Cover Story

Breaking Into Textbook Publishing: The Field is More Level Than You Think

by Brian Cole

Academic publishing. One might think the entire system has broken down. The Internet is filled with articles and Weblogs (blogs) that bemoan the fact that quality scholarship often goes unpublished. With 44,000-plus newly-minted Ph.D.s each year, many of whom invade campuses to try to climb the tenure ladder, the competition to have one’s work published is fierce. So where do part-timers fit in? Is it even more difficult for those who hold part-time faculty appointments to find publishers for their scholarship and research?

According to Cathy N. Davidson, vice provost for interdisciplinary studies, co-founder of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, and a professor of English at Duke University, in her article “Understanding the Economic Burden of Scholarly Publishing” printed in the October 3, 2003 issue of The Chronicle Review, the crisis in scholarly publishing is real, “and it signals a major threat to scholarly communication as we know it.” The focus of her essay revolves around the financial decline of the university press, the center of academic publishing. In the essay, she identifies several theories. They include the aforementioned tie between book publishing and tenure, the rise of chain bookstores and electronic booksellers, and the jargon of post-modern critical theory shrinking the audience for the humanities, among many others.

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Fourth Estate

Review of The Teaching Professor

by Mark J. Drozdowski

Each week I receive my fair share of unsolicited newsletters of various ilk. For a price, they promise to help me raise more money, become a better public speaker, reduce stress, manage people or time more effectively, or somehow improve my job performance and make me a happier camper. In most cases, I send them straight to File 13 without a second glance. Newsletters and I have a checkered history.

With that history in mind, I cautiously opened the Magna Publications envelope containing a dozen issues of The Teaching Professor, each numbering six or eight pages of cream stock with green accents. To my eventual surprise, they managed to steer clear of File 13, instead finding a permanent place on my office bookshelf.

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Part-Time Thoughts Blog

Through the Looking Glass and into the National Labor College

Posted: March 17th, 2008

I was reading about the National Labor College (oh, don't even ask me why), and I came upon this information on the AFT website:

FACULTY: 10 full-time and 30 adjunct/part-time. Part-time faculty voted for AFT representation in November 2007.

I missed coverage of that union drive in the November 2007 issue of AFT's newspaper On Campus. Really, who cares if the part-timers chose to unionize at the NLC. It's this next bit of information that I found the most interesting.

Comments: 5

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