in the past few years.

While scientists typically communicate the results of their scholarship through journal and electronic publication, the standard for acceptable publication in the humanities has, for half a century, been the scholarly monograph – the specialized book that is aimed at a relatively small audience of scholars and libraries.

Some of the most important books ever published have never earned back the cost of their publication because that cost includes not only manufacturing expenses but the rigorous system of peer review and close editing that has always separated scholarly from commercial publishing.

Because of this standardized, widely accepted system of scholarly peer review, universities have used books selected for publication by legitimate university presses as playing a vital role in determining which assistant professors are tenured and promoted and which associate professors are promoted to full. Indeed, the current American system of tenure and promotion for scholars in the humanities and social sciences is significantly based in the publication of monographs by university presses.

Unfortunately, the scholarly books that used to anchor a professor’s tenure and promotion dossier are fast becoming an endangered species, and the system whereby young professors work their way up through the ranks of academe is beginning to break down. The reason for this situation is painfully illustrated by Morris Library, whose budget to purchase these kinds of books has been reduced by half in the past year. In turn, the university presses that publish important books for libraries like Morris are no longer accepting these kinds of specialized books for publication and are forced to make decisions based not only on how important a manuscript might be but on how many copies it will sell.

At the bottom level, thousands of tenure-track assistant professors in English, history, anthropology and a dozen other disciplines are seeing the manuscripts they submitted to university presses rejected because their primary market – university libraries – no longer purchase them, making them financially unfeasible to publish.

There are suggestions to change tenure publication requirements in the humanities and social sciences to a model more closely resembling those in science and technology, with an emphasis on publication of articles in refereed journals. This new standard may well come to pass within the next decade, but long-established procedures and protocols in the world of the academy never change quickly. In the meantime, the current generation of scholars is caught in a double bind, writing books that can’t be published by underfunded university presses because underfunded university libraries can’t afford to purchase them. This crisis won’t be resolved until university administrations, boards of trustees and regents and state legislatures come to realize universities must be funded adequately to fulfill their critical role in society.

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As P.T. Barnum observed many years ago:”When people expect to get something for nothing, they are sure to be cheated.”

director, Southern Illinois University Press