Wilfrid Laurier University Press has been handed a recommendation to “phase out or minimize” from university administrators, according to a petition being circulated online. The petition states that the recommendations include “severe cuts to the press” due to “immediate budgetary pressures.”

The petition details several reasons for opposing the recommendations, among them that the group responsible for the recommendations is “comprised 86% staff, but WLU Press is not, properly speaking, an ‘administrative program within the university.’” The petition further cites the press’s importance to “Canadian and international scholarship, and its enormous contribution to the reputation of Laurier as an institution whose cultural and intellectual outreach is thereby made more than the sum of its parts.”

The petition asks that “scholars, authors, and critics” sign to demonstrate their commitment to seeing the press find “a new model of sustainability rather than phase out.”