Columbia University Press

“ For this I am dismissed from the division of philosophy, psychology, and anthropology of Columbia University, which I have made the strongest of any university in the world. Professors in every university are terrorized so that they dare not exert their influence for peace and good-will." Whatever objection is uttered to the action of Columbia is naturally put upon the cherished ground of academic freedom of utterance. ”

“ Nobody ever complains of having too little to read, as Richard Fisher, the managing director of Cambridge University Press’s academic division, has put it at many conferences. Yet, most humanities academics feel the need to publish books for their jobs and, more importantly, simply to disseminate their findings. ”

“ The university also maintains a summer session of six weeks in which are offered courses that are accepted as partial fulfillment of the requirements of certain academic degrees and diplomas. There is also a system of extension teaching for men and women who are engaged in teaching and can give only a portion of their time to study. The property of the university is valued at about $72,000,000, of which about $35,000,000 has been added by gift or bequest in the past twenty years. ”

“ Columbia University early announced that a university situated in such a city, full of problems at a time when "industrial and social progress is bringing the modern community face to face with social questions of the greatest magnitude, the solution of which will demand the best scientific study and the most honest practical endeavor," must provide facilities for bringing university study into connection with practical work. In 1901 definite practical courses shared honors of first place with the elementary or general course in college announcements. ”

“ The Cambridge Manuals of Science and Literature have already conquered a wide audience amongst cultured people. They are short studies of great subjects, and are published by the University Press at one shilling The Cambridge Press is casting its literary net widely. ”

“ We shall devote generous space to the study, for the reason already explained—that Columbia University is the largest and richest educational institution in the United States, and the model for all others that wish to grow large and rich. The author of its success is President Butler; and by observing him at work we learn how a university succeeds in the plutocratic empire, and what its success means to the faculty, the students, and the general public. ”

“ Columbia University, in the City of New York, which was organized in 1887 as "The New York College for the Training of Teachers," but since 1890 has been affiliated with Columbia University, under its present name. This institution has been a model copied by many others over the world; has trained a large percentage of the leaders in education in the United States; and has been particularly influential with students from England, the English self-governing dominions, China, and South America. ”

“ The total attendance grows steadily year by year and establishes the leading position of the school among institutions of its kind in this or any other country. The number attending is greater in proportion to the number of journalists in the country than is the number attending the law and medical courses in Columbia University in proportion to the number of those practicing law and medicine. In September, 1913, the school entered its new building, for which $500,000 was provided by Mr. Pulitzer's bequest. ”

“ The Library of Columbia University. are now our two main scientific centers, there being in each city about five hundred men engaged in research work. The first of the convocation week meetings was held in Washington four years ago, with an attendance estimated at 1,500 members, and there is good reason to suppose that the present meeting will be even larger and more wide reaching in its effects on the
The School of Mines, Columbia University. ”

“ At last, let us be thankful, a new era has dawned, and we have here woodcuts which may confidently invite comparison with any as examples of the highest excellence which has yet been reached in this department. The thorough and intelligent workmanship of the University Press has preserved to us every line and shade which was intrusted to its care, and the prints are free alike from fade indistinctness and from rubious weight of color. ”

“ The preliminary programs of the different sections show long lists of valuable papers and promise the attendance of leading men of science from all parts of the country. A movement of interest is the increasing tendency of special scientific societies to meet in conjunction with the Association. No less than fifteen societies will this year hold their sessions at Columbia University, some of them joining with the sections of the Association, and others holding independent meetings. ”

“ In small colleges, far away from the cities where the regular magazines are published, the college magazine is the only available outlet for the work of the students who can write. But here in New York the students know the condition of the literary market, and the more skilful writers among them do not care to give their writings to an amateur publication when they can sell them off the campus. So the Columbia Monthly got only second-best material. The boys who really could write would not sacrifice their work by burying it in a college publication, so the Columbia Monthly died. ”

“ When other classes of the community have been measured, comparisons can be made and we shall know whether scientific men are more variable than others, have larger heads, better memory and the like. Work of this character has been carried on at Columbia University for some years. The freshmen, both the men of Columbia College and the women of Barnard College, are measured and tested with care, equal attention being paid to mental and physical traits. Then the measurements are repeated at the end of the senior year. ”

“ You have only to consult your catalogs to see the remarkable development of the last decade in publishing which is done by endowed universities and colleges and of learned societies. See the great body of technical journals that have been turned over the university presses. Every university that pretends to accomplish much now has a press, and is developing it with great rapidity. ”

“ Nor is it to be wondered at, when we consider that we have an unequaled homogeneous population with a similar common-school education. In looking over publishers' lists I am constantly coming across good books out of print, which are practically unknown to this generation, and yet are more profitable, truer to life and character, more entertaining and amusing, than most of those fresh from the press month by month. ”

“ Moreover, since the overwhelming majority of Americans read only newspapers and magazines, it is by no means an unimportant task for our universities to train writers to supply the steady demand for well-written articles. The late Walter Hines Page, founder of the World's Work and former editor of the Atlantic Monthly, presented the whole situation effectively in an article on "The Writer and the University," when he wrote:
The journeymen writers write almost all that almost all Americans read. ”

“ It appears to me, and I trust to you, that, if our American dissertations are worth anything, if they are valuable enough to preserve, if they are real contributions to knowledge—and I believe that they are all of these—then it is worth while to secure the publication of some list which will tell librarians and specialists where to go to get copies, either from the author or from the university. ”

“ A series of descriptive papers written to The Industrial Herald, of Richmond, during a six-weeks' stay in New York and Boston, in the summer of 1883; "Paul's Trade and the Use he Made of it," read before the Baptist Sunday-school Union of Washington, D. C., and afterwards published in The Christian Recorder; "Notes to Girls," a series of letters in The People's Advocate; "Higher Education for Women," an oration before the Young Ladies' Literary Society of Howard University, at their public meeting in 1885, and subsequently printed in The People's Advocate ”

“ The program of study in Columbia College makes it possible for a well qualified student to satisfy the requirements for both the bachelor's degree and a professional degree in law, medicine, technology or education in five to eight years according to the course. ”

“ This is truly the age of intellectual improvement, and in every form and manner exertions are multiplied to advance it. Daily the unwearied press teems with new publications in aid of truth and knowledge. Compendiums, abridgments, and compressments of scientific lore, rapidly succeed each other in their pretensions to public favor; and it is now a point of competition amongst authors and publishers to give the greatest quantity of valuable information for the least money. ”

“ There are also extant a great many valuable periodical, magazine and newspaper articles which set forth in some detail accounts of the founders of other nineteenth century publishing houses, which accounts, together with what has appeared in book form, make a rather inchoate but highly valuable mass of data that could and should be compiled and published as soon as a scholarly man of historical habit can be found to edit and prepare it for the press. ”

“ They manage, or, at any rate, they are beginning to manage these things better in America. That America is the country of the [138] future is open to less doubt as a prophecy when the critic has made acquaintance with the new and renewed magazines now appearing in that country. A tone of provinciality still dominates a considerable part of the American literary Press, but it is obvious that tremendous efforts are being made to recover or, let us say, to discover centrality. ”

“ As is detailed more thoroughly in Chapter 2, the economics of scholarly publishing are complex. For instance, it is worth considering whether true markets can exist in journal subscriptions or book sales to academic institutions and whether the profit motive stands in fundamental opposition to the goal of academic research. ”

“ It will be the constant study of the Editors to maintain in the New Work all those general features which for Twenty-two Years have given their Journal its extensive popularity—a cheerful Light Literature, comprehensive Information, sound Ethics, and enlightened views of a Progressive Social Economy, without the admixture of controversial matter of any kind. ”

“ A dozen years later The New England Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure announced its motto, “Alluring Profit with Delight we blend,” but it confined itself to hackneyed essays on old models. In the same year, however, at Philadelphia, a magazine of decided originality and of genuine importance in colonial literature was coming out month by month with the first provost of the new college as its editor and guiding spirit. ”

“ In publishing a new periodical, they consider that they are merely supplying a want of the public, which desires to be informed as to passing events, new discoveries in science, the proceedings in lawsuits, &c. This journal will interest all classes of readers, not only people in easy circumstances who live on their income, but merchants and mechanics, who will find in it intelligence of which they stand in need. ”

“ What does prestige do to the economics of scholarly publishing? There is perceived pressure from assessment mechanisms to publish articles in high-prestige journals and books with high-prestige presses. Such journals and presses, therefore, are highly sought after by authors, creating a high level of supply. If good authors appear in prestigious journals or with presses, libraries must subscribe to their journals or purchase their books so that their researchers can read the material. ”

“ Whatever the drawbacks of the German influence which is so marked in America, I cannot doubt that in one thing, at any rate, the Americans are far ahead of us—in the careful study they devote to the science of education. No fewer than twenty courses of lectures on the theory and practice of education were given in Columbia College during 1898–99. Teaching, I take it, is an art founded upon, and intimately associated with, the science of psychology. ”

“ We, of all people, can ill afford to make blunders. We must teach wisely and lead aright, that the generation to come may bless us, as we bless those who have passed before us. Our Press association is well organized, and we should be able, at its meetings, to give each other wise counsel.
The study of other journals, from every point of view, has its benefits: their circulation and where they circulate ”

“ In practically every case the instances that I have given of the successful tests of our scholarship involve the work of a member of Phi Beta Kappa or of the sister society, Sigma Xi; and I therefore may be permitted to say a word more directly to our younger members of the society of those seeking the philosophy of life, to our Columbia scholars in the making. In my time, which, by the way, was just twenty-one years ago, a man who wanted to live the life of a scholar was practically limited to teaching as the means of making his living. ”

“ The public mind, taste, and morals are with us chiefly formed by books, pamphlets, periodicals, and journals. The American people sustain more journals or newspaper than all the world beside, and probably devour more light literature, or fiction, or trashy novels than any other nation. ”