The lack of diversity among university press editors is a serious problem. Solving this problem will take a sustained effort to recruit and promote highly qualified people from diverse backgrounds.
Fortunately for presses, given the scarcity of jobs in academe, these people are not actually hard to find. If we are willing to cast a wider net and consider the many applicants we get rather than hiring someone we already know from a personal connection or an internship, we can diversify without additional funding. Recruiting for the Mellon fellowship program [to increase diversity in academic publishing] has brought forward hundreds of dazzlingly accomplished candidates, many with advanced degrees, who want to work in our field.
How have we overlooked these remarkable people before? Did they even apply for openings at our presses? Were they screened out as overqualified? If so, that is a major problem. We need to hire these people, mentor them, and help them to move up as soon as they have gained the experience to do so. In the bargain, we will get to work with brilliant people, some of them bilingual or multilingual, who have the academic training and diverse life experiences the publishing industry desperately needs in order to stay relevant. —Gita Devi Manaktala
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Publishers, press directors, editors, scholars, and other insiders share their views on the state and future of academic publishing.
Achieving greater diversity in the workplace is an important end in itself, and would help us extend the range of what we publish. But there is no straight line between what an editor publishes and his or her demographic profile and personal interests. Our presses, the priorities of the academy, and the market help to determine which books and authors editors seek. Fortunately, those forces do currently encourage us to build diverse lists, though the fact that most of us are white probably affects their quality and quantity in ways we can’t clearly see.
It might be worth noting that, in addition to being overwhelmingly white, we are overwhelmingly left of center, middle-class, and trained in the humanities. We’re also disproportionately secular. At a time when the country is deeply divided, we’re a blue-state industry, like the academy itself. We should probably worry about this too, even if we believe that truth has a liberal bias, as it may affect which truths we like to tell and how we tell them. —Ian Malcolm
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There are a couple of ways to approach an answer to this question. One would be to ask whether the presses have failed to open pathways to a more diverse group of authors over the past 10 or 20 years. I have not seen any data on this question, but my impressionistic sense is that the diversity of authors among AAUP presses has grown significantly — perhaps even at a faster rate than that of the entire professoriate.
That said, there are unquestionably missing perspectives when we have such an undifferentiated population among editors. —Mark Edington
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Not only are acquisitions editors overwhelmingly white but we also look unlike the population we serve on other spectra of diversity. For example, acquisitions editors are also overwhelmingly able-bodied, which may impact how we think about issues of disability and accessibility when we design publications. In an industry where we pride ourselves on making voices from the margins heard, we need to do better in recruiting and retaining a diverse work force. —Charles Watkinson
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I’ve run three editorial searches since I’ve been director. I typically perform two rounds of interviews with a deep candidate pool. My current acquisitions editor is the only nonwhite person I’ve officially interviewed during that time. He also happens to be the most experienced acquisitions editor I’ve interviewed. But there is little to no diversity available in the job pool. I don’t know how to solve that. It’s a deeper problem we need to aggressively address if we want to remain relevant.—James McCoy
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Publishing is a very white and middle-class profession — which I believe stems from the fact that it is still very much an apprenticeship field. So if you can’t afford to work for free or know someone who can give you that first job, it is very hard to break in. Unless we as publishers acknowledge this issue more widely and make a concerted effort to put programs in place to change the demographics, not much will change. —Leila Salisbury
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I am not white, and I am ever aware of my difference. It means I am approaching a project from a slightly different angle, with different questions and concerns about an argument’s potential impact on an audience or community.
All acquisitions editors are looking for great projects, and they are especially attracted to those that resonate with their own experiences. If those experiences are too much the same, we risk seeing that sameness in the books we publish.—Elizabeth Branch Dyson
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As a gay white man, I don’t know how it feels to be African-American or Asian-American, but I do know strong and valuable scholarship. I wish university-press publishing had more people of color, but it shouldn’t detract from the fact that university presses give a platform to a highly diverse group of authors from various races, ethnicities, and genders —Fredric Nachbaur
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Although scholarly editors may be overwhelmingly white, our authors are not. University presses continue to publish books from a diverse authorship on topics that commercial presses would never touch. Still, we need to do more to open career paths for editors from underrepresented groups. The Mellon-funded initiative to create university press fellowships for editors from these groups has already attracted a talented group of candidates. —Greg Britton
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As far as I can tell, it makes no difference at all. My colleagues, all of whom are white and who work in subjects such as African, Middle Eastern, Asian, and Latin American studies, are open to all sorts of projects, actively engaged in the fields, and eager to build strong and interesting lists. The quality of their lists, in turn, attract the work of scholars of every race—Beatrice Rehl
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Our interest is in the credibility of the scholarship and not the racial or cultural backgrounds of the authors or topics. Nevertheless, greater diversity in university-press publishing can only be for the good. —David Rosenbaum
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As a white women who acquires in a diverse range of fields that includes African-American studies, Latino studies, and Asian-American studies, I think about this a lot. Just like any form of systemic underrepresentation, the general whiteness of acquisitions editors impacts the scholarship that gets published in implicit and explicit ways. I believe a book can be an action, and I try to stay mindful of my white privilege and cultivate books that reflect the diversity we want and need to see reflected in acquisitions departments. —Dawn Durante
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Editors, like others in the academy and out, rely on standard markers of achievement to identify promising authors. These are systematically denied to scholars of color. That means editors should be reaching beyond their well-established networks. — Caitlin Zaloom
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There’s so much to unpack in this question. First of all, I’m not sure many minorities see publishing — let alone academic publishing — as a potential career path. I know I didn’t. I came into all of this through a back door — from a journalism/public-relations background, I stumbled into a job as a press publicist, and eventually transitioned to editorial. In order to attract more minority candidates, we really need to sell them on the idea that scholarly publishing can be a long-term, steady career.
Still, just because you add more minority editors doesn’t mean they’ll automatically be better at developing minority voices. They could come from such privilege, or might be in such denial, that they are oblivious to race matters. At the same time, I know white editors who understand the importance of addressing race in every project they oversee, so the color of your skin does not make you inherently better or worse at acquiring race-related topics. I think it’s much more dependent on your personal outlook — and how passionate you are about giving voice to underrepresented groups. Having said that, I also have had several scholars of color tell me that they felt more comfortable approaching me than they would a white editor, so in that regard alone I suppose it’s important to have more minority editors.
We all have our “blind spots” when it comes to working outside of our comfort zones. I learned this firsthand acquiring in indigenous studies when I discovered there were additional cultural and procedural considerations that simply weren’t on my radar (things like seeking tribal permission or getting community input). So, it’s not just a “white” problem; I think we all need to work harder at understanding and including perspectives from groups beyond our own.
Because the vast majority of editors are white, it can definitely lead to some major “blind spots” in the books that get published. Don’t get me wrong — white editors who acquire in critical race studies or in specific area studies tend to be very sensitive to these issues. But what about the editor who acquires regional trade books, for example? If that editor commissions a regional history will s/he push for one that begins with indigenous accounts and also includes African-American, Latino, Asian-American, and other perspectives, no matter how small in numbers they might be? Will that same editor push an author to go beyond just “official” documents to search for minority sources? It’s possible, but my experience has been that it’s not probable. —Ranjit Arab
