We seem to have lost sight of a simple truth of late. Not all things we do should or ought to be money-making enterprises. Yet we should do them anyway, because, to put it simply, without them we lose everything that makes making money worth the bother.
A string of university decisions in the last few years—most recently the forced resignation of the president of the University of Virginia and now the announced cutting of the University of Missouri Press— underscore how far we have drifted from this truth. None of these decisions have been about bad decision-making or scandal or anything that might impair the work of education. …