Under Pressure to Prove ROI, a University Closes Its Press

Founded in 1968, Bucknell University Press has published more than 1,200 titles across numerous disciplines.

Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe/Getty Images | Education Images/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

Faculty and academic press advocates are pushing back against Bucknell University’s unilateral decision to close its academic press, which has a decades-old reputation for publishing important work in the fields of 18th-century studies and Latin American literature.

Since the announcement in August, which a pending faculty motion has labeled an “extraordinary breach of shared governance,” the Association of University Presses , the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Goethe Society of North America