In 2012, as part of its 75th anniversary, the Association of University Presses revived the idea of a University Press Week to recognize the impact that a global community of university presses has on every one of us. This year, blog tour posts will examine ways that university presses #StepUP to educate and enlighten, motivate and inspire, support and act, using some common interrogatives. Today, we’re focusing on WHERE Purdue University Press StepsUP.
As the publishing arm of the University, Purdue University Press is deeply interwoven with campus, serving faculty, students, staff, departments, centers, and colleges. Our program aligns with the university’s strengths in several key subject areas such as technology and engineering, aeronautics and astronautics, veterinary medicine, and other disciplines in the humanities and sciences. (A list of our partnerships and initiatives with the university can be found here.)
The success of diverse faculty entering institutions of higher education is shaped by varying factors at both the individual and institutional levels. The Navigating Careers in Higher Education series, launched in October 2022, utilizes an intersectional lens to examine and understand how faculty members and administrators navigate careers and their aspirations to succeed. The open access series includes books that adopt an interdisciplinary, scholarly approach as well as personal testimonies of individuals sharing their own lived experiences, including challenges faced and lessons learned. Topics include addressing sexism, homophobia, racism, and ethnocentrism; the role of higher education institutions; the effects of growing nontenure-track faculty; the challenge of research agenda that may be perceived as controversial; maintaining a life-work balance; and entering leadership positions.
Dismantling Institutional Whiteness: Emerging Forms of Leadership in Higher Education, edited by M. Cristina Alcalde and Mangala Subramaniam
Dismantling Institutional Whiteness: Emerging Forms of Leadership in Higher Education focuses on the experiences of women of color in leadership roles in higher education. Top roles historically have gone to white men, and leadership has not reflected the range of identities and people who make up higher education. Why? And why does this problem continue to this day? Most importantly, what can be done to bring about meaningful change?
Dismantling Institutional Whiteness gathers a range of first-person narratives from women of color and examines the challenges they face not only at a systemic level, but also at a deeply personal level. Their experiences combined with research and statistics paint a sobering portrait of higher education’s problems when it comes to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Interspersed throughout their stories are practical suggestions for how to address inequity in higher education, and to give a voice to people who have been silenced and excluded. Whether a trustee, university executive, or faculty member at any level, this is essential reading for those interested in diversifying higher education leadership to ensure decisions reflect the priorities of all.
You can find a Q & A with the editors here.
Transforming Leadership Pathways for Humanities Professionals in Higher Education, edited by Roze Hentschell and Catherine E. Thomas
Transforming Leadership Pathways for Humanities Professionals in Higher Education includes thirteen essays from a variety of contributors investigating how humanities professionals grapple with the opportunities and challenges of leadership positions. The collection also considers the relationship between disciplinary areas of study, academic training, and the valuable skill sets and habits of mind that serve higher education leaders.
While Transforming Leadership Pathways emphasizes that a leadership route in higher education can be a welcome and positive professional move for many humanities scholars, the volume also acknowledges the issues that arise when faculty take on administrative positions while otherwise marginalized on campus because of faculty status, rank, or personal identity. This collection demystifies the path into higher education administration and argues that humanities scholars are uniquely qualified for such roles. Empathetic, deeply analytical, attuned to historical context, and trained in communication, teachers and scholars who hail from humanities disciplines often find themselves well-suited to the demands of complex academic leadership in today’s colleges and universities.
The Challenges of Minoritized Contingent Faculty in Higher Education, edited by Edna Chun and Alvin Evans
The Challenges of Minoritized Contingent Faculty in Higher Education offers a probing and unvarnished look at the employment challenges of these faculty members in four-year institutions. Based on in-depth interviews coupled with extensive research, the book highlights the double marginalization that can occur due to secondary employment status in the academic hierarchy, and the exclusion resulting from the intersectionality of nondominant social identities including race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability. As the first-person narratives reveal, these faculty often struggle for acceptance, recognition, and rewards in the day-to-day academic environment, and they can face devaluation of their contributions. As a pragmatic and concrete resource, this book offers proactive workforce strategies and key structural and policy recommendations that will assist academic and administrative leaders, including presidents, provosts, department chairs, and chief diversity officers, in building more inclusive working conditions for contingent faculty.
Higher Education Careers Beyond the Professoriate, edited by Karen Cardozo, Katherine Kearns, and Shannan Palma
Higher Education Careers Beyond the Professoriate is one of the first collections to explore PhD career versatility within higher education. The twenty-three contributors represent diverse disciplines, institution types, professional roles, and intersectional identities. Each thoughtful and personal essay explores firsthand what it means to remain in higher education, yet not in the traditional role of a professor. Unifying the essays is the idea that career diversity is intertwined with other diversity discourse, yielding a broad-based but critical examination of careers in higher education administration. This book offers powerful insight into cultural and structural barriers that inhibit institutional transformation and obscure the real range of PhD futures.
A Q & A with the authors is available here.
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