Lose One for the Gipper

I share the author’s concern about the current state of the university press, but what’s with the Reagan bashing? Ronald Reagan is currently our most overrated former president, having replaced John F. Kennedy sometime in the late 1990s, and history will no doubt be unkind to his current legion of worshippers (if there were a stock market on future reputations, I’d sell my Reagan shares and buy Gorbachev). Still, whatever his faults, and he had many, I don’t think he had a lot to do with the decline of the U-press.

The tax revolt of the late 1970s occurred between the years of Governor Reagan and President Reagan, and Ronnie was only a bit player in its early stages. His record in California was a great deal more moderate than his rhetoric, and while he was given to McCarthyite ranting about radical students and professors, he kept the state’s universities reasonably well funded. His one attempt at hard-core tax reduction—a ballot initiative in 1973—went down in flames.

So if you want to blame someone for the current state of the university press, I’d recommend Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, whose lies and corruption fostered a cynicism about government that would eventually be cultivated and exploited by self-interested economic elites and naive libertarians. Reagan, as president, was much more the beneficiary of this movement than he was its leader. And the real damage was done at the state, rather than the federal, level.

Unapologetically Tenured, at 7:40 am EDT on September 14, 2007

The Status of Presses in the Face of Long Tail Presses

James,

Although your lead sentence has the veneer of substance, I appreciate your passionate candor on this matter and your call for institutional initiatives. Projecting blame on Reagan or any President is unfortunate given the merit of much of the rest of your argument, and actually runs contrary to what you share. You note the flooding of dollars as both causal (after WWII) and now necessary for survival. While working for the late Robert Van Kampen, progenitor of the Van Kampen trademark, he told me that his frustration with educators is the predictable quagmire on business-related decisions. He told me “I can make ten decisions before you educators can make one, and then you don’t know if it’s correct.” Your notion of the presses static through the 1980s, and clutching to past practices, seems to be the fulcrum of the problem facing the sustaining of peer-reviewed material, not a political ideology. Upon reading this piece I was reminded of your earlier comments to Scott’s July 31 article, “New Model for University Presses” (http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/07/31/ricepress). You write, “Which brings us back to the point: university presses will become more innovative when one of two things happen: either 1) presses wean themselves from their historic reliance on their host institutions; or 2) universities become more imaginative in administering their presses. The latter option, perhaps slightly more likely than the former, requires that administrators free up venture capital. . . “ In a sense, you’re now faulting trustees—most of whom are rather successful business men and women, for trying to explore the first option. Also, this is the same thing that nearly every major funder (e.g., The Lilly Endowment and the Lumina Foundation for Education) ask of recipients – to have a sustainability plan. These are great folks passionate about the educational enterprise. Your current article suggests that this sustainability notion is unfair—and that the very inherent value of publishing is reason enough for its place in the general budget. Also, having worked with many venture capitalists—including in the publishing field—“freeing up venture capital” seems to defy sensible financing options. As you note—the risks are great, major collaborations are forming elsewhere, and colleges’ primary “business” is not the publishing business (a glaring concern here). While I agree with much of what you write, I find a logical disconnect between your desires and reality, i.e., institutions doling out funds. There also seems to be a disregard for Andersen’s Long Tail and “long-tail presses” when you note the unlikely profitability of digital publications (on-demand is part of this Jukebox phenomenon; Amazon sure has figured this out to the tune of billions). Budgets aren’t returning to the “utopia” era, regardless of any political transitions. I’m headed to speak at NACADA where many educators from Florida’s leading institutions had to withdraw due to budget cuts statewide. I spoke to the Texas A & M faculty (Commerce) on the topic of grant-funded research because of this same crisis between peer-review requirements and funds to get there from zero. I am painfully aware of pains of publishing, with three books at academic presses and two at McGraw-Hill—also highly invested in the review process. In the light of Mortensen and others clamoring for the inherent goodness and “rightness” of switching funds to under-represented students (which has a lot of merit), where will universities without large endowments get such revenue? More presses will likely follow the excellent lead of Rice, and others the collaborative spirit of Stanford/Rice. As we saw recently with the New York Times efforts, there is money to be made, and like you suggest, it takes considerable creativity—the very thing that your articulated Reagan was trying to force upon our academy. You note that “presses” provide an “irreplaceable service to society.” If you substitute “presses” with “the dissemination of peer-reviewed material,” I’d agree. When I spoke on your campus last year at the P-16 workshop several graduate students present remained excited about their research. There was little alarm that tenure would escape them someday because of a lack of publishing outlets, and like the session itself, the web provided a forum (though Bugeja’s advice needs heeded, “The Publishing Pipeline”). I think the U.S. still has an intellectual utopia when looking globally—in fact, your very article in the brilliant online InsideHigherEd venue reflects such a state. I sincerely have appreciated your insights in the past and currently, and am hopeful for the continuation of a sustained peer-review process.JP

Jerry Pattengale, AVP for Scholarship and grants at Indiana Wesleyan University, at 10:43 am EDT on September 14, 2007

There is no such thing as “benign socialism.” Presidents notwithstanding, publishing, academic and otherwise, is subject to the same market forces that every other enterprise endures. Everything has its costs, whether they be reckoned in dollars or oppportunities. It seems to me, as an author published both by university presses and a trade house, that the key is to figure out where the balance should be, not simply pine for mythical palmy days of limitless resources in higher education.

Victor Stater, Professor of History at Louisiana State University, at 10:35 am EDT on September 14, 2007

question

Mr. Reische:

In the interest of transparency, are you affiliated with PRISM (http://www.prismcoalition.org/)? Was your piece requested by, written with, vetted by or sponsored in any way by PRISM or a PRISM affiliate?

Gary Holden

Gary Holden, at 10:35 am EDT on September 14, 2007

Clarification

My message above is ambiguous, or at least requires close reading.

So, let me clear: James Reische was editor at the UMich Press at the time of my “experience.”

However, his behavior was exemplary. He played it entirely straight, and fought for the book. It was turned down for what I see as purely ideological reasons at a higher level.

So, my criticism is of his argument, not of his behavior. As far as I know, Mr. Reische has NEVER imposed his own views (whatever they are; I don’t even know!) on any author or decision process.

This cannot be said of the boards, or outside reviewers selected strategically by those boards.

Michael Munger, Chair, Poli Sci at Duke University, at 11:25 am EDT on September 14, 2007

The Problems of Presses

Speaking as the current president of the Association of American University Presses, I first want to applaud James Reische for his well-informed survey of the recent history of university press publishing. While we may not all agree with his analysis of exactly what the problems are or his prescriptions for resolving them, he certainly has painted a picture that touches on many of the major developments affecting scholarly publishing (and not just that done by university presses) in the past half-century. I would hope that many faculty read this piece and inform themselves better about what has been happening with the business on which their own livelihoods (to the extent that many either have to “publish or perish") depend. Having frequently participated in panels on publishing at scholarly conventions, most recently (in the past two weeks) at the conferences of political scientists and Latin Americanists, I am always disappointed that so few people attending these sessions are senior scholars and that so much of the discussion is oriented to telling graduate students or very junior faculty about how to go about getting their revised dissertations published. The larger issues affecting the system are hardly ever addressed or discussed in any detail. But faculty need to know what is going on because, ultimately, it is their pressure on administrations that will lead to the best solutions to the problems we all face together.

Mr. Reische certainly is right to identify undercapitalization and unrealistic expectations of commercial performance as two major problems that have prevented presses from moving more quickly toward sound long-term solutions. And he rightly points to the difficulties that face efforts at internal cross-subsidization because presses risk losing lots of money by trying to compete effectively in the trade marketplace. Only the largest presses have any reasonable chance of competing for books by the top nonfiction writers, and given the increasing scarcity of review space in major media for serious books and the business practices of chain superstores that result often in more returns than sales, even the largest presses are challenged to succeed in this arena. The lack of venture capital he notes is important because presses do not have the resources to innovate in the way that giant commercial publishers like Elsevier do, yet administrators chafe at the prices their libraries have to pay such publishers for books and especially journals in science, technology, and medicine. If they had invested properly in their presses in the immediate post-WWII period when commercial publishers like Pergamon led by the enterprising Robert Maxwell entered this sector, they might not now be saddled with the problems from the outsourcing of academic publishing in the STM arena they are now deploring.

But there are other dimensions of the problem that Mr. Reische does not address, which are equally important. One of these on which I have frequently written is the dysfunctionality that results from lack of coordination within universities. A good example is the plight of the revised dissertation at present. Librarians “rationally” do not want to buy books based on dissertations because many of them already subscribe to the ProQuest database of dissertations, so this type of book does not sell as well as other monographic works; press editors, aware of this pattern of sales, are reluctant to publish many revised dissertations and thus “rationally” do not invite submissions of as many as they once did; yet promotion-and-tenure committees “rationally” continue to insist on one book for tenure and often a second in progress, which junior faculty are hard pressed to accomplish without having the first book based on their dissertation. Each sector is making its own decision “rationally,” yet together they constitute an irrational system as a whole. This is only one of many such examples that exist in universities, with corresponding effects on how presses operate and manage to survive.

One way in which some universities are attempting to meet these challenges and achieve economies is to bring their presses, libraries, and computer centers into more cooperative relationships. Penn State, I am proud to say, has been a leader in this effort, and two years ago the press officially became an administrative unit of the library (which works closely with the computer division) and the two jointly created an Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing. The library, wishing to engage in more publishing of its own, benefits from the press’s expertise in editing, design, marketing, and order-fulfillment; the press gains from having access to more IT support,the library’s close relationship with the faculty, and its staff’s capabilities in metadata creation, archiving, and preservation. The synergies result in greater efficiencies and lower costs than either could achieve separately. Similar relationships have been developing elsewhere, at California and Michigan perhaps most notably. Such cooperative ventures are applauded in the Ithaka report as one way to advance beyond our current difficulties. They also involve various experiments in “open access” publishing, which put to the test the ambitions to operate presses in the interest of the public good and to a degree free them from overdependence on the market economy.

As for Reagan’s role in all this, I will only note that it was during Reagan’s administration that the NEH’s program of publication subventions on which many presses like ours had relied to help publish many worthy projects that could not succeed on sales alone was abolished. Subsidies for monographs in the humanities remain scarce, and this was a major loss for publishing in this arena.

Professor Munger’s complaint about the “political correctness” of presses, I would suggest, reflects his own personal experience rather than any systematic bias across the industry. As an editor at both Princeton and Penn State, I have myself published books spanning the political spectrum from conservative and libertarian to social democratic and Marxist. As long as the arguments are cogent and the scholarship sound, I think most editors (being Millians at heart who believe that truth best emerges from the competition of ideas in unfettered discourse) are happy to publish books representing many different points of view.

Sandy Thatcher, Director at Penn State Press, at 12:20 pm EDT on September 14, 2007

Sandy, POD does involve printing and distribution costs, but why should the university be involved? The printing and binding of books is not a place where an academic institution adds any sort of unique value. If a reader wants a physical copy, they can send the electronic manuscript to a commercial print on demand operation. Let the university concentrate on the truly scholarly aspects of the process, like peer review.

Chris, at 1:15 pm EDT on September 14, 2007

it’s not the technology

As I started to write this, I see Sandy Thatcher has beat me to it. The value of university presses is in processes that have nothing to do with technology. If we can find ways to fund those processes (which are about peer review, badly misprepresented by the PRISM debacle) the mission of university presses (and universities) can continue, however those books are designed and distributed. But to suggest that technology has rendered UPs obsolete ignores what publishing is about. It could also be used to argue that universities are no longer needed, now you can podcast lectures on the Internet.

As far as the argument that we don’t need university presses because expertise that doesn’t have a mass audience or can’t otherwise carry its own weight (though sales to other experts) has no social value — well, sometimes we don’t know what’s valuable until it’s too late. That’s why university press books filled the gap in bestseller lists after 9/11. Trade publisers wouldn’t have bothered with those titles because who’s interested in middle east politics or Islam? And don’t we need well-researched, well-argued books about topics most Americans don’t want to think about?

By the way, trade publishers are no more tech savvy than UPs, though they are very much interested in cost-cutting and profit margins. I just reviewed copyedits for a book coming out from a New York commercial publisher — on paper, with instructions to use a different color pencil than the copy editor.

Incidentally, one reason trade publishers have not yet figured out the e-book market is that they’re so concerned about how to put locks on their intellectual property. If we could fund the work of university presses so that they could put out quality products and release them on the Web, research could find its audience and have more social impact than it can if we’re trying to fund it after the fact, through sales.

barbara fister, at 1:55 pm EDT on September 14, 2007

What percentage of a university press’s sales currently go to university libraries? Given the potential savings to libraries of not having to buy, catalog, store, and lend out copies of all these seldom read scholarly publications, I think that subsidizing 100% of a book’s pre-publication costs ought to be quite possible. Working out the details of how to get money from university library budgets to university presses would be difficult (particularly since not every university with a library has a university press). However, moving to a free, open access publishing model would both save money and provide better access to scholarly publications.

Chris, at 4:05 pm EDT on September 14, 2007

Author responds

As the author of this piece, it has been enormously gratifying to follow the thoughtful responses so many people have provided. This was my first formal publication on the subject (after a lot of conference presentations, blog posts, etc., over the years), and I’ll admit to feeling some trepidation about its reception. I can safely say that my fears were misplaced. While I don’t agree with all of my critics—or even some of my supporters, as I’ll explain in a moment—the discussions that are swirling around this question about the future of scholarly publishing seem to me to be of a requisitely high level to actually drive constructive change. That is, the impulse is there, and the question is really one of whether any real degree of consensus will crystallize around a particular approach or set of approaches, or whether we’ll fall back into the same kind of fatalism that characterizes so much of the field at present. It’s an attitude that I once labeled “disappointed idealism” in an essay on Dostoevsky and Celine, and which I see everywhere in scholarly publishing: a tenacious idealism submerged under a hardened, even bitter pragmatism about the real possibilities for change.

Well, I’m going to make an ass of myself and persist in an optimistic direction. But I’d like to begin by answering some of the major points readers have raised in response to my piece. This is a long post, and I apologize, but there were a lot of ideas worth responding to, and I’ve tried to be thorough. Please, skip around if you want.

First, and most importantly, I never meant to imply that Ronald Reagan actually cared a whit about scholarly publishing. I was therefore surprised to see the comments from Unapologetically Tenured and Jerry Pattengale in particular, which seemed to me to misconstrue my argument. On returning to the piece after reading their critiques, I now see where I should have been more emphatic. To clarify: I seriously doubt that Ronald Reagan ever so much as uttered the phrase “scholarly publishing” during the course of his lifetime. My goal was not to claim he did, but to highlight the indirect ways in which his Presidency marked a crucial moment in the history of university presses:

1)As I remark in the section beginning “And then there was Reagan...,” the first of these was the triumph of Reaganomics and so-called federalism, which in my opinion was really just the federal government’s divestiture of responsibility for the traditional obligations of the state—obligations that were supposedly going to be fulfilled by the free market, but which in the event had to be picked up by the states. This is the one sense in which I think George W. Bush can be accurately described as completing the Reagan revolution: by untying the last lines of regulation and oversight that tethered private industry to the public good. Returning to Reagan and the UPs, though, this divestiture placed enormous burdens on states, which, understandably, were forced to make cuts in various areas of their budgets. Public education—including higher education—fell victim to some of the harshest cuts. And university administrations, in turn, had to make some hard choices of their own. In other words, a series of individual actions had an unanticipated aggregate effect: one (the disenfranchisement of university presses), which Reagan was almost certainly unaware of, but which I seriously doubt he would have objected to.2)The second avenue of influence is purely intellectual (a phrase not often heard in its un-negated form, in reference to RWR). What perhaps most intrigues me at a level of pure social abstraction is the question of how a group of people (in this case, university administrators) who are generally opposed to an ideology (Reaganism, which I very much do think is an ideology) can nonetheless unconsciously absorb some elements of that ideology into their thinking and even become proponents of it. Metaphorically, this is an intellectual version of viral transmission: some piece of Reaganism’s RNA was inserted into the genetic code of academia, which then began replicating it blindly, even to the extent of threatening its own systemic survival. As I point out, I think many academics and higher-ed administrators would be horrified to think of themselves as having become Reaganites as any way. My piece was meant to make readers aware of the fact that they seem to have nonetheless done so—and hopefully to enable us to consciously move in a more constructive direction.

As for “Tenured’s” objections to Reagan’s rising stock, well, we’re about 20 years on, which seems to be roughly the cycle for waves of historical revision—and appropriately so, given that enough time has gone by to allow us to appreciate the long-term effects. It would be difficult, in my mind (not to say inaccurate) to write a history of the last thirty years in American politics that doesn’t assign significant influence to Reagan and his cohort. Without his administration you don’t have George H.W. Bush, or Dick Cheney, or Donald Rumsfeld, or George W. Bush for that matter (who’s no Ronald Reagan, but who never would have been elected without the help from his father and GHWB’s buddies from the Reagan White House).

Marvin McConoughey has a fair point, and one which is commonly made: let the market set the price. Except that it’s subject to several incorrect assumptions. First, that “experts tend to be better paid than non-experts.” Apparently McConoughey has forgotten about the hundreds of thousands of graduate students around the country, who need to know the literature more urgently than anyone, and yet who, often with families, are living on next to nothing. Even as a grad student at Harvard and Michigan in the 1990s, most of my books were freebies given to me by professors who had extra copies taking up space on their shelves. This is hardly a way to run a system of higher education.

It also neglects the libraries, which of course are at the core of the story. Commercial academic presses like Routledge and Elsevier are notorious for charging what they claim are fair-market prices, which frequently turn out to run north of $100 a book. Sure, you could argue that universities should boost library budgets instead of subsidizing presses, but it’s a big circle, and the point isn’t to set these institutions against each other but, as Sandy Thatcher points out, to help them cultivate healthy partnerships that benefit the scholarly community as a whole.

Jerry Pattengale’s quote from Van Kampen is nicely on the money. Presses went through a considerable period of general stagnation in the 1980s (or at least Michigan did; there were notable exceptions, as always), and much of it had to do with a failure to read the historical trends and foresee their likely effects. This is the core of my argument. But at the same time I think the quote misses a fundamental distinction. If your goal is to create a market to which you can sell a defined product—whether it’s securities or windshield wipers—then you need an organization capable of making accurate strategic choices and acting on them decisively. But if, as I would argue (and this is a principle that I absorbed from my boss at the University of Michigan Press, Phil Pochoda), your goal is to create a virtually endless series of unique products, each of which appeals to an entirely different audience, and the market-readiness of each (that is to say, in this case its scholarly merit) has to be vetted with enormous care, then you need to run your organization very differently. Quick and decisive management is not enough for a university press. Scholarly publishing by definition will always be at least as much of a craft as a trade. If it ever ceases to be so, then it will also have ceased to deserve the label “scholarly.” And I would argue that the current crisis is really a failure to creatively reconcile the tensions between craft and market. My conclusion is that we should have a little less market and a little more craft.

It’s hard to know what to say to Victor Stater’s statement that “There is no such thing as ‘benign socialism.’” Clearly he missed the irony of that juxtaposition: if I thought my readers would understand all socialism as benign, I wouldn’t have needed the descriptor. But if you’ll look at the last sentence of the previous paragraph in this response, you’ll see that he and I agree, to an extent. Where I think we differ is that he thinks all publishing is rightfully subject “to the same market forces that every other enterprise endures,” whereas I think that to treat scholarly publishing like a financial enterprise is a dreadful mistake, which comes at a great cost to the integrity of the system of scholarly communications and the accumulation of knowledge.

I was profoundly hurt by Mike Munger’s response until I saw his followup, and even still a bit afterwards. Mike’s a good guy and an incredibly talented political scientist, arguably one of the most respected of his generation. He has given me good advice about manuscripts over the years, and has been an extremely reliable and acute peer reviewer. He’s also a UMP author. I happen to think he’s sorely mistaken about the reasons why the manuscript he mentions was rejected, but I also don’t think this is the place for that argument. Suffice to say that the University of Michigan Press’s list includes both Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution and a new book co-authored by Condoleezza Rice and two fellows of the Hoover Institution, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Kiron Skinner; a biography of Paul Wellstone by the communications director of Wellstone Action, and economics books by various members of the staunchly libertarian Independent Institute. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a band of the political spectrum that we haven’t covered. And as Sandy points out, that’s true of any major university press in the country.

In response to Gary Holden’s question, I can only say “Huh”? Followed by: “no.” I happen to be concerned about Prism’s activities, which I see as a shill for commercial interests. But I’d still appreciate it if we could skip the “are you now or have you ever been...” business.

Chris and Sid Knowles make a number of incorrect assertions about scholarly publishing. Sandy Thatcher has addressed most of these in his comments, so I won’t belabor the point... much. Sid needs to learn the difference between a monogram, which Webster’s defines as “a sign of identity usually formed of the combined initials of a name”; and a monograph, which I would define as “the initial sign of identity in establishing a scholar’s name.” Or something. I never was much good with puns. More seriously, Sid’s crack about buggy whips is so thoroughly uninformed about the value of scholarship that I’d just as soon let it die a quiet death.

Chris does have an interesting point, which I raised at UMP a number of years ago: if people aren’t buying monographs, then shouldn’t presses focus on their core mission of providing stringent peer review? I wouldn’t be surprised if we see some movement in this direction, as one among a variety of new approaches (Rice University Press, Penn State, Michigan, and many others). But I can’t help but thinking that someone still needs to make sure the knowledge universities generate is available to others: to other experts, to policymakers, professionals and members of the general public. Thank you, Barbara Fister, for taking the trouble to reminder everyone that “sometimes we don’t know what’s valuable until it’s too late.” I would point to the work of Scott McLemee right here at IHE: Scott is an exceptional example of how a talented thinker and writer can sift through sometimes obscure and long-forgotten texts and use them to tell us something new and remarkably interesting about the world.

Sandy Thatcher is someone whose work I admire a great deal, and I was pleased to see his lengthy response to my piece and the ensuing comments. As evidence of Sandy’s copious talents as an editor and publisher, I would point out how he almost imperceptibly schools me on a number of points even as he overtly praises me. He’s correct that I chose no to address questions of coordination among units, an issue which he has emphasized in his work to bring Penn State’s press and library together. The rule of unintended consequences operates powerfully in scholarly publishing. That, of course, is part of my point, too: a series of individually rational (or, at least rationalizable) decisions over the course of many decades—made by politicians, universities, libraries, presses, departments, and individual scholars—has added up to a very troubling outcome, one whose impact on society’s collective welfare society is still, despite all our insiders’ discussions and all the worthy efforts of the AAUP and others, insufficiently appreciated. Here’s the driving impulse behind my piece, in a sentence: it is not possible to measure the value of knowledge is measured strictly in the dollars it attracts within a three-year period. That being publishers’ standard schedule for depreciating their inventory. If ideas are evaluated in these terms, then we’ll have to give up any hope of another Galileo, another Joyce, possibly even another Einstein. The pioneers of such promising new fields as artificial intelligence and nanotechnology were until recently treated more like science fiction authors than scientists. Nor under such a system, as Barbara Fister points out, would we have more than a bare handful of books to help us understand such momentous social phenomena as the eruption of Islamic fundamentalism, the re-emergence of socialism in Latin America, etc. Are you still listening, Victor Stater? Market value, indeed.

Barbara also raises a very good point about intellectual property. The AAP is, like the RIAA, desperately racing to lock up as much intellectual property as it can. Seen from their point of view this is entirely justifiable: they’re in the business of selling books, not disseminating knowledge. And there’s the crux of the biscuit. University presses were created by universities to help them disseminate their knowledge. The Bayh-Dole Act gave an enormous boost to universities’ tech transfer activities, the goal being to encourage universities to put their knowledge and innovation out in the public domain, where everyone can benefit from it. Presses have guarded this principle for more than 100 years.

John Eklund is absolutely correct that the demise of the truly good independent university bookstore is a loss to the system (has anyone been to the Harvard Coop lately? It’s a long walk through the sweatshirt section to the books, and they’re one of the better cases). I’m not sure what market share was sold through those channels, or whether those books are now being sold through the chains. I bet the AAUP has data on this. But I would suggest that the demise of the university bookstore is a consequence of some of the same factors that now threaten the university press: the explosion of the used book market, the glut of titles and the consequent shrinking of the market for any single book.

Ron Force is right: libraries were badly hurt by the criminal (in my opinion) inflation of subscription rates for STM journals. And university presses have to be very sensitive to those wounds, which is one reason why UPs shouldn’t start charging libraries a hundred dollars a pop for their monographs (the other reason, which I think I’ve made ad nauseum, is ethical).

The only way that universities can overcome the current dilemma plaguing scholarly communications is to help bring their libraries and presses together. So many of the respondents have said this, or left it assumed, that I need barely mention it here. It will be a slow process in which each of these institutions will have to work hard to learn about each others’ missions—their strengths and weaknesses, their aspirations and anxieties. But there is a solution. My goal in this article was to suggest that too many people, perhaps unconsciously echoing the Reagan ethos, are looking toward the market for salvation, when instead they should be surveying the rubble around them and taking an earnest inventory of the opportunities to build a new future.

Jim Reische, at 7:52 pm EDT on September 15, 2007