‘Very discouraging:’ Budget cuts in Pullman may mean final chapter for 96-year-old WSU Press

Originally posted at MyNorthwest.com

Officials at Washington State University (WSU) in Pullman decided in July to eliminate annual funding for the school’s academic publisher WSU Press. The roughly $300,000 cut is effective at the end of December, and the press would be shut down then.

WSU Press, which is part of WSU’s Department of Marketing and Communications, was founded 96 years ago. It employs three full-time and one part-time staff and publishes a range of titles from dozens of authors focused on the history and culture of Washington and the Pacific Northwest.

Linda Bathgate is editor-in-chief and has worked for WSU Press for nearly five years. She told KIRO Newsradio Tuesday afternoon that she learned of the cuts and the impending shutdown in early July.

“With the beginning of the fiscal year on July 1, 2024, Phillip Weiler, who’s our VP of University Marketing and Communications, had to make a 7.5% cut in the budget for the group, and he decided to cut the funding for the University Press,” Bathgate told KIRO Newsradio. “We would close down as of December 31, 2024.”

Bathgate is clearly disappointed at the prospect of WSU Press going away.

“We’re the only publisher that really covers the Inland Empire, Washington, Idaho, Oregon … and we work a lot with tribal communities to provide an outlet for their stories,” Bathgate said. “So we feel that this was a very short-sighted, and maybe not a well-thought-out decision, maybe just a financial decision, but without consideration to the repercussions.”

“I think it will give WSU a lot of poor press,” Bathgate continued, “because nobody likes to see these kinds of institutions disappear, and we are part of the land-grant mission that WSU has, to provide an outlet for research to educate the community.”

“It feels like the efforts that we’ve been doing for the past 96 years are really just not even considered, are just tossed away and that they’re not of any value in today’s academic community,” Bathgate said. “So it’s very discouraging.”

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Bathgate, who KIRO Newsradio contacted after information about the funding cut was posted Tuesday on Facebook by the WSU English Department, has not been actively spreading the word in hopes of finding some means to continue operations beyond the end of December. However, book publishing often follows timelines that stretch for a year or more from when a contract with an author is signed, to when books are printed and shipped.

Bathgate wants to be sensitive to the authors with whom she and her WSU Press predecessors have cultivated long relationships with, some stretching for decades.

“I’m very gradually notifying authors, because I want them to understand why there may not be movement on their project,” Bathgate explained. “And even if they want to take the project to another press, since I’m not able to guarantee that we’ll have a home for it, I’m allowing that.”

Rather than cease operations, Bathgate hopes to find a new home for WSU Press, perhaps within another department at WSU, or perhaps as part of a publishing consortium managed by the University of Colorado – so that the nearly two dozen books already in the pipeline to be published by WSU Press will still be able to be produced.

“I tend to be cautiously optimistic,” Bathgate said. “And if the president of WSU, Kirk Schulz, if he determines that it’s appropriate to keep the press at WSU, I think there will be a way to find funding to at least bring it back, even at a reduced level. I do think it’s important for the president to hear how valued the press is amongst the community, even outside of the state of Washington.”

If WSU Press does find a new home at WSU, Bathgate said the publisher will likely look very different from the current operation.

“I think that we may have to make some changes,” Bathgate said. “We may have to slim down a bit. We’ve done our own warehousing and distribution traditionally; we may have to outsource that because we won’t be able to support (employing) an order person.”

In fact, Bathgate said, while she and the WSU Press marketing person will be kept on the payroll at least until the end of 2024, the order person’s position was cut effective in mid-July – leaving Bathgate and her colleague to pick up the slack on all that person’s order fulfillment duties.

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Phil Weiler is Vice-President of Marketing and Communications at Washington State University and the WSU official who made the decision to cut funding to WSU Press.

Weiler told KIRO Newsradio Tuesday afternoon that it’s too early to report on the imminent closure.

“I guess the issue is that there will be a change in six months, but we don’t know what that change is, so I would say the story is premature,” Weiler told KIRO Newsradio. “Once we know what the plan is, we will obviously share that with authors, with readers, so that everybody knows, but we haven’t had the time to be able to determine what our next steps are.”

“We just know that by the end of the year, there will be some sort of a change, but we haven’t figured out what that change is going to look like yet,” he continued.

“We have a fiscal year that we need to plan for, and so this was a decision made for the current fiscal year,” Weiler said. “And so we are being able to take the next six months to figure out what we can do with the operation so that authors and readers aren’t disrupted by the change in the funding.”

Is one option restoring the funding, so that WSU Press would remain within the Department of Marketing and Communications after the end of 2024?

“That’s certainly a possibility,” Weiler said. “I don’t think that’s a likelihood, but that’s certainly something we’re looking at.”

Weiler was not able to provide a timeline for when an alternate plan to find a new home for WSU Press might be hatched.

“We’ll let the public know as soon as we have a better sense of which options are still viable,” Weiler said.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

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