Will the minnestoa review Survive?

Marc Bosquet reports on his blog and at The Chronicle of Higher Education that the minnesota review's days may be numbered due to budget cuts that"quality managers" at Carnegie Mellon Univeristy want to impose on the journal.

It would be a shame if the minnesota review closed shop. (Full disclosure: The mr has published my work.) Could Williams move to another university and take the minnesota review with him? Many public U's are hurting financially right now, it's true, but surely there's a shrewd dean somewhere who can recognize that hiring Williams and funding the mr would be a great opportunity to increase their English department's profile - for a reasonable price.

It's great that Jameson, Felski, Berube, Menand, etc. went to bat for the mr, but maybe it's time to call in Stanley Fish. As a specialist in contract law and the former head of Duke UP, I would think that Stan the Man could - and probably would - negotiate a sweet deal for the mr and Jeffrey Williams. In fact, if Fish was still the Dean of LAS at UIC, I'd ask him myself if it would be possible to bring the mr to UIC's English Department. It already hosts two fine critical journals, ebr and Mediations. Why not one more?

Part of the problem is that editorial work is not properly valued in academia. Editorial work is absolutely necessary for the publish-or-perish model to survive, but the time-intensive labor (too much of which is effectively outsourced) required to put out a quality publication is invisible, and editing is treated more like service than research, which is a serious mistake. Faculty and grad students need to make it clear that the editorial infrastructure needs to be maintained in order for the system to function.