Penny-Wise and Pound-Foolish

I think this counts as misery, though of a more structural type. And I strongly suspect it's not an isolated instance. It's also worth noting that here, as elsewhere, the underlying issue is cuts in state funding. Feel free to add your own examples of penny-wise but pound-foolish cost-cutting measures in the comments (or to meditate on the question of how we put a value on scholarship, especially humanities scholarship, and the activities that support it).

Supporters Mount Effort to Save Journals of American Literature
By Peter Monaghan

Hundreds of supporters of two well-regarded journals of 19th-century American literature have protested a plan by Washington State University administrators to deprive the publications of state financing, a move that would threaten their existence.

The two journals, ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance and Poe Studies: History, Theory, Interpretation, are based in the English department at Washington State. During the summer, administrators told the journals’ editors of the proposed cuts, which they said were necessary because the institution is struggling to cope with Washington state’s severe budget crunch. . . .

So, cost-efficiency was the order of the day, Floyd wrote in his July letter. . . .Cuts would have to be made “without compromising the quality of instructional and research programs,” he wrote. To harm those was “not an option.”

Supporters of ESQ and Poe Studies objected that discontinuing state support for the journals “with the intent that they become self-supporting” did threaten to compromise research. That, because cutting state support, even though it was a small amount in the overall scheme of the university’s shortfall, would leave the journals without editors. (State support amounts to $90,000 a year, most of it to pay editors, according to administration spokesman Darin Watkins, the university’s executive director for external relations.)

Editors and supporters of the journals launched a campaign, writing to colleagues on campus and around the country that it had become necessary “to take a strong public stand against the notion that one of the primary means by which the academy referees and exchanges ideas can be dispensed with.” . . . .

One supporter, Russ Castronovo, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, wrote to W.S.U. officials: “Roughly five years ago I served as an external reviewer for academic programs at Washington State University. And we concluded that ESQ and Poe Studies represented shining lights that add sizably to the national and international reputation of your university.”

Carl Ostrowski, a professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University, wrote that the authors covered by the two journals “made cogent observations about American culture in its formative years, and their insights are often as relevant to the twenty-first century as they were to the nineteenth. But this relevance cannot be fully explored without a place for contemporary scholars to publish their findings.”

Full story in the Chronicle here; petition here.