| |
Comment on this article
A Betrayal of the Yale Press’s “Central Reason for Being”
September 10, 2009
by Gideon Rose '85
Gideon Rose '85, former associate director for Near East and South Asian Affairs on the staff of the National Security Council, is the managing editor of Foreign Affairs.
According to its mission statement, the Yale University Press publishes “serious works that contribute to a global understanding of human affairs,” “aids in the discovery and dissemination of light and truth,” and “further[s] scholarly investigation, advance[s] interdisciplinary inquiry, stimulate[s] public debate, educate[s] both within and outside the classroom, and enhance[s] cultural life.” It is supposedly “commit[ted] to increasing the range and vigor of intellectual pursuits within the university and elsewhere.” This, presumably, is why the press decided to publish Jytte Klausen’s study of the Muhammad cartoon controversy, a dispassionate analysis of a major issue in contemporary history by a top-rank scholar with relevant specialized expertise.
| |
What are great university presses for, if not cases just like this?
|
As the officials at the press were making their decision to acquire and publish Klausen’s book, they surely understood the sensitivity of the topic and the reasons that nonacademic trade publishers would shy away from it. One imagines that concerns about possible consequences of its publication were raised, and that in the end the intellectual importance of the project and the quality of the author were seen as the central reasons to go forward. After all, officers of the press must have said to one another, what are great university presses for, if not cases just like this?
As someone who followed the cartoon controversy carefully as it played out, and as an admirer of Klausen’s other work, I was pleased when I first learned about the forthcoming book, because it seemed to me an ideal opportunity to bring some cool, sober analysis to a subject that had attracted far too many polemics on all sides. When I heard about the move to publish the book without the cartoons themselves and related illustrations, therefore, I thought somebody was pulling my leg: surely this was a joke about the extraordinary reach of political correctness, right? I mean, nobody would publish a monograph on the Mona Lisa without an illustration of the painting, or an analysis of the Shroud of Turin without a picture of the shroud, or a biography of Julius Streicher without copies of pages from Der Sturmer. So nobody would publish a serious study of the cartoon controversy without relevant illustrations, would they, especially if the author wanted to run them?
Unfortunately, it turns out not to be a joke. Whether from extreme sensitivity to the feelings of certain communities of readers or from more practical motives such as fear of controversy and retribution, the Yale Press has apparently decided to neuter itself. Tacitly conceding the obvious substantive case in favor of including the illustrations, the press states that it has chosen not to do so solely “because there existed a substantial likelihood of violence that might take the lives of innocent victims.” This gives de facto veto power over the press’s core editorial decision-making to unspecified anonymous parties notable solely for their fanaticism and violence.
We all know that leaders of large institutions with diverse interests sometimes feel the need to compromise their principles and accept unseemly tradeoffs in order to keep the peace and make life easier. But this compromise is particularly egregious because it betrays the institution’s central reason for being. If the Yale Press was planning to choose such a path, it should have discreetly passed on Klausen’s book in the first place and let some other publisher handle the project properly. That at least would have kept its abasement and humiliation private. Now it might want to edit its mission statement to reflect the true state of affairs--something like, “light, truth, and vigorous intellectual pursuit up to a point, with the rest available from somebody else on the Internet.”  |
|
