Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion from a University Press Perspective - An Update

Cathy Felgar, Publishing Operations Director of Princeton University Press returns to the Westchester Words podcast to provide listeners with an update about the Press' ongoing diversity and inclusion initiatives.

Transcript

Nicole Tomassi: 0:06

Welcome to Westchester words, education ed tech and publishing I'm Nicole Tomassi, and in this episode, Cathy Felgar, Publishing Operations Director for Princeton University Press joins me to share an update on all of the DEI initiatives that the press has been working on since Cathy was originally here on Westchester words earlier this spring. Cathy, it's fantastic to welcome you back to Westchester words.

Cathy Felgar: 0:30

Thank you, Nicole.

Nicole Tomassi: 0:31

I'm really excited to catch up with you because the press has been quite busy with a number of E and I initiatives. And I wondered if we could first start with an update about the two individuals who were the initial hires for the press' publishing fellowship program, uh, which to remind our listeners was intended to introduce underrepresented communities to the opportunities that are available within the university press publishing space.

Cathy Felgar: 0:55

Yes. Things are going great with this program. Jayden Young and Alejandro Perez joined us in, in July as PUP's first two publishing fellows. We are so glad that they joined us Jayden hails from Spokane Washington and is a 2020 graduate from Dartmouth. She majored in geography and minored in Eastern middle Eastern studies. Jaden has been learning about coding manuscripts copy editing indexes, and she's already taken on a couple of projects to oversee herself in the production editorial department. She's also designed a survey for our existing and new freelancers on optin demographic information and areas of interest. She's collected the data on about 200 existing freelancers so far, and we'll be using this is a starting point for measuring and we hope eventually expanding our freelancer pool overall, especially in terms of diversity and inclusion. Alejandro recently received his BA in Hispanic studies from Columbia university. He's working in our special sales group, looking at identifying common reading audiences, including underrepresented student populations at community colleges and other schools. Both Jayden and Alejandro participate in a wide variety of meetings at the press to acclimate to the business in a way that new hires generally would not have the time to do. They also write monthly reports on their experiences, and we hope this will help us better shape the experience for future fellows. We're already starting to think about recruitment for our next two publishing fellowships. So the program is set to run for five years with two fellows per year, and they, the new fellows start in July. So as a reminder to anyone listening, who might be considering applying for future fellowship, we will be seeking applicants from groups who are traditionally underrepresented in publishing. These are salaried 12 month positions with full benefits and a college degree is not required.

Nicole Tomassi: 2:59

It sounds like the, uh, fellowship program is off to a really incredible start. Thank you for sharing an update on that. Can you tell me how things are progressing with the Supporting Diverse Voices grant program, um, which partners an unpublished scholar from an underrepresented group with an acquisitions editor and with a book coach?

Cathy Felgar: 3:19

Yes, sure. I'm happy to say that all is going well in this endeavor also. For the first group we took in the entire science acquisitions team spent several weeks reviewing and discussing applications for the first grant cycle, which focused on women trans and gender expansive authors in science and math. We had more than 100 applications and on May 24th, we notified 14 scholars that they had been selected for grants and introduced their sponsoring editors and coaching partners. We offered every applicant copies of our books, the book proposal book by coaching partner, Laura Portwood Staser, and the scientist guide to writing. We received some very supportive comments from awardees and applicants alike. Then for the second intake group, the social science team started brainstorming on themes last June. And we announced in July that we were seeking non-fiction work by BIPOC scholars in social sciences in the fields of economics, sociology, politics, and international relations, anthropology, and urban studies, including books intended for general readers, scholarly monographs, and textbooks. We received more than 200 applications in August. That opportunity was available to previously published authors and first time authors alike. We expect to be informing the awardees later this month. Then we'll have a third cycle in winter 2022. The grants will focus on humanities. We'll announce more details on that by the end of this calendar year during the process, we've added a fifth book coach to the group. All five of our book coaches are listed on our webpage about the program, which I think you'll be listing, uh, in your notes, Nicole.

Nicole Tomassi: 5:14

I most certainly will. And, uh, it sounds like there was a great, um, outpouring of interest from the community in the application, so that that's really exciting.

Cathy Felgar: 5:24

Yes.

Nicole Tomassi: 5:26

I'm hoping you're gonna continue to share more good news with me and the rest of the audience listening in. What can you tell me about the global equity grants program?

Cathy Felgar: 5:36

Sure. We have in that program, we've awarded 14 grants to date, to authors under contract, uh, to support court, the authors under from underrepresented groups in the areas of parental or family care, travel, art permissions, developmental editing, translation workshops, advertising, media, coaching, or research assistant funds.

Nicole Tomassi: 5:59

Coming back Inside the university press, does Princeton have currently any initiatives that are underway for the staff?

Cathy Felgar: 6:07

Yes, we have quite a few. So, um, first I'll mention we all completed mandatory anti harassment training recently with Emtrain, our new learning management system. It was very up to date training, including remote working, Zoom meetings and gender diversity in the workplace. Their model is built on social competency, pillars of ethics, respect, and inclusion, and they emphasize that social competencies are earned so you can change your behavior. Then we had a meeting in June to discuss how to approach neurodiversity in the workplace. At that time, we identified some recommended steps that could help all of our colleagues, such as ensuring that meeting agendas are available at least 48 hours beforehand, and that notes and recordings are provided afterward. We identified a best practice that someone other than the meeting chair needs to monitor zoom chat. Because of COVID, although we have come back to the office on a voluntary basis, all meetings of more than two people are still via Zoom. We also concluded during that meeting that we needed a consultant to come in to help us define what neurodiversity really is and map a path toward greater understanding and inclusion for the neurodiverse in our workplace. I'm excited to say we've engaged Daniel Ahearn of Adjust, who will be leading an all staff training session scheduled for December 6th. I am actually really personally, um, excited to learn more about this topic, but in another area we have an exciting development at PUP, where more than 30 staff have elected to attend a 13 class core called BIPOC design history. I'm not taking part in that, but from what I hear, the course was originated by Polymode, a design collective based in California, and the classes begin with the origin of the African alphabet, continue through topics ranging from design, design systems within slavery and white supremacy, design history of the Harlem Renaissance and the intermingling of black music and design and funk black exploitation and hiphop. And lastly, I'll say that earlier this year, our E and I committee hosted a discussion of the Latino experience, which was a showcase of nonfiction and fiction, short films, and a number of colleagues here at PUP entrusted their life stories and experiences during that meaningful and generative conversation.

Nicole Tomassi: 8:56

It sounds like a lot of great work is being done with the staff of the press as well. Um, and it's wonderful that so many members, uh, so many colleagues were willing to share their experiences and stories for the Latino experience.

Cathy Felgar: 9:09

Yeah.

Nicole Tomassi: 9:10

When you were here in the spring, Cathy, you had mentioned that Princeton University press was looking at broadening the diversity of the authors it publishes. Are there any additional DEI related measures within the editorial workflow that you can talk about?

Cathy Felgar: 9:27

Here, we are Um, still working on making the author diversity, uh, targets more transparent within PUP, but in other areas, we are, uh, discussing diversity and peer review. Um, like all other groups of people, we found peer reviewers are feeling the strains of COVID and relating family care issues. So during the past 18 months, it has become more difficult to secure peer reviewers. Anecdotally, it seems like the burdens of COVID and family care are falling disproportionately on female and BIPOC scholars, so to address this, we are as flexible as we can be regarding schedules, and we're allowing more time for turnaround. And when possible, we offer additional compensation for rush peer reviews, we have also had staff over the past 18 months and still ongoing who need to take family leaves or otherwise adjust their work schedules during this time, and we've all joined together to keep the work going on, regrouping, reassigning projects. It's really been wonderful to see how people are pitching in. And, uh, I'll say that we have taken a more intentional approach on who we reach out to, to provide blurbs, endorsements and pull quotes in part based on in-house feedback. We are trying to pay more attention to which voices we elevate and amplify. And we try to bear in mind that we need to keep our choices for blurbs, endorsements, and pull, pull quotes in line with our code of conduct. We've added wording to our author contract citing the code of conduct and to date, I'm happy to say there's been very little concern raised on this front from authors or agents. In my own group, editorial production is still engaged in reviewing freelancer diversity. As I mentioned earlier, Jayden has been helping on that. And the group has gave an all staff update on these initiatives earlier this month, that was very well received. We are hoping of a, to choose an existing inclusive language style guide that we can all endorse, ideally, I'm hoping, among a group of other university presses or even maybe a group of larger publishers. Toward that end, I've been looking for platforms or other resources where all interested publishers and freelancers can meet to discuss, uh, I I'm happy that AUP has created a great resource called UP Commons. Uh, you do have to be a member of AUP to join this group, but for those who are members, I strongly urge you all to explore and join groups that they have there, such as their equitable workplaces group. And I'm sure Nicole, you'll be adding a link for this as well. And AUP also sponsors Humanities Commons, which is open to anyone working in the humanities, not just AUP members. So we might be able to broaden out there to include freelance copy editors and proofreaders. I've found that they often spend as much or more time thinking about inclusive language issues than in-house publishing staff are able to do.

Nicole Tomassi: 12:52

As you correctly noted. I will be including links to all of these, um, resources, and they'll be able to be found on our website, uh, with the podcast episode. Are there any other resources that you might be able to recommend for people in the industry who are interested in increasing awareness and working with their colleagues towards progressing DEI initiatives within their workplaces?

Cathy Felgar: 13:16

Yes. I have a couple. I would recommend everyone in publishing read, uh, two reports. First, the workplace racism survey by People of Color in publishing and Latinx publishing. This report was released in June based on an industry survey in 2018 of just over 200 people of color in publishing. Very, very insightful. And the second is the Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion in Scholarly Communication, which is known as C4Disc, D,I, S, C. They publish anti-racism toolkit for organizations and another toolkit for allies this past August, the toolkits were written by a multiracial group of industry professionals and PUP participated. And we've been looking to incorporate these resources as we continue our collective work toward equity and in inclusion inside PUP, but as a member of C4Disc, we did help to author edit and peer review the toolkit for organizations. So that link is included.

Nicole Tomassi: 14:27

We will also include those, um, with this episode for anybody looking to read those resources. Is there anything else that's all on the horizon as far as P is concerned in terms of diversity, equity, inclusion, and publishing?

Cathy Felgar: 14:44

Well, I'll mention that we've been hearing about potential use of content or trigger warnings and, and thinking about how these might be employed with print and or audio books. Uh, some of our content is controversial and can include discussion of disturbing events and whether or not we should include warnings is the topic that's going to need a lot more discussion. But lastly, I just wanted to say, I hope all of you who are listening will join us in finding ways to progress all of these DEI issues at your publishing company, but also across the industry as a whole. We can only do this together.

Nicole Tomassi: 15:25

I think that's a great sentiment to end this conversation on Kathy. Thank you so much for coming back and give us an update on all the work that Princeton University Press is doing within and, um, outwards within the community to, uh, better promote the principles of diversity, equity and inclusion. I guess we could say it's walking the talk. Um, you guys are, you know, contributing greatly to this much needed initiative. So I want to thank you for sharing that here with us today.

Cathy Felgar: 15:55

Thank you, Nicole. It was great to great to join you.

Nicole Tomassi: 15:58

If you would like to learn more about Princeton university press's diversity equity and inclusion initiatives, you can visit their website at press.princeton.edu, where there is a dedicated area detailing the various ways the press is involved in carrying out meaningful equity and inclusion work both within the press staff and in the wider community. Thank you for listening to this episode of Westchester words. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with like-minded colleagues and friends, and be sure to follow us on your favorite streaming platform to learn about new episodes as they become available. All of the episodes from season one, as well as the current season, plus additional content that's been shared by some of our guests is available on the podcast page of our website Westchester publishing services.com. We also love hearing from our listeners. So drop us a line at westchesterwords@westchesteredscs.com with your thoughts or comments about today's discussion and let us know what content you'd like to hear Westchester cover and future episodes. Be sure to join us for the next episode of Westchester words. When I'll be speaking with Rebecca Durose-Croft of Westchester education, UK and international. Until then stay safe, be well and stay tuned.