University of Michigan Press

• 1. Introduction

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  The University of Michigan Press releases 170 new titles each year in the humanities and social sciences. Yet one of the hardest tests in its history involved a book it never published. The press was only the American distributor, and still the argument reached faculty committees, university regents, and the news media. Underneath that fight sits a larger puzzle. What is a university's publishing arm supposed to stand for? And how did a campus that once had no organized press at all end up facing that question in public?

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• 2. A Late Start

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  From 1858 to 1930, the University of Michigan had no organized home for its scholarly publishing. What it printed tended to be conference proceedings or research tied to a single department. That changed in 1930, when the University Press was established under the university's Graduate School. In 1935, Frank E. Robbins, an assistant to university president Alexander G. Ruthven, was appointed managing editor. The early plans were modest. They foresaw little beyond conference materials and Alumni Readings Lists. Robbins pushed for something wider, with books on archaeology, linguistics, and international interests. He held the post until 1954, when Fred D. Wieck was appointed Press Director. The press changed its institutional address once more in 2009. It became part of the University of Michigan Library, where it now sits within Michigan Publishing.

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• 3. Teaching English

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  In 1941, the University of Michigan became the first place in the United States to publish two kinds of books. One was textbooks for students of English as a second language. The other was manuals for training their teachers. The press first handled these materials as a distributor and later published them in full. For a time, the only new titles in this line came from faculty and staff at the English Language Institute. Today the authors work at institutions around the world. The list now carries the name MICHIGAN ELT, and it is best known for English for Academic Purposes, called EAP, along with teacher training. Textbooks and training manuals of this kind are among the main things the press publishes today.

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• 4. Shelves and Series

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  Scholarly monographs at the press span classical studies, Asian studies, political science, disability studies, and theater and performance. A further shelf is devoted to Michigan and the Great Lakes region. Prizes have followed the list. Titles have won Lambda Literary Awards, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Joe A. Callaway Award, and the Nautilus Book Award. Its authors include winners of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Humanities Medal, and the Nobel Prize in Economics. Ongoing series give the catalogue its texture. Jazz Perspectives, Poets on Poetry, and Tracking Pop sit beside Perspectives on Contemporary Korea and Michigan Modern Dramatists. Corporealities: Discourses on Disability and Triangulations: Lesbian/Gay/Queer Theater/Drama/Performance cover other corners. The list also includes a series called Digital Humanities, a field that one of the press's imprints was created to serve.

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• 5. Digital Experiments

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  More than 1,100 monographs in the press's catalogue can be read as ebooks. In 2006, the press and MLibrary launched digitalculturebooks, an imprint for new media studies and digital humanities. It drew on the skills of staff across Michigan Publishing. Its stated goal was to act as an incubator for new publishing models in the humanities and social sciences.

  Fulcrum came later, built by the press with a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Indiana, Minnesota, Northwestern, and Penn State Universities joined as partners. Fulcrum lets a scholar attach images, video and audio clips, and three-dimensional interactive models directly to a book-length interpretation of them. Those digital objects can appear as supplements to a book published elsewhere, or alongside the narrative as a single package.

  Open access was a third thread. The press was one of thirteen publishers in the Knowledge Unlatched pilot, a global library consortium approach to funding open access books. Three of its titles went into the pilot collection.

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• 6. The Kovel Dispute

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  In the fall of 2007, the press stopped distributing Overcoming Zionism, a 2007 book by Joel Kovel. The press had been the American distributor for the British independent firm Pluto Press, which handled the book. Kovel's book argues "that the creation of Israel was a mistake and urges adoption of the 'one state' solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which Israelis and Palestinians would form a new country, without a Jewish character".

  The pause followed "serious questions" raised by "members of the university community". The faculty committee that oversees the press also examined its relationship with Pluto.

  Later in September, the press reversed course and announced that it would resume distribution, after complaints that it was practicing censorship. The Executive Board said it had "deep reservations about Overcoming Zionism" but that removing the book would be "a blow against free speech". It added: "We conclude that we should not fail to honor our distribution agreement based on our reservations about the content of a single book." The same statement promised a review of the press's relationship with Pluto Press.

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• 7. Rewriting the Rules

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  In October 2007, the press announced that it would keep distributing books for Pluto Press while it reviewed the policies governing its ties to outside presses. Meanwhile the dispute spread into the media. Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! interviewed Kovel, and the conversation turned to the influence of Howard Zinn. Kovel said he had contacted Zinn, and that "Zinn and other well-known people, like Richard Falk, you know, have said yes, we're on board with this."

  In November 2007, three of the eight members of the University of Michigan Board of Regents issued a statement. It called on the press to stop distributing books for external publishing companies.

  In January 2008, the university announced new guidelines. Under them, the press would distribute only books from presses "whose mission is aligned with the mission of the UM Press and whose academic standards and processes of peer review are reasonably similar to those of the UM Press." That peer review clause would soon become the stated reason for a break.

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• 8. Parting With Pluto

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  In June 2008, the press ended its relationship with Pluto Press. Peggy McCraken, an associate dean at the university and chair of the press's executive board, told Inside Higher Ed that the reason was peer review. Pluto Press does not use the same process as Michigan.

  A question put to her suggested a link to the criticism of Overcoming Zionism. She replied that "the initial decision of the executive board of the press was that it would not make a decision based on a particular book." She added that "certainly the free and open exchange of ideas is the foundation of everything we do at the university."

  Roger van Zwanenberg, chairman of Pluto Press, drew the opposite connection. He said: "What this tells you is that there are dark forces in America who would like to control the flow of ideas, and they are powerfully organized and they are very dangerous." He argued that Michigan had known about the difference in peer review from the start of the relationship, and he called the focus on it "a facade". Pluto Press said it would seek a new American distributor. Today, the University of Chicago Press distributes Pluto Press in the United States.

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