This week’s programme is rather unusual: it has six guests rather than one. To mark the twentieth birthday of Princeton University Press‘s European office in Woodstock, near Oxford, I spoke to some PUP staff members about their jobs and their views on the publishing landscape. The extract below is from my conversation with Christie Henry, who’s been director of the press since 2017. Previously she spent over two decades at the University of Chicago Press where she was editorial director for the sciences, social sciences, and reference, so I was curious to know what it’s been like experiencing PUP from the inside rather than the outside these past two years.
CHRISTIE HENRY
One of the really appealing aspects of Princeton is that it is an independent press closely affiliated with a world-renowned university. So I thought it would be an interesting shift to go from being a reporting department of a university, which is the way Chicago is structured, to this kind of environment, where you’ve got a great partnership, but independence. I hadn’t realized just how meaningful that distinction is. And one of the most tangible examples for me is that we are able here to do things like create new positions or reorganize teams to perhaps better reflect the dynamics of the publishing industry now, without having to always map and align those on the university structure. We can make decisions that we feel are best as a publisher without having to ensure that alignment. And that has been much more meaningful in these first two years than I realized, so that’s a great discovery.
I had, like many people, the impression that Princeton was at the top of publishing knowledge and evolution in everything, which could have made this a less interesting job, because then what’s a director to come in to do, if everything’s humming along? I’m pleasantly surprised that there were opportunities for change and ongoing growth, and I would wrap most of that around our modernization. So another aspect of being independent is that it’s then incumbent upon the press to come up with its own best practices because it’s not always driven along by the growth or change of a university. So in areas like equity and inclusion, for example, that’s something that we’ve had to create internally and something that really appeals to me and that hadn’t been accomplished in a cross-organizational way here. So pleasant discoveries which I’ve seen as opportunities.
hedgehog & fox
Christie studied environmental science as an undergraduate so it’s perhaps unsurprising that she compares the world of university press publishing to an ecosystem.
christie henry
One thing we know from ecosystem studies is that the greater the diversity the more resilient those systems seem to be, and I think that is one of the particular strengths of the university press ecosystem. We have a great diversity of types of publishers, from small publishers that publish a handful of books a year to group four publishers that publish hundreds of books a year, and then Oxford and Cambridge as these kind of apex species in that ecosystem. So we can adapt to the different needs and we each find our niche in many ways. Yes, we occasionally compete for books, but I think each of us is serving the ecosystem in a really beneficial way because we’ve got so many varieties of forms.
Within many of our own publications programs, we also have great diversities of models of publishing: journals, distribution, and within the book lists. In a list like Princeton’s, what compels me so much is that it has titles in humanities, social sciences, sciences, contributing in significant ways, but it also is reaching general readers through our trade program, textbooks shaping the way the pedagogy is steering, and monographs, which are really field-defining, knowledge-codifying.
And I think, therefore, as the economic climate shifts (and we’re facing that all the time), when one part of our business faces acute challenges in a particular year, we can approach that volatility with greater confidence because of the diversity of form and the diversity of revenue streams. So that’s a great plus to me.
Fundamentally we’re also guided by a mission, so we can still be making decisions that are about animating conversations and forming knowledge and now more than ever I’ve heard us referred to as ‘the new world free press’. And that’s incredibly empowering – also a bit worrisome, given what it says about the press itself, but our commitment to peer review and to the integrity of knowledge, I think, has become ever more acute and something that positively reinforces our existence. We need to be better about communicating that as a community and not doing so within the echo chamber of ourselves. It’s incumbent upon us to signal how we differ and what we’re doing to protect the integrity of knowledge in a meaningful way.
hedgehog & fox
So, I suggested, that argues for a view of the University Press publisher as an active participant in creating the intellectual climate rather than merely a conduit for the output of the academy.
christie henry
I see us an active agent. Really. I think that that’s where, by putting a book in our catalogue, we’re making a statement about the kind of work that is resonant with the academy; by supporting underrepresented authors through giving them more information about publishing or giving more resources toward their books, we can make a change that then might flow through to the university environment in a different way; by challenging the focus on elite institutions and broadening our author demographics, that can also bring change to the university ecosystem. I think there is a lot that we can do, a lot that we are doing; this is not new, this is what university presses have been working towards since our origins as printers. Every one of us has worked hard to distinguish ourselves as publishers and not service industries of our universities.
The programme also includes interviews with Global Promotions Director Caroline Priday, Digital and Audio Director Kimberley Williams, International Sales Director Andrew Brewer, Editorial Director (Social Sciences) Sarah Caro and Senior Publisher and Executive Editor Rob Tempio. My thanks to Kate Farquhar-Thomson (Head of Publicity Europe) for all her work behind the scenes to make this programme possible. Longer versions of the interviews on which this programme is based will be published over the coming months.