University presses seek out new roles and new markets

Originally printed July 9, 2012, in the Iowa City Press-Citizen.

After the University of Missouri's recent decision to phase out its university press, there has been a lot of discussion nationally about the future of university presses in today's rapidly evolving marketplace.

To see how the decision in Missouri might affect things closer to home, I called Jim McCoy, the director of the University of Iowa Press.

The following is an edited account of our conversation.

JCC: So, what's to keep what's happening at the University of Missouri Press from happening at UI Press?

JM: The first thing is that we have an incredibly supportive administration who understands that we fill a necessary function. ... We bridge the gap between research and teaching.

We are able to publish the research done at universities, and then the people who want to can turn around and use it for course material.

So, we're an important part of the scholarly eco-system.

And not only does our administration understand that, but we also live in a community that is heavily invested in "the book" and in the humanities.

That's of critical importance to our situation.

JCC: Missouri officials said they weren't getting enough of a return on their investment in the university press. Where does the bulk of the funding for UI Press come from?

JM: I don't know what Missouri's financial situation is, but we have been very good stewards with our money.

We're given a healthy allocation from the university to cover our payroll and benefits, but we generate the rest through sales and commissions. And we work hard to stay within that budget with what we can generate.

JCC: Where does UI Press rank on the university press hierarchy?

JM: In terms of size of staff, we are very small. But we can claim that with our 7½-member staff we are able to print an average of 45 books each year. That's the most per capita for any press. Most presses our size produce about half that amount. And our productivity shows in terms of revenue.
We also get a lot of citations. We are well reviewed in scholarly journals. And we get a good number of course adoptions. So we do well by all standard measures for seeing how our books are gaining hold.

It's also important to remember that there are no other university presses in the state. There are some other publishers — such as Steve Semken of Ice Cube Press — that print books of regional interest and history. But we fill that general interest need as well.

JCC: What new roles/niches do you see university presses filling in the next five years?

JM: We've really done a good job aligning ourselves with the overall mission of the university. We're starting an editorial program with the UI Obermann Center for Advanced Studies. ... We've contracted with Jan Weissmiller of Prairie Lights for a new publishing venture that they are undertaking. And we're pulling on the expertise of Special Collections at University Libraries, which has large holdings of fan material, as we look into starting a series on fan studies — a largely unexplored field of pop-cultural studies.

So, we're working to align ourselves with what the university is doing. And we contribute to the state at large through our regional list.

JCC: And what older roles/niches do you see university presses moving out of during that same time?

JM: Editorially, it usually takes about two or three years to develop a new idea. I've only been here 18 months, so we really haven't moved out of any of the more traditional areas yet.
And that's one of the challenges facing university presses in general.

We can't move out of those older niches. Printed books make up to 95 percent of our revenue.

They are our primary mission still, and they will be for a long period of time. So we have to keep them sustainable.

JCC: How do you find the right ratio between regional trade books and scholarly books in your catalog?

JM: There is a lot of talk about scholarly books supposedly not being able to pay for themselves.

That's simply not true.

Our print runs are very small, and we're able to figure out how to do that in a profitable way. And with digital printing, we are no longer prisoners of the economy of scale. ... We've cut our production costs by a third in the past 18 months.

In the end, we're looking at a 50-50 mix of trade and scholarly books. And that blend seems to work pretty well for us.

JCC: What role has UI Press played in helping the Iowa City area develop as a City of Literature?

JM: Along with University Libraries, UI Press has been one of the early planners for the Iowa City Book Festival. They approached us first, but we worked together to get the ball running.

We also let the world know that Iowa is a center not only for writing but also for book publishing. Our books are sold and taught internationally, and our overseas markets are expanding.

That amount of awareness and good will is hard to come by.

Opinion editor Jeff Charis-Carlson can be contacted a jcharisc@press-citizen.com.

Our View: Watching the evolution of a public university

Printed in the Iowa City Press-Citizen, Feb. 20, 2010.

The negative consequences of an emerging "new normal" for public universities became uncomfortably clear a few weeks ago after some unofficial recommendations of the University of Iowa Task Force on Graduate Education leaked out. The task force -- one of six strategic initiatives task forces -- has evaluated more than 100 graduate programs on campus and rated them excellent, strong, good or weak. The baker's dozen of programs initially labeled "weak" often included a recommendation to close down or to merge. But after some pushback from the program faculty and alumni, the language was changed to "additional evaluation required."

The task force's recommendations cut to the heart of how Research 1 public universities have balanced research, teaching and service for at least a generation. UI faculty members justify their salary by focusing on the production of cutting-edge research -- making new discoveries, writing books and organizing centers and institutes that become go-to places for national media and public officials looking to talk to "experts."

To keep churning out that high-level research, the university has depended on attracting well-qualified graduate students to serve as research assistants, teaching assistants (to help those faculty members who teach large, lecture hall classes) or general instructors (to teach their own undergraduate classes under the supervision of one of those faculty members).

For faculty, programs and departments that are able to attract large grants and other external funding -- primarily in the hard sciences -- this research-teaching-service model is still working fairly well. For faculty, programs and departments that depend on state allocations and other internal funding -- primarily in the humanities -- the model is wholly unsustainable in the present economic environment.

That's why it's not surprising that many of the threatened graduate programs are in the humanities. Although generations of scholarship have rewarded more and more narrow specialization in these fields, the graduate programs' very survival now depends on figuring out how to attract more undergraduate butts in seats.

On top of that, many state legislators -- the people who decide how much state funding UI receives -- don't seem to care about how well qualified graduate assistants are. They want to see high-salaried UI professors themselves in the classroom teaching the next generation of Iowans (and Chicagolanders).

The faculty and administrators of the threatened programs say that the task force members seem to be missing a key point: That cutting back on graduate programs will cut back on the quality of the graduate students and faculty attracted to a department, which then will cut back on the quality of the undergraduate program.

But the task force is responding to a larger trend in which public universities nationwide, in order to justify their public role, are de-emphasizing the importance of their graduate programs and changing the research-teaching-service model into a teaching-service-research model.

It's unclear what the final recommendations, released Monday, of the Task Force on Graduate Education will lead to. After all, that task force's recommendations will have to be added to the recommendations of the other five task forces, and then UI officials will have the challenge of coming up with a new model for how all those different components work together.

No one yet knows that that new model will look like or how it will function. But today's Press-Citizen begins a three-part series -- "Is this the new UI?" -- exploring the options for the public university of the present and future.

Our View - Taking time off from teaching to focus on research

Printed in the Iowa City Press-Citizen, Dec. 18, 2009

Our View - Taking time off from teaching to focus on research

The Iowa state Board of Regents is considering whether approving 111 faculty "sabbaticals" would send the wrong message at a time when:

• Other state employees face layoffs and mandatory unpaid time off and

• Students will be charged extra next semester to offset budget cuts.

The regents agreed to let board president David Miles make the final call after more scrutiny, and Miles expects to make a decision this month.

We can understand why some people are worried about these "sabbaticals." After all, enrollment is remaining steady at the three universities while hiring has slowed on the campuses. That means that fewer professors and teaching assistants are around to share the same teaching burden.

But we're not sure whether these "sabbaticals" are being singled out as a budgetary rallying cry because critics misunderstand the practice or because critics are willfully misrepresenting it to hurt the university's image at a time of budget crunch.

In truth, we shouldn't even be using the word "sabbatical" at all when discussing the 111 requests from professors at Iowa's three regents universities (56 from UI). After all, the word "sabbatical" usually conjures up images of some kind of imaginary job perk in which stuffy professors get to take every seventh year off to read books and to play around before they have to come back to cushy teaching jobs.

And even if there ever was once a time when Iowa professors enjoyed such automatic time off, that practice has long been out of use. Because professors at public universities will be lucky if they can hang on to tenure for another generation, the idea of regular leisurely sabbaticals is a mere fantasy.

These 111 professors aren't asking for a chance to get out of doing their work altogether; they are asking for a temporary reprieve from their teaching responsibilities -- and in some cases their service responsibilities -- so that they can focus on their research responsibilities. They're asking for the time necessary to improve their grant applications, to make big discoveries, to write books and even to re-immerse themselves in the language and cultures that they are teaching about back in Iowa.

The regents universities don't even call these requests "sabbaticals" any more. They are "professional development assignments" or "career development awards."

This year, because of the budget crisis, the deans and provosts at UI, Iowa State University and the University of Northern Iowa are under internal and external pressure to ensure that none of these requests are going to be embarrassing. Each university long ago implemented plans for evaluating professors' proposals and then for documenting afterward how well the professors delivered on everything they promised to do. (UNI goes as far as to avoid all replacement costs by ensuring that all teaching responsibilities either are covered by other faculty or the classes are left untaught.)

We think it's fine for Miles to go through the proposals and to weed out any that might come across as less important (or comprehensible) when read by state legislators and their non-academic constituents. But we agree with the university that deferring all of these research requests would be damaging to the professors' research careers and, eventually, to the quality of research and teaching offered at our public institutions.

Our View - When do layoffs start to count as layoffs?

Printed in the Iowa City Press-Citizen, Dec. 6, 2009

Our View - When do layoffs start to count as layoffs?

If we didn't know that the statement simply wasn't true, we would've been ecstatic to hear University of Iowa President Sally Mason tell a group of students Wednesday that UI has been able to weather the massive state budget cuts without any layoffs.

"To date, we haven't had to lay off anyone," the UI president said, after explaining how the flood of 2008 helped prepare the university to weather the budget storms of 2009.

But we know UI announced last month that it was closing the medical instrument shop in the Carver College of Medicine and that eight employees in the shop received layoff notices. And the same day that Mason was participating in the student forum, the Press-Citizen was working on a story about how the university was laying off 11 people in its College of Pharmacy manufacturing department, UI Pharmaceuticals.

That's why Mason later had to clarify her statement and explain that whenever UI officials say there have been "no layoffs," they're actually talking about how there have been no layoffs directly connected to the state budget cuts. The state budget supports the general education fund, or the academic component of UI. The pharmaceutical department and the instrument shop, on the other hand, are in self-funded units. Therefore, even though there are layoffs in those areas, they're not the kind of "layoffs" that can stop UI officials from saying that no one has been laid off.

UI spokesman Tom Moore said that the pharmacy college layoffs weren't due directly to the state budget cuts but to a "decline in the demand for their service caused by the general economic climate." Yet the pharmacy layoffs still need to be approved by the Iowa state Board of Regents. (And, as of Thursday, it was unclear when the regents would consider it.)

When asked if there will be more layoffs, Moore responded, "UI leaders continue to work very hard to preserve jobs to the greatest extent possible. Additional layoffs could be possible."

UI officials said in the spring that they expected layoffs, but an influx of $35.5 million in federal stimulus funds staved off job cuts. In June, faced with a $10.8 million shortfall, Mason said a worse-case scenario was 130 layoffs that could be announced in December or January. However, because of better-than-expected results from cost cutting measures, Mason said in October that there would be few -- up to 20 -- if any layoffs. University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, which has a separate budget, laid off about 150 workers in June, according to human resources data.

We certainly hope that university administrators and regents can figure how to avoid losing any more employees -- who administrators in the past have called their "most precious" assets. And we commend UI officials for their relatively successful efforts to keep that number as low as possible.

But there is a thin line between decisions directly and indirectly affected by the state budget cuts and the current economic climate. And UI officials do themselves no favors by seeming to discount (or under-count) the jobs that have been lost throughout the university this year.

Our View - UI Center for Human Rights looking for funds

Printed in the Iowa City Press-Citizen, Dec. 5, 2009

Our View - UI Center for Human Rights looking for funds

Last month, the University of Iowa Center for Human Rights celebrated its 10th anniversary with a series of lectures, films, panel discussions and performances. But the celebration was made somewhat bittersweet when University of Iowa officials announced the center will lose most of its funding -- including all the money for its small staff -- at the end of the fiscal year on June 30, 2010.

The announcement basically means that the center wouldn't be able to fully celebrate an 11th anniversary unless it raises its $110,301 budget -- which covers salaries of three non-faculty staff members, or 1.75 full-time equivalent positions -- from other sources. And it wouldn't get to see a 15th or 20th anniversary unless it secures either a large enough endowment (about $2 million) or finds sufficient additional streams of independent revenue.

Happily, since the announcement of the budget cuts, center officials say they have raised more than $57,000 in donations for next year's budget. The center also recently received a $50,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice for continuing its work with immigration rights. And center officials are finalizing plans for developing a Human Rights Certificate Program through the UI Division of Continuing Education -- a program that would include Web-based courses that could provide the center with an independent stream of revenue.

Gregory Hamot, a College of Education professor and the center's director, said he is optimistic about the center's short-term and long-term prospects.

"I wouldn't invest the time in it if I didn't think there were people in our community and our university that want to see it continue," Hamot said. "I am committed to maintaining the center."

We would hate to see the center have to cut back on the work it has done to coordinate a human rights focus throughout UI and other universities. Throughout its 10-year history, the center has earned an impressive national reputation. An earlier Justice Department grant help the center establish itself as a leader in child labor scholarship and advocacy. And in the past few years, it has begun to build a similar reputation in immigration rights.

And the center's influence has been felt throughout the university and the surrounding community. There are human rights-focused classes being offered in departments across the campus. Some of that convergence has been the direct result of organized efforts by the center's staff and affiliated faculty. But much of it has been the indirect result of the many classes, conferences and community connections that the center has helped to bring about.

But we also understand that, during a period of state budget cuts, the university needs programs and academic endeavors like the Center for Human Rights to become self-sufficient. Some of the current plans have been in the works for years, but the untimely death of UI History Professor and Center Director Ken Cmiel in 2006 -- and the succession of short-term directors trying to fill in -- delayed their implementation.

That's why we hope the recent donations and long-term plans show UI administrators that there is a spark of life in this center, one worth keeping alive until more independent funding comes in the next few years.

And we praise the center staff for deciding not to waste time on trying to press UI administrators to change their minds about the funding cut and for deciding instead to begin an aggressive campaign to go after its own funding.

We wish them luck.

Printed in the Iowa City Press-Citizen, Nov. 13, 2009

Our View - Starting to grow Iowa's Ciudad de al Literatura

Iowa City has well earned its prominent role in the history of American literature. And the city also has served well as a special gathering point where writers from around the globe can inspire one another as they learn more about America in the classrooms and coffeehouses of one over-educated, Midwestern college town.

But Iowa City also has begun to establish itself as a prominent location in la historia de la literatura estadounidense. Alongside the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the International Writing Program, a growing number of Spanish-speaking writers and poets have been coming to town and staying for much longer than a three-month residency.

Whether they are here to teach, to study -- or even for some non-academic purpose -- writers like Ana Merino, Santiago Vaquera-Vasquez and Roberto Ampuero are putting down roots in the community and are helping to establish Iowa City as a more dual-lingual City of Literature.

Local residents can experience a small sampling of this movement at 6 p.m. today when the professors and students in the University of Iowa undergraduate Spanish creative writing classes read from their work at Prairie Lights Books. The classes have been taken and taught by ex-patriots from Spain and Latin America, by American citizens who learned Spanish as their mother tongue as well as by Anglophones who are interested in a more personal and less academic relationship with the language.

"They say the best way to learn a language is to fall in love," said Merino, a UI associate professor of Spanish who moved to Iowa City just a few months ago. "Creative writing is like falling in love. It's a way to develop your skills for the emotional side of the language."

It's not surprising that the work produced by the students is a mezcla of the already fertile mixing of Spanish and English -- moving back and forth from Spanglish, to Espanglés, to more formally precise literary Castilian, to the modismos spoken in Chile, the U.S./Mexican borderlands and other places throughout the Spanish-speaking world.

Tonight's reading also is being advertised as an event "to celebrate the development of a future MFA in Spanish Creative Writing." But given the recent budget crisis in the state, the usually long process of a establishing a new graduate-level program has become even longer. It probably will be quite a while before Hispanophones come to Iowa specifically to earn an MFA in Spanish-language fiction, poetry or nonfiction. But the writers and scholars who are creating the groundswell support for such a program say they aren't going anywhere any time soon.

Instead, they'll be working hard to enhance their small but growing part of our very international -- and yet very Iowan -- Ciudad de la Literatura.

Our View - Focus on Iowans while attracting other students

Printed in the Iowa City Press-Citizen, Sept. 23, 2009

Our View - Focus on Iowans while attracting other students

"Have you seen the size of that recreation center that they are building on the river?" said Tom Mortenson when we asked him if he really thought the University of Iowa was the "Gated Community" described in the title of the talk he will give at noon today in the Jones Commons of the UI Lindquist Center.

"I think that shows they've moved up to country club status," he said.

Mortenson, a scholar with The Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, said he is using those phrases as "pejorative and critical terms" that he hopes will catch the attention of UI officials and get them to "think about what they are doing."

Specifically, Mortenson is worried at how only little more than half of the freshmen at Iowa are in-state students. That means nearly half of the class are coming to the school from outside the state. That means, he said, the university is spending more and more of its time focusing on how to make Iowa an attractive "destination university" for out-of-state students whose middle-class or wealthy families are willing to pay Iowa's out-of-state tuition rates.

That means, Mortenson goes on, that the university is spending more time appealing to the leisure-driven mindset of these relatively well-to-do, out-of-state students and not enough time focusing on the low-income Iowa students who are looking to their state universities to provide them with opportunities for social mobility.

And Mortenson said his data shows students from wealthier families spend less time studying and more time in sports and leisure activities than do students from low-income families.

"The lower income students have more of a 'you better study your butt off' attitude," he said.

Mortenson also said the trend is likely to continue because, as Iowa lawmakers cut back in the state support of the university, UI officials have a responsibility to look for ways to make up for that lost revenue.

"If you extrapolate the trends," Mortenson said, "you have to ask when we are going to change the name of the university to the University of Illinois at Iowa City."

And it's not enough for the university to improve its relationship with community colleges. Mortenson places a high value on the students having that experience moving away from home to attend school.

"It's an emergence into the culture of learning," Mortenson said.

Even when we pointed out that those years are likewise an "emergence into the culture of drinking," Mortenson said that university's current focus on improving student's leisure activities isn't helping the drinking situation either. If anything, Iowa City's downtown becoming "one big bar" is only serving to attract students who are more interested in a college lifestyle than a college education.

To counter this trend, Mortenson said he wants to see Iowa's public universities double or triple the number of students from low-income families who qualify for need-based Pell Grants.

"If they don't, they are not doing anything to broaden the educational opportunities for Iowans," Mortenson said. "Instead, they are only continuing to serve students from inherent privilege."

Mortenson described himself as "flaky" and a "dinosaur," but we think the issues he raises need to be part of the discussion about the future of higher education in Iowa.

"Even if he's wrong, it will spark good conversation," said David Bills, associate dean of the UI College of Education. "We need to be thinking about these things."

Our View - UI balancing accessibility, preparedness

Printed in the Iowa City Press-Citizen, Sept. 13, 2009.

We're not quite sure what to make of the news that University of Iowa freshmen are among the least likely to return for a second year of university education. But it's definitely not a statistic anyone should be proud of.

According to a recent survey from U.S. News and World Report, UI has an average annual freshman retention rate of 83.5 percent, which ranks last in the Big Ten. Northwestern University, in contrast, ranks highest in the Big Ten with a 96.8 percent freshman retention rate. And even Iowa State University ranked slightly ahead of UI with an 84.8 freshman retention rate.

Ernest Pascarella, a professor in the UI College of Education, reminds us that retention numbers can be misleading -- especially when you compare a public university such as UI with universities that have far more exclusive admission standards.

"What is the preparedness of students you admit has nothing to do with what they do afterwards. It has nothing to do with quality of education," said Pascarella, who studies undergraduate education, including retention rates. "UI has a state legislature that says you folks have to take certain people. We are there to serve the people of Iowa, and I don't think that should change just to move up in U.S. News and World Report."

But the measures by which UI is made accessible have changed in recent years. The Iowa state Board of Regents used to make a promise that any Iowa student who graduates in the top half of his or her graduating high school class would be admitted automatically to the state's universities. A few years ago that simple formula was expanded into an index that would take into account a student's grade-point average, class rank, ACT composite score and the number of core subjects taken.

The change was supposed to better assess whether a student was properly prepared for the rigors of an academic environment. (Potential students can input their information into the "Regent Admission Index Calculator" at http://www2.state.ia.us/regents/RAI/index.html.)

At the same time, the University of Iowa began a more direct partnership with community colleges. The goal was to ensure that students who were not quite ready for a four-year university environment -- or those who just couldn't afford four years of tuition at the university's rate -- could take classes at community college that would readily transfer toward a four-year degree.

And then, while helping to ensure that some of Iowa's lesser prepared K-12 graduates could get up to speed in a community college environment, state and university leaders were talking passionately about transforming UI into a destination university -- one that attracts lots of out-of-state students and additional tuition dollars they pay.

So, that leaves us wondering which group makes up the bulk of the freshmen who fail to return for a second year at UI:

• The under-prepared Iowa students who should have been tracked to community colleges in the first place (a situation that reflects badly on Iowa's K-12 systems)?

• Or the out-of-state students who either couldn't get into or couldn't afford their own state universities (a situation that makes us wonder about what type of "destination university" UI has become)?

We're proud of the state's commitment to keeping its public universities accessible both financially and academically to all Iowans. And we agree with Pascarella that such a standard shouldn't be changed just to "just to move up in U.S. News and World Report."

But the low retention numbers suggest that many of the programs that are supposed to be assessing and assisting potential students are not working as effectively as they should be.

UI tops Yale for number of best dissertations in the country

What does Press-Citizen Poetic License contributor Mike Chasar have in common with Jessica Horst, Susan Behrends Frank, Matthew Anderson, David Lasocki?

They are all winners of the University of Iowa’s best dissertation award — the D.C. Spriestersbach Dissertation Prize — who have gone on to win the nation’s top dissertation prize: the Council of Graduate Studies/UMI Distinguished Dissertation Award.

That means, for each of the years that they’ve graduated, each one has written the best dissertation in the nation in one of four broad fields — biological sciences; social sciences; mathematics, physical sciences and engineering; and humanities and fine arts.

When Chasar won last year — for his English dissertation, “Everyday Reading : U.S. Poetry and Popular Culture, 1880-1945” — he helped UI tie with Yale University as the school with the most Distinguished Dissertation Awards received in the entire country. Each school had received four awards.

This year, Jessica Horst — who won for her pediatric psychology dissertation, “Turning novel names into known names” — brought UI’s total to five and helped the university clinch one of the most difficult and most underappreciated titles in academia.

Frank won in 1997 with an Art History dissertation on collaborations between Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel. Anderson won in 1993 with a Physiology dissertation on the “Function and Regulation of the Cystic Fibrosis Transmembrane Conductance Regulator.” And Lasocki won in 1984 with a Music dissertations that focused on “Professional Recorder Players in England, 1540-1740.”

In the past decade, UI also has had many finalists for the national dissertation prize — including Angela Hess, Anatomy and Cell Biology (2003); Michael Tavel Clarke, English (2003); Nathan William Brixius, Computer Science (2002); Christopher Otrok, Economics, (2000); Daryl A. Scott, Genetics (1999); Eric Griffin, English (1999); and Razvan Gelca, Mathematics (1998).