KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Administrators at the University of Missouri completed a reversal of their decision to close the university’s publishing house when they announced on Friday that the longtime editor in chief, Clair Willcox, would be rehired.
The move also could save the core of the operation — 41 authors who had works published by the university press asked for the rights to their works back unless Mr. Willcox was rehired.
“Victory Is Ours!” declared a post on a Facebook page, Save the University of Missouri Press, created by Ned Stuckey-French, a professor at Florida State University and an author with the press, and Bruce Joshua Miller, a sales representative for university publishers.
“I’m floating,” Mr. Stuckey-French said in an interview.
Mr. Wolfe said in an interview that the university was not changing course. His intention never was to close the press, he said, but rather to reinvent it in a more cost-effective technological model.
“We’re down this path and we’re continuing to move toward our goal of having a more adaptive, innovative press which attracts the best scholarly work on a global basis and publishes both physical print books as well as electronic,” he said.
When Mr. Wolfe announced that he would pull the $400,000 annual subsidy that the university system, which includes four campuses around the state, provides the press, the outrage pressured the administration into hastily announcing a new operation that it said would be more efficient. But that announcement sparked even more criticism. The announcement was short on details, and critics said it did not offer a bold, new, innovative system that the administration had promised.
The controversy highlighted a broader challenge that university presses are grappling with nationwide. Publishing scholarly works directed toward a niche audience, most do not generate profits, and they are finding it difficult to survive amid shrinking campus budgets and a digital publishing landscape.
Under the intense scrutiny, the Missouri administration, in late August, pulled back from its new model and announced that the university press would continue to operate with its current staff in its current location in Columbia. Administrators also announced that the Columbia campus would take over responsibility for the press from the system, and they created an advisory committee to examine ways to grow and innovate the press.
But the outrage did not spur this decision to change course, Mr. Wolfe said; rather it was the result of further discussions that helped administrators find a more effective model.
While press supporters saw the decision as a win, they remained unhappy that Mr. Willcox had not been given back his job. So they continued to lobby.
Mr. Wolfe conceded missteps had been made early in the process of deciding what to do about the press.
“There’s more people that should have been brought into this conversation,” he said, like authors, other university publishers and the staff of the Missouri press.