13 ms·

Universities have disinvested from their presses just as much as their libraries

• echelon 3y ago
  They need to disinvest from new buildings, "lifestyle" dorms, expensive gyms and amenities, and sports programs (except for schools well-regarded for this). Tuition inflation is absurd. The goal is to grow learners, not set them back.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • Racing0461 3y ago
    nah, we just need the government to not back student loans and allow it to be discharged in bankruptcy. the system will sort it out from there.
    • JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > we just need the government to not back student loans and allow it to be discharged in bankruptcy Honestly, start with the latter. See what happens. Maybe include a first-loss provision for schools with an endowment.
    • silenced_trope 3y ago
      This is what really gets me about loan forgiveness. I'd be in favor if it was only for people who pursue certain degrees that we need. But going to party schools? Going for the cliche "underwater basket weaving" degree? The money being funneled into building a new pool and rock climbing wall for one of the dorms? No, no, and no!
    • julienb_sea 3y ago
      How is this going to solve anything? Unless the school itself has skin in the loan, currently the only impact of bankruptcy discharge would be on private loan operators (who would probably go under) or on taxpayers who would absorb the loan losses. The schools are getting paid their tuition from the loans immediately, they won't even notice.
      • morsch 3y ago
        Presumably the idea is that guaranteed student debt is what enables US tuition levels. The schools will already have been paid, but the next generation of students won't be able to get loans for tens of thousands of dollars -- the lenders will have gone under and nobody else will want to be in that business, so universities will have to lower prices. I think that's the idea. It sounds rather painful to me? But the status quo is also very weird?
      • Racing0461 3y ago
        > taxpayers who would absorb the loan losses that's no different than what we have no. we don't need everyone going to college especially to major in history of tampons type degrees. the end goal is for loan companies to decline people who won't be able to repay their loans given the expected value of their degrees. (Your future earning potential is the collatoral for your loan). For people that want to "expand their horizons", they can go watch khanacademy on youtube.
        • imchillyb 3y ago
          Your mentality is why so much of the world is set back centuries from the USA. That's the old Brit way of thinking, and we sent that packing over a century ago. I'd thank you to not return us to the 'good old days.'
    • rqtwteye 3y ago
      Be careful. You may end up with universities where only millionaires take classes. The universities would like this because of money and the millionaires would like it because the proles would keep out of well paid careers. We would be back to how education and science worked a few hundred years ago. As in health care I don’t think there is a market solution. Government needs to mandate lower prices for them.
      • cvccvroomvroom 3y ago
        Demographics vary by institution. Some shakedown the poor by packing 600 students to a lecture hall. The Stanford's get unlimited free laundry. Government isn't going to get involved here because most are private, for-profit masquerading as nonprofits while fattening up their endowments.
        • rqtwteye 3y ago
          If they are for-profit, at a minimum they should lose any special tax status.
  • throwing_away 3y ago
    > The goal is to grow, not set back. If you're a university, the goal is to fill up your university with satisfied customers and increase revenue. If you're a student, the goal is to form social networks that you can later use to help in business. If you're a politician, the goal is to increase college attendance rates. If you're a hard-line right winger, the goal is actually to set undesirable groups back, but that's a pretty fringe position. If you just want to learn and grow, you should avoid the university system entirely.
    • whatshisface 3y ago
      I went to school to learn what they were teaching in class and I did actually learn it.
    • EatingWithForks 3y ago
      > If you just want to learn and grow, you should avoid the university system entirely. I disagree with this. The university system is really good for exposure, assuming that people who are attending the system actually take advantage of the exposure. e.g. I was able to take dedicated lessons in multiple languages, artistic mediums, theories in various fields, by experts in each field. Many of these experts were presenting their work for free outside of lessons, and often times provided free food and drink to boot! Also, because my institution was larger, we often had scholars travel here to present their various works and even little get-togethers where multiple scholars from multiple fields collaborated and presented work. For free! With free food and drink! I can't get a single dedicated language instructor for my life nowadays, it's bullshit apps or stuff oriented towards children only. Same if I wanted to learn the basics of, say, a performance art, or painting. The best system I have nowadays for learning is mostly hacker spaces and maker spaces, but they're specialized in what they can teach me and don't often have the kind of dedicated experts "office hours" or anything like that.
      • bombcar 3y ago
        You may find it worthwhile to reach out to local community colleges, because once you're "in the group" you can find people doing various things, and they're often not advertising, but will be willing to take a bit of cash on the side.
  • manuelabeledo 3y ago
    > ... and sports programs (except for schools well-regarded for this) Those shouldn't be called "universities", then.
    • trgn 3y ago
      A healthy mind in a healthy body. We should all aspire to it. It's a beautiful thing, to have institutions nurture both athletes and scholars.
      • whyenot 3y ago
        Maybe it's a "beautiful thing" for some sports, but for contact sports like football, it doesn't lead to a "healthy mind." Instead, it leads to brain damage. CTEs didn't go away just because we stopped talking about them.
      • wolverine876 3y ago
        Your comment seems sarcastic, but the athletes aren't getting much of the beautiful mind part, few students get the athletic experience, and the institutions are nuturing their TV revenue. Good intramural sports would serve far more students.
        • trgn 3y ago
          I wasn't sarcastic! point taken though, maybe the choice of sports does not fit the ideal.
  • Georgelemental 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • EatingWithForks 3y ago
      I don't know if grievance studies is a cause of tuition bloat. Most of the departments I know to be labeled as grievance studies were founded well before tuition increased, so it makes not much sense to attribute them to increased tuition. The increase in tuition hews much more closely with the decrease in government funding to these institutions, which requires more tuition from students, which means students desires must be catered to... so increased lifestyle luxuries makes sense there...
      • Clubber 3y ago
        When I went to college in the 90s, the gave us a breakdown of tuition costs. Half the cost was crap the student government wanted.
        • BeetleB 3y ago
          That's because tuition was cheap in the 90's.
      • whatshisface 3y ago
        It might be naive but I imagine training students to make improvements to weapons systems increases government support of universities and training students to criticize the government decreases it.
        • EatingWithForks 3y ago
          Like I said, the founding of such studies predates the increases in tuition. Trying to argue that specific academic studies causes tuition increases by making students mistrustful of government, but only several decades later, needs a lot of evidence for that kind of claim. There are far more direct, closely related situations, like the federal and state governments decreasing funding or the inverted proportion of funds coming from govt/grants vs student-paid tuition via the loan system.
  • deleted 3y ago
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  • AmericanOP 3y ago
    Parents can't afford to send kids to summer camp so they can save for college which is four years of summer camp.
  • wolverine876 3y ago
    Like many other things now, from healthcare to midtown Manhattan, it's by the wealthy, for the wealthy, of the wealthy. The wealthy want beautiful new buildings and a good football team, and a high-touch experience for their kids. They are happy to pay administrators lots of money to deliver on those things.
    • cvccvroomvroom 3y ago
      That's not how a university works.
      • wolverine876 3y ago
        Would you elaborate?
  • cvccvroomvroom 3y ago
    Most universities are on the death march to rebuild Versailles for athletes and whoever else. They can't even bother to build something beautiful like a gothic church with all that ill-got blood money. Instead, it's a construction competition to teardown and replace buildings like bathroom decor.
• sheepshear 3y ago
  I don't think it's fair to say they've disinvested from libraries. Most of the information is digitized, which has better reach. Books that cannot be digitized yet due to copyright are held in storage until they enter public domain, and you can request chapter scans in the meantime or even check out the physical book. Separate special collections are kept for items whose physical existence is significant. Libraries are being repurposed as study spaces, which campuses otherwise tend to lack. Reference librarians are available online with extended hours. The overall trend seems positive. Similar arguments about presses. Mixed media is the future. Some schools invest in various learning platforms and knowledge hubs, sometimes collaboratively. A building doesn't facilitate such variety very well.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • ahi 3y ago
    University expenditures on libraries have been stagnant at best for decades. This includes those "various learning platforms and knowledge hubs." The digitization of collections and repurposing of facilities is driven by cost cutting as well as hampered by it. Archival storage is not cheap (the conditions for special collections drive many librarians to drink) and renovating century old stacks into usable people space requires capital expenditures few libraries can scrape together. At the same time, Elsevier et al take larger and larger bites out of the budget for those digitized collections. The failure to invest in University presses will only exacerbate this in the long term. Attempts to provide an alternative to the for-profit parasites, e.g. open access platforms, wallow in grant funded misery with budgets considered laughable in the private sector.
    • sheepshear 3y ago
      Let's take nanohub.org as an example. It's funded by an NSF grant and everyone can access it for free. A university doesn't need to make any expenditures for their students to benefit from it. Researchers choose to publish in Elsevier's journals, not for lack of a university press.
  • 3y ago
• darth_avocado 3y ago
  It is so strange that donors and alumni can put pressure on schools to fire coaching staff in athletics programs to make schools perform better. Yet when it comes to the administrative bloat and waste alumni don’t hold their schools to the same standard. Like academic degradation is something no one cares about.
  • godzillabrennus 3y ago
    Athletic programs can make serious money for a school
    • fragmede 3y ago
      Serious, directly measurable money for the school. If I graduate with a degree and that degree gets me a career that goes exceedingly well and I become a 10 or 100-millionaire, and donate money for a lab to the university, that's not exactly trackable to that one really good professor. Meanwhile, the coach who won the big game is well known.
      • solardev 3y ago
        This is so silly. We make our educators beholden to businesspeople who run sporting arenas so we can still charge our kids tens of thousands of dollars to spend 4+ years of their life on something that has maybe a 50% chance of paying itself back over time. Meanwhile other countries just fund public education and subsidize tuition. shrug
        • Ylpertnodi 3y ago
          Sadly, several persons in non-US countries are rubbing their hands with jealousy, thinking about the US system. To some, it's a thing to be admired.
          • fragmede 3y ago
            We see that across the world; countries gutting governmental services which enriches their cronys and ultimately hurts the users of the service. The NHS, programs for addicts in Portugal, I'm sure there are others.
• Pannoniae 3y ago
  Do I understand this correctly? Since universities pay through their nose for journal and publisher subscriptions, they don't have money to actually publish books themselves. Is that right?
  • operatingthetan 3y ago
    Seems like universities have enough power that they could jailbreak themselves from this situation, right?
    • ahi 3y ago
      It's a massive coordination problem. Few universities have the resources, even if central admin had a clue. Even UC Berkeley's fight with Elsevier was a huge undertaking: https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/03/16/ucs-deal-with-elsevier-what-it-took-what-it-means-why-it-matters https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/03/16/ucs-deal-with-elsevier-... For most, that means collaborating with others. UC system and B1G academic alliance are making moves, but it's herding cats. Even within universities, it's a nightmare of competing interests. How do you convince your faculty to publish through your own press or consortium instead of the higher impact factor journal owned by Elsevier?
      • robertlagrant 3y ago
        This sounds like an incredibly easy problem to solve if some people felt like solving it. I imagine that it's some administrators near the top that would block anyone from saying "let's have no-one publish to Elsevier any more" because John from Elsevier takes them on such lovely days out in bespoke locations, staying in boutique hotels.
        • andrewxdiamond 3y ago
          > This sounds like an incredibly easy problem to solve if some people felt like solving it If you ignore the hardest part of the problem; getting everyone to agree and coordinate, then yes it’s a simple problem to solve! You can simplify any problem like this, just ignore the hard part! :D
• specialist 3y ago
  The production of scholarship is table stakes for any org claiming to be a university.
  • bell-cot 3y ago
    In modern America... `sed 's/production of scholarship is table stakes/production of passably-competitive NCAA football and basketball teams is table stakes/'`
• cultofmetatron 3y ago
  Libraries need to change. most people go to the library to use the computers. what if we expanded the role of libraries to be places for autodidacts to learn and practice new skills? imagine a library full of maker equipment. 3d printers, sewing supplies, wood/metal working equipment. the modest government investment would be paid back 10 fold in the amount of innovation an individual would be able to accoplish.
  • trgn 3y ago
    That's already the model for a lot of libraries. They are all "learnings commons" now. Sometimes there are "maker spaces" or whatever attached to it, for tool use. They can be next to each other but don't have to me (who wants to study next to a table saw anyway) I think libraries are adjusting fine to accommodate these needs. Really, the most important building in any educational institution is still the library, even in 2023. What libraries fail (start failing (?)) at is their archival responsibilities. And apparently, from the article, their publishing responsibilities too.
  • SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
    I'm fairly certain that our local library has a 3d printer. They are definitely trying to take on different ways for people to learn and gather information, but wood/metal working equipment seems like it would be a liability nightmare.
  • fnordpiglet 3y ago
    I think libraries function well in their original purpose. When I visit the library the computers are mostly empty and there are lot of people there - reading and browsing books. I think the death of the book is overhyped by people with a vested interest in technology. (Disclaimer: I have a vested interest in technology)
  • jkaptur 3y ago
    My local library is already exactly this. It's great, but they get no credit for it.
  • i_am_jl 3y ago
• gamepsys 3y ago
  I just went through my bookshelf. While there were many authors that were professors, there were few books published by a university press. Are university presses a professors' first choice when it comes to publishing?
  • allturtles 3y ago
    University presses have less reach than a popular press, but the flip side of that is that they are willing to publish works only of interest to an academic audience. If you want to reach a wide audience, then, no, you don't want to publish in a university press. However if you want to publish a detailed study on a niche subject, no popular press will want to touch that. That's what the university presses are for. e.g., here's a title I came across at Princeton University Press, "A Velvet Empire: French Informal Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century." Just based on the title, there's no way some place like Penguin Random House is going to even look at that manuscript. The same author may approach different publishers depending on their intended audience. e.g. Daron Acemoglu published "Introduction to Modern Economic Growth" with Princeton but "Why Nations Fail" with Crown (a division of Penguin RandomHouse).
    • dendrite9 3y ago
      Another example of a niche collection of books from a university is Duke press' Latin America collection. Someone recommended looking there for information on a question that came up in a discussion, I had no idea it existed as an outsider. https://read.dukeupress.edu/latin-american-studies https://read.dukeupress.edu/latin-american-studies
  • beepbooptheory 3y ago
    Well, if you go to grad school in humanities, or otherwise have more professional academic pursuits, you slowly end up submitting your home bookshelf to a huge takeover of very plain spines with small font.
  • Telemakhos 3y ago
    It really depends on the field. On my shelf, things are pretty much just Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Harvard University Press, Princeton University Press, Routledge or De Gruyters. Oxford is very prestigious in the field of these books, and a professor seeking to publish a book would likely prefer Oxford.
• slyall 3y ago
  A press can be one way for a smaller University to have an outsized impact. For example I read books about Spaceflight and the University of Nebraska Press has a great series called "Outward Odyssey: A People's History of Spaceflight" which I have read many of: https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/series/outward-odyssey-a-peoples-history-of-spaceflight/?amount=100 https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/series/outward-odyssey-a-p... If you look here they have many other series on all sorts of topics: https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/series/ https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/series/ I also often end up read books by other University presses.
• I_am_uncreative 3y ago
  I'm a PhD Candidate and was very disappointed to find out that my university no longer does printed copies of dissertations. I really wish they did.
  • robotresearcher 3y ago
    You can get it printed and bound yourself for your bookshelf, plus one for your mom and one for your advisor if they are interested. At my grad school we had to arrange that ourselves using the prescribed service, and deliver the finished books to the university. I don't recall it being super expensive.
    • whatshisface 3y ago
      I wonder if we'll live to a time when you have to go to Staples for your diploma...
  • tkgally 3y ago
    Do they put the dissertations online? At the university where I teach, all dissertations are posted as PDFs to a permanent public repository hosted by the university library. (Authors can choose to delay that posting for a few years if they plan to publish the thesis.) Paper copies of theses are still put in the library as well, with the cost of printing and binding borne the authors.
    • I_am_uncreative 3y ago
      They do! But paper copies do not exist. You can have a paper copy of your dissertation printed, but it is unofficial.
      • tkgally 3y ago
        That's too bad. While I said that our online archive is "permanent," digital preservation can be fragile, as we all know. Additional archival in physical form would increase the chance that the knowledge you and other thesis writers are creating will remain for future generations.
• j45 3y ago
  I wonder how much this is related to incoming revenue changes from books or publications of their own.
• onecommentman 3y ago
  As a point of calibration, a hot melt perfect binding machine for books up to 500 pages, up to 180 books/hour, is around $7000. You know the print cost for laser copies. The “print” aspect, incremental cost and logistics, for a book is pretty modest for any niche interest publications. Speaking here of functional performance of the published content, and not the fetish/status side of the physical book. My local university press is a hit-and-miss affair. Some books have been real classics, some books have been laughably bad. The university press probably ranks low in institutional power pecking order and so have evolved to operate as little more than a vanity press for certain academic departments. The writing and editing of content proves to be only as good as the academic department pushing its publication. And that is often wanting. In my interest area of local history, my local university press, which should by rights be the top quality publisher, is all over the map in quality, while out-of-state university press books on our local history are uniformly excellent.
  • WillAdams 3y ago
    Or, rather than perfect binding, stitch it --- there's probably someone local who does bookbinding, and it's far better than glue.
  • flerovium 3y ago
    What is the ongoing cost of the price of ink?
• dieselgate 3y ago
  TIL the difference between "divest" and "disinvest". When seeing the title I didn't think "disinvest" was a "real word" and ironically it is red squiggly underlined on my screen after typing (maybe "dis-invest" is more proper?). Had only ever heard of universities divesting from {x} Regardless: > The difference between disinvestment and divestment is nominal and appears to be one of scale. Disinvestment, meaning the sale of shares, can happen in small lots at any time to raise funds without losing control of the asset. Divestment or divestiture, on the other hand, usually refers to the sale of controlling shares. [1] [1]: https://www.ansarada.com/mergers-acquisitions/divestiture https://www.ansarada.com/mergers-acquisitions/divestiture