Not from the Good News Department. Better that I just keep working and avoid updates from the outside world.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jqpGXF8kW1UOrJfxyspSPQKKVwgwD98R8N1G0
Nice quote about linebackers, but it is true that most big southern universities (or their alumni supporters, anyway) are far more concerned with their standing in the AP polls than, well, just about anything else.
Ugh.
I don't think they need a new business model so much as they need a massive capital campaign. I know first hand how rabidly loyal alum are to this school. If they make their case, they'll get the funds.
ReplyDeleteThing is, too, how much of the half-a-million they are bringing in is from sales of A Confederacy of Dunces alone? I can tell you from experience that a lot of the output of university presses don't exactly constitute page-turners. One hot item in my stack now is going generate "fireworks" in the "lit crit" community (the UP tells me) by asserting that Coleridge grabbed some of his concepts from the poetry of an eighteenth-century American slave girl. I'm on the edge of my seat. All this stuff is important to somebody, though. I've said it before: the subtitle to most UP books should be "The Quest for Tenure."
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