For decades academics and publishers have lamented a “crisis in scholarly publishing.” Today the conversation has moved beyond economic concerns, and the challenges facing university presses are part of a much larger crisis. Heightened political pressure and ongoing attacks on higher education have reached every corner of the academy, and American university presses are not emerging unscathed.
We sat down with Eli Bortz, acquisitions editor at Flatpage and former editor in chief at University of Notre Dame Press, to hear his perspective on the state of scholarly publishing in 2025.
How would you describe the state of scholarly publishing today?
Eli Bortz (EB): I don’t think the problem can be boiled down to anything as grim as, say, university presses deliberately abandoning disciplines or manuscripts considered “dangerous” in today’s political environment. But it is true that most presses are monitoring hasty or politicized decisions by university administrations and state legislatures, and at the same time, entire academic disciplines have been axed. This is the reality of the university press system meeting the larger crisis of the contemporary university. There’s a lot of upheaval coming for the university press world, through no fault of their own.
At Flatpage, I can collaborate on smart projects that are tricky politically without having to worry about pressure from university administrations. Such pressures are very real and are only getting scarier. So the idea of being able to support scholars working on projects that might cause trouble for certain university presses is very appealing.
For decades, there has been talk of a “crisis in scholarly publishing.” Did you agree with that assessment in the past? How is the current crisis a different story?
EB: I entered the world of scholarly publishing in July 2003 as a part-time editorial assistant at the University Press of Florida, and I left as editor in chief at Notre Dame Press in July 2022. I worked for three different presses, and all of them were remarkably stable. But I heard from day one the idea that there was a “crisis in scholarly publishing.” People would say, “everything’s gonna be different in a decade. Who knows if there will even be university presses?” Well, we’re in 2025. University presses are still here. And the three presses I’ve worked for always made ends meet. We still published books and catalogues that had an impact. So I started dismissing the idea of a “crisis in scholarly publishing.” Is it a crisis if it goes on for two decades or more? Can that really be called a crisis, or is it just evolution?
But this moment in time feels different. The presses I worked for were stable because their parent universities were stable, and now higher education itself is under attack in ways I’ve never witnessed. They’re still talking about the “crisis of scholarly publishing,” but the conversation has to change utterly. The crisis has become much more ideological, and it’s taking place on a much larger scale.
It’s inevitable that university presses are going to be pulled along in the political madness that is being unleashed upon universities right now. That’s going to be the crisis—simply by virtue of existing within the academic ecosystem, university presses have to navigate the influence of openly hostile state governments and federal governments. That’s something they’ve never seen before, but it’s a reality that presses have to face in a much more palpable, much more frightening way.
How has the situation changed over the past few years?
EB: The situation has become very different, almost always because of political pressures applied from beyond the academy. We’re seeing this across the nation right now, with huge institutions are basically being coerced into settling financially with the federal government because of alleged bias. Things are changing drastically right now in ways that I’ve never seen in higher education—and it’s not just budget cutting. There’s a real fear of what the public university can do if their state government or the federal government is openly hostile. I have no doubt that university presses will be on the radars of some of those antagonistic exterior forces.
That’s not the university presses’ fault. They are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do: publishing compelling work that might exist outside the political norm or push boundaries in an uncomfortable way. But PhD programs are being cut across the board. That has nothing to do with the university press, but it means that there are just going to be fewer and fewer researchers and scholars who are writing book-length projects. It’s going to be a very difficult decade to navigate politically.
The authors, too, are having to navigate difficult political morasses on the state level. They’ve got to publish to get promotions, but they’re going to have fewer and fewer resources if they work in a discipline that’s considered “dangerous” right now. So there’s going to be an external reckoning, that I think is going to rear its head in a way that university presses haven’t seen—not since the boom days of research support in the aftermath of World War II.
How are acquisitions decisions at university presses being affected by political pressures? Is fear now a factor shaping editors’ lists?
EB: You’ll never hear an acquiring editor say out loud that external political factors are motivating their acquisitions choices. But the fact remains that these acquisitions editors are, at the end of the day, university employees—often without the protections that university faculty might have. So it’s always going to be in the back of your mind, if you’re working on politically dangerous topics or subjects, that something could happen. If a group of well-connected alumni of your institution objects to books you’re publishing, for example, or if large, well-funded organizations are attacking you, how much of that can you endure before it starts to impact the work at an acquisitions level? That’s just the reality editors are facing right now.
Flatpage gets to exist outside that storm. I don’t have the same set of concerns as an acquisitions editor here that I had at a university press. My concern here is building a press mostly from scratch. I’m dealing with a different set of challenges, instead of having to watch my back politically because of “dangerous books.”
What, to you, is the most concerning aspect of this crisis?
EB: I’ve never seen such gatekeeping of speech by university faculty and staff. I didn’t expect it to get so granular that political actors would be chasing people down to get them fired if they said something untoward. That’s new. In the past, pressure campaigns, if they were ever applied to university presses, came from very large entities that had organized or other forces that didn’t affect you personally. This year the situation feels different. Individual university employees, and that includes university press staff, are being scrutinized politically. It’s becoming personally dangerous in a way I’ve never seen before, with outside forces attacking individuals to such an extent that they lose their job, even if they committed no fireable offense. That is terrifying, and there’s a lot of it right now in higher education.
There are people who want to publish their books, but are terrified of letting the manuscript out for fear that it will destroy their careers. The biggest thing that’s come out of my discussions with people over the last year is that tangible personal fear, and that’s a situation that is going to require different publishing tactics to navigate.
Eli’s responses have been edited for clarity and concision.
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