Publishing insiders are horrified because they claim that powerful university presses “ganged up” on the New York Review of Books after it published a story by accused sex offender Jian Ghomeshi.
Backlash over the essay, “Reflections from a Hashtag,” in which he moaned he’d become a pariah since the 2016 charges (of which he was acquitted), ultimately led to the sensational firing of NYRB editor Ian Buruma for running it.
After Buruma’s ouster, Jennifer Crewe, president of the Association of University Presses — whose members, we’re told, are the NYRB’s main advertisers — told the New York Times, “the university press community was greatly concerned” about the article, but “to my knowledge no one threatened to pull ads.”
But in a large email group that included Crewe — messages from which have been leaked to Page Six — the executive director of the University of California Press, Tim Sullivan, said he planned to write a letter of complaint to the NYRB, and, “if their response isn’t satisfactory, I plan on pulling the Press’s advertising and inviting others to do the same.”
He asked others to sign the letter, but we’re told it wasn’t sent.
On Wednesday Sullivan told us, “I never sent the letter (or contacted the Review in any other way) because Buruma’s departure and the Review’s explanation of his departure – which I’m sure you’ve seen, and which involved multiple factors, including a breakdown of editorial process – made it unnecessary.”
Crewe, also director of the Columbia University Press, replied that she’d spoken to the NYRB’s associate publisher Catherine Tice, and told her, “I thought that the way the magazine deals with the aftermath of the publication of the Ghomeshi article will be all-important, and any decisions Columbia makes about our future working relationship with them would be taken after that …”
On Thursday, Crewe told us her message was “intended to urge the few directors who seemed to be contemplating pulling ads to wait until we had a response from the NYRB to their own story before anyone responded.”
She added, “university presses have had a long and strong tradition of defending freedom of expression” and said that, “I fully expect that we will continue our strong relationship with the NYRB.”
A publishing insider said, “we just find it concerning that university presses, which are supposed to stand for liberal values, open inquiry and free thought, would gang up on an editor who made an unpopular choice.”
Sullivan told us he wondered how his proposed letter could be seen as a threat, and said, “The idea that we ‘ganged up on’ Buruma is an outright mischaracterization. And the idea that the I – or anyone else – reacted because the choice was ‘unpopular’ seems laughable.
He called Ghomeshi’s piece “mendacious, self-serving, poorly argued, lacking in any revelatory moment or insight, deeply anti-empathetic, obusfactory, and, in my estimation, unworthy of the New York Review of Books’ editorial approval,” and said “One could also argue – and I would – that by publishing such a flawed piece, the Review exacerbated Ghomeshi’s original act of silencing of women’s voices.”
The NYRB didn’t get back to us.
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