This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Oct. 5, 2012 - The new editor of the University of Missouri Press will be a familiar name – Clair Willcox, who had been the editor until he was let go by the university system earlier this year.
Since that time, responsibility for the Press has moved from the four-campus system to the flagship campus in Columbia, where Provost Brian Foster announced Friday that Willcox would be returning as editor-in-chief and associate director, effective immediately.
“We are very excited to have Clair returning to the Press as we move forward with this transition,” Foster said in a statement announcing the hiring.
“He will provide continuity and help maintain the foundation that the Press has built throughout its strong history. This is an important step in getting the Press fully up to speed in the new campus environment.”
In the statement, Willcox added:
“One of my first priorities is to contact our authors and work to re-engage them as we move forward and become a part of MU.”
Reinstatement of Willcox as editor had been one of the chief goals of a campaign by UM Press authors who had protested earlier moves by university officials. Many authors had sought to have rights for their books returned to them after Willcox left the Press, and other authors who had previously published books with the Press had said they would go elsewhere.
On its Facebook page, titled “Save the University of Missouri Press,” a message appeared shortly after the university announcement, saying:
“VICTORY IS OURS! THANK YOU TO EVERYONE WHO SIGNED THE PETITION, WENT TO MEETINGS, WROTE LETTERS TO THE EDITOR, ASKED FOR THE RIGHTS TO THEIR BOOKS, AND SO ON AND SO ON.”
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Bruce Joshua Miller, who represents many university presses in his book distribution business and has been a leader of the critics of the university, told the Beacon:
“It’s nice to know that sometimes, you can get the right outcome and people at the top will actually hear what people at the grassroots are saying.”
Added Ned Stuckey-French, an English professor at Florida State University who has been vocal in calling for Willcox’s return:
“This is a big victory for writing, for scholarship, for academic presses, for the people of the state of Missouri and for public higher education.”
Series of plans
The saga of the Press began in May, when university President Tim Wolfe announced that because it did not fit in with the school’s six major areas of focus, the operation would be shut down and its employees would be leaving, including Willcox.
That announcement set off a drumbeat of protest in social media and elsewhere, with authors and others complaining that the Press had been a valuable asset that university officials were jettisoning for no reason.
In July, the university announced that it would not be shutting down the Press after all. Instead, it would move from the system to the Columbia campus. In its new format, the school said, a professional staff of editors would work with students in a variety of disciplines to combine publishing with instruction and research.
“We need new models for a new era,” Mizzou Chancellor Brady Deaton said in making the announcement, “and this is such a moment for the university.”
But that change seemed to increase the opposition from authors who said they wanted to work with a professional editing staff, not one that was using students. Calls for Willcox’s reinstatement continued and intensified.
Then, in August, the university made yet another shift, saying the students’ role would not be as great as had been previously outlined. Instead, employees who were still in their jobs – which did not include Willcox, who had left earlier – could remain and an advisory committee made up of representatives from throughout the university would help ease the transition.
At that time, Wolfe said:
“My goal is to develop a Press that is vibrant and adaptive, but I realize that change is often difficult. I have been listening to the support and dedication the community and others have shown the Press, and make every assurance that university administration is working to create the kind of Press of which the academic community and those that it serves can be proud.”
Still, authors were unhappy that their major demand had not been met: the return of Willcox to his old job. With the announcement Friday that he was back in the editor’s chair, many of the changes that had been announced earlier appeared to be reversed.
In an interview with the Beacon, Foster denied that such reversals were the case.
“That is definitely not true,” he said. “We are still on the same track, with the same vision, to be a very adaptive, forward-looking press in a very volatile environment. None of that has changed. The Press has been pretty good at that, but it will be more adaptive now. Clair is a big asset in making that happen.”
Asked why Willcox had been let go in the first place if he was such a big asset, Foster noted that that decision was not made at the campus level, so he could not address it. “I didn’t have anything to do with that,” he said.
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Work still to be done
Stuckey-French, the English professor, said Richard Wallace, the former Mizzou chancellor who became involved in the controversy in August, played a big role in the rehiring of Willcox.
“He was instrumental,” Stuckey-French said. “It was very important to have him involved. He had a commitment to academic publishing and scholarship, had the respect of people on both sides and brought a steady hand to it.”
For his part, Wallace said that the announcement Friday was the result of the willingness of people at Mizzou and at the university system to face the issue squarely.
“This cut across both campus and system,” he said, “which meant it was a very busy group of people that had to work through several issues to move from where we were when I came on board in early August to where we are today. It’s taken honest, open conversation among key administrators in the system and on the campus. I’m grateful they had the patience, took the time and considered the issues.
“I firmly believe we arrived in the right spot. I wish we could have done it quicker, but it would have been very difficult.”
Wallace is among 21 members of the transition committee named to help move the Press to its new version. Members include faculty and staff members from all four university campuses, plus authors from the Press' backlist and others involved with the operation.
Now that Willcox is back, Stuckey-French said, the Press has a lot of work to do to catch up and restore its reputation.
“They’ve got no list for 2013, no spring or fall list,” he said. “A lot of authors I think are still going to be leery about wanting to send manuscripts there. They want to see what will happen. But that said. This is a total victory. We had five points on our petition that we launched in the first week of June, and we won on all of them.
“I started on this because of my book and because I thought it was wrong. It was personal. But as it went on, I saw that public higher education is under attack. The fact that they thought they could go out there and just cut this press that was out there for 54 years, at the same time they were spending millions on a sports facility, was a contradiction that people saw real clearly. Their priorities were really out of whack.”
Miller, the book distributor, said he didn’t necessarily expect that Willcox would get his job back, “but I was hopeful. I was saying all along that I didn’t see how the university would resuscitate the Press without rehiring Clair, given the fact that so many authors were rebelling against what had happened.”
He said that Willcox “hit the ground running. His first priority was to contact authors at 8 o’clock this morning, so I have confidence he’ll be able to repair a lot of the damage. It will take some time. But it sounds like the university if being quite supportive and over time, it will re-emerge as a strong press.”
In a statement, Peter Givler, executive director of the Association of American University Presses, applauded the return of Willcox, saying it “will go a long way toward settling the minds of press authors and series editors and restoring stability.
“At the same time, much remains to be done. No organization recovers overnight from the kind of uncertainty and turmoil that has racked the press for the last four months, and even without that turmoil, charting a new course is never easy.”