Paul Parsons

Specialization by university presses

Just as scholars now specialize, so do university presses. This article explains why university presses designate publishing lists, discusses how they determine their list-building areas, and analyzes the listbuilding designations of eighty leading American university presses. Listbuilding at university presses is heavily weighted toward the humanities and social sciences, with less emphasis on the natural sciences.

Roscoe Dunjee: Crusading Editor of Oklahoma's Black Dispatch, 1915–1955

After founding a weekly newspaper in 1915, Roscoe Dunjee spent the next four decades taking leading stands on civil rights issues. He spoke out editorially, and he also took personal risks to test discriminatory laws. He supported others who fought to integrate public transportation and schools. An activist, he sought to use peaceful methods to encourage change. In World War II he pointed out the incongruity of condemning Nazism for its treatment of Jews when blacks suffered continuing discrimination. Such protest earned the attention of the FBIs J. Edgar Hoover, who was not able to get Dunjee prosecuted during the war. Dunjee is one of twelve black leaders, including W.E.B. Du Bois and Frederick Douglass, recognized as “giants in American journalism” by the National Newspaper Publishers Association.

The Application of Libel Law to Fiction

Libel cases traditionally arise when the media offer as true something that is false. Through the years, the Supreme Court has fashioned a libel standard that emphasizes a defendant’s awareness of the truth or falsity of what is written. Ironically, this same standard now is being applied to works of fiction-works that, conversely, are offered on the face as false. Typically, a person will claim that a character in a novel is a thinly disguised rendition of himself and that readers who know him will have no trouble making the identification. If the plaintiff succeeds in showing identification, then “actual malice” can readily follow simply from the author’s knowledge of the difference between real events and the fictional accounts of those events. In California, a psychologist who ran nude encounter therapy groups sued Doubleday and novelist Gwen Davis Mitchell for the alleged portrayal of him in the novel Touching. The psychologist, Paul Bindrim, won a

Dangers of Libeling the Clergy.

75,000 judgment, including punitive damages.! More recently, Viking Press and author Robert Tine were taken to court over the novel Stale qf Grace. Tine’s former girlfriend, Lisa Springer, complained that a prostitute portrayed in the book had her first name, many of her physical attributes, the same educational background, and similar personality traits. Tine’s lawyer. Martin Garbus, argued before the court:

Fund-Raising Appeals to Alumni: Two Experiments.

From our nation’s founding, it has been particularly dangerous to publish criticism of the clergy. Courts have held that words not actionable in themselves may become so by being spoken or written of persons engaged in a particular profession.! It became well settled in both federal and state courts that an oral or written accusation that imports a moral or mental unfitness in a clergyman, or that accuses him of acts not reconcilable with his role as minister, is actionable per se without an allegation of special damages. To charge a minister with drunkennesseven if true-was actionable in Massachusetts in 1816.2 To suggest in print that a minister had lied was libelous in Virginia in 1867.3 To call a minister a “rotten egg” was ruled grossly libelous by the 7th US. Circuit Court of Appeals in 1894.4 To say that a minister was devoid of moral principle was ruled actionable in Texas the same year.’ To print that a minister was arrested for being “too much of a family man” was held to be libelous in New York in 1895.6To accuse a member of the clergy with having a violent and un-Christian temper was libelous in Nebraska the same year.’ To refer to a clergyman as a “religious hypocrite” was actionable in Minnesota in 1896.8 As that state’s supreme court wrote in 1910 It is not necessary to descend to vulgar abuse. or to make specific charger of