COLUMBIA, Mo. — A tide of anger has been swelling here since May after the new University of Missouri president, Timothy Wolfe, disclosed plans to close the university’s publishing house, stoking arguments over the institution’s priorities and fueling an escalating national debate over the necessity of university presses and their future in the digital world.

For more than five decades, Missouri’s press has printed prized academic titles including “The Collected Works of Langston Hughes,” “The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson” and “Mark Twain and His Circle.” Word that it was shutting down after losing its $400,000 annual subsidy drew outrage from professors, students, authors and alumni, and from the son of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower and black historian John Hope Franklin. A news release that the university circulated this week announcing plans for a new publishing operation seemed to only intensify the venom.

Such disagreements are playing out on campuses around the country, as tightening budgets have complicated efforts by university presses to keep up with the changing publishing marketplace.

Half a dozen universities have closed or suspended their presses over the past three years. Utah State’s press had to join a consortium of university presses in Colorado to survive. Another press, at Louisiana State, was spared after cutting staff and making other organizational changes.

“I really wish that universities would step up and say these presses are essential, we should fund them 100 percent,” said Richard Clement, the dean of libraries at Utah State. “I think that most presidents would tend to agree, but given the budgetary climate and situation, they have to make choices, and unfortunately the choices have not favored university presses.”

Scholars argue that university presses are vital for academic discourse. They publish erudite texts that commercial presses do not, giving scholars a forum to share and further research. Professors often rely on them to publish the works they need for tenure and promotion. But they are usually money-losing operations. The presses at the University of Chicago, Oxford and Cambridge are the only ones widely believed to be profitable.

Some universities have taken steps to revolutionize their publishing systems. Project Muse, which has published academic journals online as part of Johns Hopkins University Press since 1995, began publishing full-length digital books in January.

After closing its press in the mid-1990s, Rice University reopened a digital-only operation in 2006 but shut that down after four years. Rice’s example revealed a difficult truth about digital scholarly publishing: It’s still expensive. Most of the cost in producing scholarly writings comes before anything is printed on paper, through expenses like hiring people for peer review.

Under the University of Missouri’s new plan, the more than 2,000 books already published by the existing press operation, which will make way for the new one after production of its fall books, will be digitized and promoted by university libraries, a news release said. The new press will publish about 25 titles a year in hard copy, slightly less than the current output of 30, and digital format, although most will be in print initially, according to Brian Foster, provost of the university’s Columbia campus.

The university also will honor the contracts of authors signed to upcoming works and plans to publish the titles on its spring list, Wolfe said. Administrators do not know exactly how much the new model will cost, Foster said.

“One of the things that I believe is, if in fact we come up with a model that is more effective at disseminating scholarly work,” Wolfe said in an interview last week, “the other presses are going to have to look at this model and say, ‘Can we do what the University of Missouri is doing?’ ”

Wolfe acknowledged that he had never spoken to or consulted employees of the current press, and they were not involved in the creation of the new model. Many critics said the plan was vague and full of corporate language. They were concerned with the prospect that under the new plan students would be handling much of the work.

“Will established scholars be willing to work with such a haphazardly staffed press?” Bruce Joshua Miller, a sales representative for university publishers, and Ned Stuckey-French, a professor at Florida State who has published with the Missouri press, wrote in a more than 1,500-word news release responding to the university’s announcement.

The administration seemed unaware that the press already was doing the supposedly new things described in the plan, Clair Willcox, the current editor of the press, said. The press, for instance, already publishes e-books, he said.

“The staff was enraged,” Willcox said of when his colleagues saw the details of the plan. “They were looking at descriptions of what they already did. It suggests that somehow they weren’t doing a good enough job over here.”