Can we save Gettysburg Review?
Welcome to our weekend conversation!
Many of you have likely already heard the news: Gettysburg Review announced this past week that Gettysburg College would cease the magazine’s publication.
On the magazine’s site, Editor Mark Drew posted,
After thirty-five years of editorial and publishing excellence, the president of Gettysburg College has decided to end the Gettysburg Review. Lauren [Hohle] and I are understandably devastated. We have been offered a rationale for this decision, but it’s frankly one that neither Lauren nor I understand or accept. It was made clear to us that they know little about who we are, what we do, and what our value is, and could be, to the Gettysburg College campus.
This news hit a lot of people hard, myself included. My first response was shock. But we just read that magazine!, I thought, the way people sometimes respond after hearing terrible news about a person—But I just saw them!
A literary magazine is not a person, of course. But the closure of this particular journal means not only the loss of another vital home for beautiful and important contemporary writing, but the loss of jobs for the editors. I interviewed Lauren about a week ago, as part of our Lit Mag Reading Club discussion of Gettysburg Review. She was engaged, funny, and clearly passionate about this work.
If the magazine’s closing felt shocking to me, I cannot imagine how these editors feel. From what they’ve tweeted, it appears they were completely excluded from this decision.
It also appears the editors were given no warning that this was coming, and that there was no negotiation option made available to them. Nor, it seems, was there any effort to seek a buyer for the magazine. The college board met last week and presumably discussed this situation. The editors, from what I gather, were not part of that discussion.
Evidently too, the college president’s reasons for closing the magazine are not based on facts. According to the editors, he inflated the magazine’s budget when speaking with the faculty. He also hinted at layoffs which suggest a need for budget-cutting overall. Yet just last week, the college received a $10 million-dollar donation from a former English major. The editors are right to ask, where is that money going?
Another question, of course, is what can be done?
Several magazines have gone through threats of closure over the years, then pulled through. In spring of 2022 Conjunctions almost stopped publication, but then didn’t, after outcry and public pressure upon Bard College. In the Story Magazine newsletter from a few days ago, Editor Michael Nye recounted the way people rallied behind and ultimately saved Missouri Review.
The editors of Gettysburg Review are encouraging readers to reach out to the president and provost of Gettysburg College.
You might also try this contact:
If you need some inspiration, here is a letter from Dr. Corey Van Landingham, Assistant Professor in the Gettysburg English Department. She writes,
Dear President Iuliano, Provost Bookwala, and Gettysburg College,
…You have stated that you need to implement a “more intentional focus” and that your efforts must relate to student demand and experience —but what exactly is your intent? To make the humanities less human? To continue, as other colleges and universities have recently done, bulldozing the arts out of the liberal arts? And how much do you know about the student experience of the coveted internships with the Gettysburg Review? About the import, as a young undergraduate reader and writer, of having a renowned novelist, memoirist, or poet visit your classroom, answer your questions, give readings on campus, sign your books? For the Review doesn’t only bring writing to life on the page—pages that reach across, and outside of, the country, pages that have and continue to contain the nation’s most important writers, pages that consistently feature work that wins the country’s top literary prizes and recognition—but off the page as well.
Another powerful letter was written and posted by writer A.C. Francis.
I wrote and posted a letter of my own, which is here.
If you feel compelled to speak up on behalf of this magazine and the jobs of its editors, do so! Call, write letters, tweet, tell your influential friends to reach out to the college president, write an article, find reporters who may be interested and make some noise.
If you need added incentive to write an open letter, Ninth Letter is waiving submission fees for anyone who does so.
“What exactly is your intent?” Professor Landingham asks the school principal and provost in her open letter. “To make the humanities less human?”
It very well may be.
We ought not let that happen.
What say you, friends?
Were you surprised by this news?
If you have a connection to this journal, did you speak out in some capacity?
Do you have your own experiences with rescuing a lit mag, and its staff, from closure?
Any other ideas for ways to push back on college administrations who don’t value lit mags?
Is our literary culture speeding headlong into heck in a handbasket?
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