John Jay Associate Professor of Public Policy, Heath Brown, Ph.D., and Howard University Associate Professor of Political Science, Niambi Carter, Ph.D., are teaming up to level the playing field for professors at Minority-Serving Institutions (MSI) across the U.S. by creating publishing opportunities in the field of Political Science. The duo, who both recently published books with distinguished university presses, saw an inequity in the world of academic publishing, and amidst the pandemic, realized the potential of a virtual environment to leverage resources to professors at MSIs who have manuscripts in the works by creating an online book workshop. “Often, you see these initiatives, but it’s not clear what the endgame is and who the beneficiaries are,” says Carter, reflecting on the mission of their workshop called Minority Serving Institution Virtual Book Workshop Project. “Our goal is to help professors at MSIs take the manuscripts that they have and turn them into books with some of the best publishers that they can get. We are building a bridge, and we’re making it our business to go out into the various communities and say, ‘We want you to submit your work. We want to review your work. We want you to be here.’” For faculty members interested in submitting their finished manuscript, they can access the application via the American Political Science Association (APSA) website. The submission deadline is January 14, 2022.

Developing a Course of Action
Speaking on the high cost of the path to publication and how it affects who gets published, Brown says, “Niambi and I were both talking about why most of our colleagues were not publishing books, especially at university presses, and it’s because book workshops are very expensive. It’s expensive to fly people around the country, put them up at a hotel in New York or D.C., ask them to come out to dinner, eat dinner, and give them an honorarium. We’re talking about an $8,000 to $9,000 expenditure at the end of the day. We knew that both of our institutions couldn’t financially cover the cost, but we thought, ‘Wouldn't it be great if we were able to do it?’”

By eliminating hotels, dinners, travel, and other in-person expenses, Brown and Carter theorized that a virtual platform could pave the way forward to diversify the bodies of literature coming out of these award-winning publishers, but developing an online workshop still required funding. “We knew if we figured out how to raise the money, we could support these kinds of workshops for our colleagues and all of the excellent but underfunded and under-supported MSIs, HBCUs [Historically Black Colleges and Universities], and HSIs [Hispanic-Serving Institutions] across the country,” says Brown. After realizing that one beneficiary of this kind of work would be the university presses themselves, Brown and Carter began putting their proposal together. “When we talked to the editors, they all shared awareness of the lack of publication from these under-represented schools. They understood that who they published were from the same institutions, but they didn’t know how to remedy the situation,” says Brown. “We told them, ‘If you fund these workshops for scholars at MSIs for a relatively small amount of money, you could increase the pool of great projects you receive.’” The publishers more than loved the idea, and five were willing to step forward and provide financial support, among them Oxford University Press, Princeton University Press, and Cambridge University Press.

So far, Carter and Brown have managed to raise $18,000 for the first year of the program with organizational commitments to run the program for a total of three years. With this funding, they are hoping to offer six to seven professors the opportunity to have their manuscripts refined, reviewed, and ready for publication. For Carter, this opportunity couldn’t be happening at a more important time in history. “In this moment of racial reckoning, and all that has been happening in the world, I think that publishers and other institutions are trying to think about how they approach the work that they do differently and are asking questions like, ‘How can we do the work that we do in a more just and equitable fashion?’” she says.

Creating a Review Board
With funding secured, next came figuring out the logistics of running the workshops. “In the beginning, there were significant questions like, ‘Who’s going to manage the money? How’s the money going to be distributed?’ All these things that as academics, we don’t think about,” says Carter. To keep the process equitable, Brown and Carter have begun establishing a review board of junior- to senior-level peers to sort through the numerous manuscripts they are expecting. “We want our board to be equitable and diverse in a true sense that reflects our value as Minority-Serving Institution faculty members, but also as Minority-Serving Institutions, which have always been this kind of open space for a variety of people,” she says. “They’re there to look at the manuscripts and make recommendations about which manuscripts they think should move forward, but they’re also there to be our partners as we think through the program.”

Once the review board has been assembled and the details have been ironed out, Carter and Brown plan on hosting the workshops in June 2022. The Board will select winners in February and winners will be notified by early March. Currently, the program focuses on the works of scholars publishing in the field of Political Science, however, Brown asserts that this shouldn’t discourage professors from applying if they’re in a related field. “Right now, we’re focused on scholars that study politics, whether they’re formally in a political science department, like my colleague is, or less formally in a political science department, like I am,” he says. “You would still be eligible if you’re a political sociologist or if you’re a historian studying politics.”

Planning for the Future
In the world of academic publishing, having a polished manuscript can open or close doors. “If you don’t get your book workshopped, your work ends up not having the polished quality of those coming out of these presses. Professors with unpolished manuscripts get turned down,” says Brown. “We want to make sure that colleagues at all of these institutions end up with workshopped book manuscripts that are publication-ready.” It’s Brown and Carter’s dream to watch their program develop throughout the coming years. “One of the directions we’d like to see the program grow in is the number of participants. We’re limited now by money, but I think it would be terrific if we were able to increase the scale of our grants from somewhere in the neighborhood of seven recipients up to 20,” says Brown.

For Carter, creating these opportunities will not only level the playing field, but will also have a lasting impact on the institutions themselves. “Our hope is that this program will serve as a model for other disciplines and fields facing similar kinds of constraints on faculty publishing. We’ve known for a long time that resources matter. When we talk about the academic enterprise, all universities aren’t created equal,” says Carter, noting that a lack of funding and opportunities for publishing contributes to lower educator retention rates. “I think the larger issue we’re trying to tackle is the divide in the ways resources get allocated to these different kinds of spaces, especially for our colleagues and scholars that are really good. If we can find a way to incentivize educators to stay by providing them with some of the resources that they need at MSIs like John Jay or Howard, then let’s try to do that.”