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Budget deficit sends UW press director packing
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by Michael Gendall
Monday, August 8, 2005
The University of Wisconsin Press is searching for a new director after Robert Mandel resigned from the position in May 2005 amid a period of financial strain.
Mandel, who said he was “heavily recruited” when he took over as director in Oct. 2000, cited the state deficit and subsequent budget cuts for his inability to mold the UW Press into one of the top 20 university presses in the nation, his stated goal.
“No one could have foreseen the state deficit,” Mandel said. “We moved into an era that did not support my vision for the university press. That really was the reason I decided to leave. I really didn’t want to be a caretaker [director].”
Mandel said during his tenure the UW Press increased from about 55 books published annually to a high of 119.
“When I got there, the press was losing money every single year in its history,” Mandel said. “My analysis was that they were not generating enough revenue from their books, so my goal was to increase the number of titles to generate [revenue].”
But following stress in state finances and Mandel’s resignation, UW Graduate School Dean Martin Cadwallader said the UW Press is now preparing to move back in the other direction of production.
“The idea is to scale back again and produce fewer books,” Cadwallader said.
But even decreasing the amount of books produced annually will not completely remedy the financial problems facing UW Press, Cadwallader noted.
Mandel agreed simply decreasing publication from numbers such as “119 to 70” is not the key solution. He added this policy will only maintain a “low visibility” and will not alleviate all financial stress.
UW Press is not alone in its struggles. Ohio State University Press Director Malcolm Litchfield said the OSU Press ran up a very large deficit in the early 1990s to the point where Ohio State considered closing the press down. He said he has hope for the UW Press to become profitable again.
“We’ve survived with less support than what Wisconsin’s press has had,” Litchfield said, adding the financial difficulties at the UW Press are a product of “conventional management.”
“This is fairly common,” Litchfield said, noting there needs to be a change in the way academic publishing is run.
While the OSU Press publishes approximately 30 books a year, less than what UW Press generally publishes, Litchfield stressed there is no “ideal number” for university presses, only a general policy of matching the number of books published to the amount of resources.
“The reason why Wisconsin got into trouble was because it spent more than it was [generating] in revenue,” Litchfield said. “It’s just that simple. While it’s true you need to spend money to make money, you can go overboard and spend too much. It’s just as simple as they spent more than they had.”
Currently, UW has not set timetable for naming a new director, and Interim Director Susan Cook will only carry the position through August.
