To the readers of Dissent

This is the first issue of Dissent published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. Penn Press will be taking over the entire business end of the magazine—production, circulation, subscription fulfillment, advertising, permissions, and promotion. The new cover by the Penn Press designer, John Hubbard, based on the original 1954 design, marks the transition. We retain complete editorial control of Dissent; there will be no change in the political direction of the magazine.

This is our 55th anniversary, and for all those years, we have been self-published. Dissent, one of the early editors said, was run like a family grocery store. In the age of the internet, we are no longer able to sustain that kind of independence. Like many other magazines, we face rising costs and declining revenues. Penn Press has come forward with a plan (it is a five year plan, but we won’t call it that) to make the magazine solvent, even to earn a little money. We are grateful for their enthusiasm for our project—which is obviously not a standard university press project.

The biggest change in our operations will come on our website. Since Penn Press hopes to increase the number of print subscriptions, we will no longer be able to post all of our print articles on the Web.Our current issue will be available in full for the next month. It isn’t possible to sustain a magazine that is essentially free—even the left must pay its way. We will post two art...