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“Essential” became a key concept during the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic as businesses from nail salons to pet groomers clamored for “essential” designations in order to remain open. Bookstores were often deemed essential, emerging as spaces that provided important mental and emotional refuge for isolated people.
But what about the publishers whose books fill their shelves? And the people doing the work of making and publishing those books, who ensure that the research that emerges from higher education is not siloed within only scholarly spaces, but is instead part of larger conversations? Not all university press books make it to the shelves of all independent bookstores, but all of us publish work that fosters conversations among academics, in scholarly disciplines, and into communities of readers, learners, and thinkers around the world. We know our authors, our books, and, often literally, our readers.
University presses (UPs) are a unique community within publishing and in higher education. There are many common traits across UPs, some of which we share with other publishers and some of which are exclusively our own:
- We make scholarly research visible to both disciplinary scholars and non-specialist readers.
- We publish books and journals that would likely otherwise never reach the readers whose concerns and dreams they articulate.
- As nonprofits, our publishing decisions are as much informed by content and collective good as they are by sales.
Our publications are commonly used as texts in classrooms and for pedagogical development by teachers, to shape policy, and to offer important benchmarks that sustain faculty job searches, tenure, and promotion in support of higher education. Our institutional histories are often as deep and long as the disciplines we publish — some presses are synonymous with certain fields. And, like scholarship itself, UPs operate in worlds of far horizons; as we celebrate during University Press Week 2024, November 11-15, university presses often “Step UP,” generating work that results in deep thought, formal innovation, and challenging ideas that directly participate in social change and understandings of cultural and policy-driven spaces I argue that this work of making connections through difficult ideas is essential, but also that we have more work to do.
We exist as publishers and also within higher education, and we prioritize and understand the ideals of both sectors. University presses do hard work — we take on both big, unwieldy research and small, laser-focused examinations and we work through dense material and collaborate with readers and authors to produce meaningful research, recognizing expertise and knowledge at every step. That combination of collaboration and expertise has long been essential — but it could also be transformative in the present moment if we embrace doing it meaningfully with each other. We could push hiring and publishing practices to a better place:
- Hire and retain early career staff while we support contingent faculty in writing their research.
- Embrace remote work and ensure that we’re publishing work from scholars at a broad range of institutions and not just privileging those at the most elite institutions.
- Seek gendered, racial, and ethnic demographic representation across our staff and in our publications.
The scholarly work we publish and the peer review processes we navigate are not without bias or shortcomings – but we continually strive to make the whole endeavor more equitable, inclusive, and generative for ourselves as publishers, our readers, and our authors.
Higher education and the people within it are negotiating with state legislatures that intervene deeply into what it means to learn, teach, and exist on campuses; a genocide that, in addition to inconceivable deaths and suffering, has become a flashpoint in US education with impacts to academic freedom and faculty’s and students’ rights around the world; U.S. laws that legislate the safety and rights of women, queer folks, and people of color; and deep, existential fears about a foreboding upcoming election. From institutions to faculty and from students to staff, promises were made in 2020 about dedicating resources, time, and energy toward bettering campuses and the world – but in 2024, we see faculty hiring freezes as states and schools restrict funding; universities and colleges divesting from their DEIJ commitments because of restrictive legislation (and sometimes in anticipation of far-right demands); strategic underfunding of humanities; declining rates of hiring and tenuring of faculty; and entire colleges shuttering overnight.
Like higher education, the publishing community made promises of progress during the pandemic, too. While some publishers have utilized remote or hybrid work and organizations like We Need Diverse Books are ensuring more substantive bodies of work by marginalized writers, Black women have been pushed out of top-tier positions, jobs continue to coalesce in major metropolitan areas despite knowing that these places aren’t affordable or accessible for most, and hiring and publishing practices fail to reflect the varied demographics of the global landscape.
What happens in both sectors is deeply interwoven with larger political and economic structures. Undermining campus freedoms is just one example of broad efforts to restrict civil rights. Promises of change, investment, and actions were made and broken in both higher education and publishing, but university presses are uniquely positioned to demand that everyone is valued within this work — contingent faculty and tenured, editorial assistants and directors. Our UP fates are largely intertwined with higher education. And the circulation of knowledge and creativity, with roots in relationship-building and communications, is essential. Ensuring that continues is how we can always find value in what we do.
The works we have published are evident everywhere in the current moment — scholars have long advanced ideas about women’s rights, LBTGQ+ people’s rights, and environmental protections, and university presses have always published those ideas and circulated them through social, cultural, and policy spaces because of our essential investment in translating complex ideas and data into action. And we have an opportunity now to keep doing that through continuing not just the work we do but how we do it: through diversity and inclusion efforts, centering mentorship and retention practices to change who works and stays in publishing, and publishing books and scholars that value equity. It’s imperative that an industry that holds such an important place in higher education, publishing, and society figures out how to not just be essential but also to understand why being essential is necessary. It’s not just to sell more books. It matters that we continue to do this work together and that we always endeavor to do it better — better publications, better colleagues, better processes, and better futures for everyone, regardless of what places they hold in both higher education and publishing, but also beyond. We grow by investing in ourselves and each other and recognizing what we do, how we do it, and why we do it as essential.
