Letter to the Editor

Re: Alison Baverstock, 'Where Will the Next Generation of Publishers Come From?' JSP 42, 1 (October 2010): 31-44

Dear Dr. Baverstock,

I write to congratulate you on your fine article in the October 2010 issue on 'Where Will the Next Generation of Publishers Come From?' This is an issue that I fear American university presses have not paid as much attention to as they should, with some notable exceptions. The current president of the AAUP, Richard Brown of Georgetown University Press, has always made this a concern at his press, and perhaps he will want to tell you more about what Georgetown has done.

While I was director of Penn State University Press (1989-2009), I made it a point to think of training the next generation as a specific part of the press's mission. Indeed, ours may be the only university press that explicitly includes reference to its internship program as part of its mission statement: http://www.psupress.org/aboutPSP/mission.html.

Even before I arrived at the Press, it had a cooperative program with the English Department whereby students who had taken and gotten an A in the 400-level Editorial Process course could qualify for an (unpaid) internship at the Press in the Production Department that would count for course credit. Over time we added internship programs in the Editorial and Marketing departments as well. Generally speaking, an intern in these programs would be paid a minimum-wage hourly rate for working 10-15 hours per week. Sometimes interns would be given the opportunity to do an unpaid internship over the summer which, if their performance proved meritorious enough, could convert into an internship paid at a somewhat higher than minimum level during the academic year.

In every case, we made an effort to expose these interns to the workings of the Press overall, so as to further their education and stimulate their interest in a publishing career. This was not too difficult to accomplish in an office where we had fewer than two dozen staff and were located on campus.

One additional special program targeted to minority students thrived for about ten years, until legal changes in the status of anything identified as an 'affirmative action' program made it impossible to continue. In this program, the Press made an application on behalf of a student to the campus-based Equal Opportunity Planning Committee for shared funding, and over the course of a year this intern would spend some time working in each department of the Press. At the end the student would prepare a formal report on the experience, which was submitted to the EOPC: http://www.equity.psu.edu/eopc/.

The staff member who championed and developed this program at the Press, Alison Reeves (now at the World Bank), who had been a minority intern herself at Ohio State University Press before joining the Press's staff as a marketing assistant, used it as the basis for recommending a more general diversity initiative for the AAUP and became a member of its Diversity Committee when that was formed in the 1990s.

Within the AAUP, concerns about diversity first were voiced in the early 1980s by members of the WISP (Women in Scholarly Publishing) group, led by Carol Orr, then director of the University of Tennessee Press, and they were mostly aimed at breaking the 'glass ceiling' for female employees, who at that time were underrepresented in the highest ranks of university press administration. That problem was largely solved by the 1990s, and concern for underrepresentation of ethnic and racial minority groups came to take its place. The founding of the Diversity Committee in the AAUP was one manifestation of that shift. That committee itself has since been disbanded, for what reasons I do not know, as I don't think this problem has been resolved in any completely satisfactory way. The broader industry group AAP [Association of American Publishers] founded its own Diversity Committee around the same time, and it remains in existence today: http://www.publishers.org/main/Diversity/divers_Comm_Roster.htm. I was glad to read about the efforts along...