Christie Henry: ‘Shaping knowledge, shaping communication’

This week we have an interview with Christie Henry, who’s director of Princeton University Press. She joined PUP two years ago in September 2017, after twenty-four years at the University of Chicago Press, where she was Editorial Director for Sciences, Social Sciences, and Reference Publishing. In the course of our conversation, Christie mentioned that she thought university presses had some ‘reputational work' to do. I asked her to expand on this:

Specific to PUP, the reputational work I feel that is important to us extends from the cultural work we're doing internally to become a more inclusive environment where we have empowered a wide range of staff in all departments to be active contributors to who we are and what our brand is. And we will be soon releasing a new website that will showcase that: telling more of our story and explaining why we think the collaborations that we have and that are entrusted to us are so powerful.

I think university presses in general need to be thinking about being less reactive and less in service to universities and really being powerful forces in shaping knowledge and shaping communication. And I do think many of us do that, but in a role that is quieter, in much the way that editors play a role that is often unnoticed and subtle and very purposeful at the same time. So I think it might take us doing a little bit more public communication around the role that we're playing than we we do now – with doses of humility, of course. I think that's really important.

I've been overseeing a taskforce on gender equity and cultures of respect for the AU presses, which we'll be turning over to the board this week. We, like many publishers in the UK, are struggling to reach equity along a number of axes. We have a dominance of women in positions, but not in leadership positions. We have pay inequities. (This is speaking across the university press world.) We've conducted a survey of the lived experience of the community to learn where people feel we have work to do on equities. I think that's where we can also effect some important reputational change.

We can do things like look at the author demographics of our list; as proud as every publisher is of their list,there is room to grow and to adapt. I also think it's really important for us to think about ourselves as an industry and how we present to the new generation of colleagues and collaborators; we're switching from an environment that was dominated by baby boomers to one that is by millennials. And what does that mean we have to change in terms of our management style, in terms of our team dynamics?

University presses, I think, I have been known to be a little bit more conservative and slow to change; going back to evolutionary terms, maybe operating in a more kind of punctuated equilibrium model. I think we need to do more punctuation and with intention, and that will help lend a currency to our reputations that we don't always have. Many of us have very storied histories, but trying to connect those histories to the here and now and also to the future impact is really important and I know a lot of my peers directors are spending a lot of time thinking about that.

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