Some Thoughts on “The State of Academic Publishing”

Abstract

Some Thoughts on “The State of Academic Publishing” Thomas Schatz (bio) I strongly suspect that I was invited to contribute to this In Focus forum because of my sheer longevity in the film studies arena. This year marks my fortieth in the Radio-Television-Film (RTF) Department at the University of Texas and nearly a half century since I began thinking seriously about “film” as something that might actually be studied. When I started teaching at UT in August 1976, RTF was a small, disreputable, and very lively department, and its steady growth in size and stature has mirrored that of film studies in higher education and in publishing as well. Indeed, the film school phenomenon of the 1970s sparked not only the Hollywood renaissance, as the movie brats with their MFAs stormed the studio gates, but also an explosion in publishing, as both trade and academic presses went after a suddenly surging market of film students and cinephiles. I experienced that surge firsthand as an author and a book series editor. I have also witnessed a widening rift since the 1980s between academic and trade publishing, which in my view has been one of the most important developments in film and media studies in recent decades. As an author, I’ve been on both sides of this divide—which by now is a yawning chasm—and as a series editor I know the university press “side” all too well. The aim of this brief essay is to sort out my own experiences and perspectives as an author and editor and to provide my take on the current state of academic publishing—which like the academy itself is in the throes of massive change. The Rise of Film Studies—An Author’s Perspective I happened into film studies when the field was in its formative stages. After securing two previous degrees in literature, I enrolled in the graduate program “Broadcasting and Film” at the University of Iowa in 1973, shortly after Dudley Andrew launched it (upon the completion of his PhD in comparative lit there at Iowa). Iowa was among the first universities to offer a PhD in film studies, and the new program was hitting its early stride. When I arrived, David Bordwell had just finished his PhD and headed off to Wisconsin, and my grad cohort at Iowa included Phil Rosen, Mike Budd, Jane Feuer, Robert C. (Bobby) Allen, Mary Ann Doane, and several other Young Turks in the nascent field of film studies. My dissertation on Hollywood film genres was codirected by Dudley and Rick Altman, and after settling in at Texas, I began [End Page 148] thinking about turning it into a book. The publishing prospects were vastly different then than they are today for two main reasons: first, the relative dearth of university (and academic) presses doing film studies, and, second, the fact that trade presses were seriously interested in scholarly and academic books. In fact, trade publishers were well ahead of their university press counterparts in cultivating the new field of film studies—with three notable exceptions, Oxford, Cambridge, and California, which even then were in a class by themselves. Dudley introduced me to John Wright, his editor at Oxford University Press, who handled The Major Film Theories and had just edited the first edition of Horace Newcomb’s Television: The Critical View.1 Although Oxford was an extremely attractive option, I went with the Random House College Division. And to further complicate matters—and to underscore how different the publishing world was back then—the so-called trade edition of Hollywood Genres was published (in a nice hardback with a dust jacket) by Temple University Press.2 Neither of these publishing options would be available for long, and in fact Random House sold the College Division in 1989 to the educational publishing giant McGraw-Hill, which handled Hollywood Genres for the following two decades (and cut various copublishing deals overseas, including mainland China, where the book still generates royalties, to my utter amazement). The sale of Random House’s academic operation to McGraw-Hill was one obvious sign of the growing split between trade and academic publishers. I was caught in the midst...