A deep dive into the value of diversity for students

This week in North Philly Notes, Elizabeth Aries, author of The Impact of College Diversity, writes about the results of her findings about race and class issues at an elite college, the subject of three books and 12 years of study.

My 12-year interview study of affluent Black, affluent white, lower-income Black, and lower-income white students from Amherst College focuses on what students learned from engagement with racially and socio-economically diverse classmates during college. I interviewed students as entering first years, as graduating seniors, and for a final time at age 30. The age 30 interviews, described in The impact of College Diversity, reveal that 81% of Black and white Amherst graduates reported learning about race and racial inequality through peer interactions during college. The interviews also revealed how a racially diverse college provided a successful pathway to upward social mobility for lower-income Black and white students.

The data provide strong evidence of the educational benefits students derived from daily interactions with classmates whose racial and class backgrounds, experiences, and views differ greatly from their own. At a time when the Supreme Court is soon to decide whether to ban the use of race in college admission decisions, and diversity is very much the subject of heated national conversation, my research found huge financial and social benefits to affluent and low-income Black and white students interacting on our small, residential, racially diverse campus.

I began my study in 2005 at a time when Amherst College began recruiting and enrolling a more socio-economically and racially diverse of the student body. This change was motivated by the desire to promote equity and social mobility, and by a belief in the educational benefits for students of interacting daily with classmates whose experiences and views are different from their own.

As a professor of psychology, the presence of more racially and socioeconomically diverse students was enriching classroom discussions in my courses. Due to the differing backgrounds and life experiences students brought to the table, they offered more varied perspectives and insights on course readings. Their comments enabled me and their classmates to understand the texts we read in new ways. My best teachers have been my students. I could clearly see the benefits of learning from diversity that were occurring in my classroom, but wondered about the extent to which such learning from diversity was taking place through peer interactions outside the classroom as well.

Originally I set out to chronicle the nature and extent of what students had learned about race and class during the college years from engagement with racially and socioeconomically diverse classmates. I then grew interested in what the longer-term impact of being part of a diverse student body had been on them. For most college graduates the period of their twenties is marked by continued identity and job exploration; changes in intimate relationships, possible graduate school attendance, and a focus on self-development. So I waited to do a final set of follow-up interviews until my participants reached age 30.

The focus of The Impact of College Diversity is on the voices of the graduates as they report on their lived experiences and subjective understandings of race and class. The findings trace how hearing the lived experiences of their Black peers during college opened white graduates’ eyes to the harm of racism their classmates endured throughout their lives, deepened their understanding of stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination, and of their own racial privilege. Interviews with Black graduates revealed how being part of a diverse student body prepared them to become bi-cultural, gave them the skills to succeed in predominantly white settings and helped them cope with the challenges of a white-dominated work world. Lower-income graduates acquired new forms of cultural and social capital and higher aspirations during college, which led to greater upward social mobility in the future. Upward mobility did come at a cost, as lower-income graduates had changed in many ways while family and friends left behind had not. They faced the challenge of bridging two different worlds.

Several findings surprised me. When questioned as graduating seniors. just over half the participants reported learning from the racial diversity at the college. Yet looking back at age 30, this percentage rose to 81%. Thirty percent of the white graduates aspired to raise their potential children in a racially diverse environment because they believed in the importance of intergroup contact. And almost all the graduates, Black and white, strongly agreed that a diverse student body is essential to teaching skills to succeed and lead in the work environment.

I was also surprised by the extent of upward mobility of the lower-income graduates because many of them had struggled at Amherst both academically and socially. At the time they were at Amherst, many fewer resources existed than do today to help create an inclusive community and to provide the supports they needed to foster their success. Yet 65% percent of lower-income graduates had gone on to attain graduate degrees, the majority reporting being inspired by the ambitions of their classmates and having their own ambitions raised. Most had attained degrees that led to the highest earnings – an MBA, Ph.D. MD, or JD – and had attended top graduate schools in the country, or had gone into finance and worked for a prestigious investment bank.

The bottom line: A college experience at a diverse school is better for our society, and that can only happen by using race-conscious admission practices.

Economics for Life

This week in North Philly Notes, we showcase the latest book published by our imprint, North Broad Press.

North Broad Press, the joint Temple University Libraries and Press imprint, has published its fourth open textbook. Economics for Life: Real-World Financial Literacy, by Dr. Donald T. Wargo, is now available open access on the Press’s Manifold platform.

Wargo, Associate Professor of Economics at Temple University, has for several years taught an undergraduate course on financial literacy as part of Temple’s general education program. In the process of planning for and teaching his course, Wargo realized that not only did his students lack an understanding of financial decision making—including credit card use, making large purchases such as a car or home, and retirement planning. Opportunities for guidance on these major decisions were limited.

Wargo found that the available textbooks on the subject lacked the breadth and depth he believed was necessary to prepare students for the numerous decisions they would be facing, This, coupled with the high cost of the commercial textbook he had been using, led him to submit a proposal for an original open access textbook to North Broad Press. As he noted in his proposal, “Economics for Life: Real-World Financial Literacy is designed to help soon-to-be college graduates emerge into the start of their ‘real lives’ with better comprehension of how to analyze the financial decisions that they will soon have to make.”

With chapters on creating and living within a budget, evaluating and managing debt, and the fundamentals of investing, Economics for Life’s approachable style and accessible content make it an ideal book for anyone looking for practical guidance. Readers will learn how to use financial data to make informed personal finance decisions. The book’s Manifold site also includes a supplemental resource—an article by Wargo on the explanation and impact of the “pandemic recession,” defined as mid-February to mid-April 2020.

About the author

Dr. Donald T. Wargo is an Associate Professor of Economics at Temple University. His specializations are in Real Estate, Behavioral Economics and Neuroeconomics. Prior to his teaching career, he held executive positions in several large real estate companies in the Philadelphia area, including Vice President of Finance and President. For fifteen of those years, he ran his own development company, Wargo Properties, Inc.

About North Broad Press

North Broad Press publishes peer-reviewed open textbooks by Temple faculty and staff. It operates under the following core principles:

• We believe that the Libraries and the Press are critical resources for publishing expertise on campus.
• We believe that the unfettered flow of ideas, scholarship and knowledge is necessary to support learning, clinical practice, and research, and to stimulate creativity and the intellectual enterprise.
• We support Temple faculty, students, and staff by making their work available to audiences around the world via open access publishing.
• We believe that the scholarly ecosystem works best when creators retain their copyrights.
• We believe in experimentation and innovation in academic publishing.
• We work to decrease the cost of higher education and improve learning outcomes for students by publishing high quality open textbooks and other open educational resources.
• We believe in the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and promote these values through our publications.
• We commit to making our publications accessible to all who need to use them.
• We believe place matters. Our publications reflect Temple University and the North Philadelphia community of which we are a part.

Announcing Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies, Volume 9, Issue 1, Spring 2022

This week in North Philly Notes, we present the new issue of our journal, Kalfou.

Special Issue: “In These Uncertain Times, Pittsburgh”

Guest Editors: Leon Ford and Deanna Fracul

FEATURE ARTICLES

Introduction: In These Uncertain Times, Pittsburgh • Deanna Fracul and Leon Ford

Uncertainty, Discourse, and Democracy in John Edgar Wideman’s Writing, 1980s to Today • Leila Kamali

Call-and-Response in the City: Embodied Mercy in August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone • Kathy Glass

Resisting Arrest: Race and Pittsburghers’ Struggles against Police Power from the 1840s through the 1950s • Elaine Frantz

Tomorrow Never Came • Jamaal Scott

Working Together for Health Equity: How a Multidisciplinary, Community-Engaged Partnership Reframed Our Understandings of Pittsburgh’s Maternal-Child Health Crisis • Cathleen J. Appelt, Andrew T. Simpson, Jessica A. Devido, Sarah Greenwald, and Brittany Urban

Pittsburgh, the Realest City: Shit Talk’n’, Storytell’n’, Social Livin’ • Jacqueline Roebuck Sakho

IDEAS, ART, AND ACTIVISM

TALKATIVE ANCESTORS

Derrick Bell on Living in Relation to Others

KEYWORDS

Frankstown Was the World with a Big W: Pittsburgh and Beyond, an Interview with John Edgar Wideman • Leila Kamali

LA MESA POPULAR

Black Lives and the Tree of Life • Emmai Alaquiva and Lauren Apter Bairnsfather

ART AND SOCIAL ACTION

East Pittsburgh: White Supremacy, Radical Relationships, and Chosen Family • Norman Conti

MOBILIZED 4 MOVEMENT

Where Have All the Black Revolutionaries Gone in Steel City? An Interview with Sala Udin • Tony Gaskew

TEACHING AND TRUTH

Redreaming Boundaries and Community Engagement: John Edgar Wideman and the Homewood Reading Series • Esohe Osai and Dan Kubis

Khalifa • Richard Khalifa Diggs, with postscript by Norman Conti

IN MEMORIAM

Memorial Quilt: Patchworked Remembrances of Those Stolen from Us • Mian Laubscher, Lauren Apter Bairnsfather, and Keith David Miles

REVIEW

A City Divided: Race, Fear, and the Law in Police Confrontations, by David A. Harris • Jesse S. G. Wozniak

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MOBILIZED 4 MOVEMENT

Scholar Collectives Advocating for Social Justice in Education • Lois A. Yamauchi, Joni B. Acuff, Ruchi Agarwal-Rangnath, Bill Ayers, Margarita Berta-Ávila, Kari Kokka, Kevin Kumashiro, Therese Quinn, Colleen Rost-Banik, and Katherine Schultz

IN MEMORIAM

The People’s Artist: In Loving Memory of Eugene Eda Wade, 1939–2021 • Hannah Jeffery

REVIEW

Prison Theatre and the Global Crisis of Incarceration, by Ashley E. Lucas • Chinua Thelwell

The Pitfalls of an All-Charter School District

This week in North Philly Notes, J. Celeste Lay, author of Public Schools, Private Governance, writes about how school choice in New Orleans hurt more than it helped.

The Covid-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on our lives in so many ways, but for children, one of its most important and potentially lasting effects has been in public education. The pandemic has been a boon for school choice advocates, who see in this disaster a means to push legislation that eases restrictions on charter schools, voucher programs, homeschooling, and more.

The parents and teachers of public school students in New Orleans know all too well how advocates can take advantage of a disaster to achieve long-term political goals. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Louisiana’s state legislature voted to strip the city’s school board of its authority over nearly all its public schools. In Public Schools, Private Governance, I examine the path that has led the city to become the nation’s first all-charter district, and its consequences on democratic values like representation, accountability, and participation.

Although many scholars and advocates place Katrina as the starting point for education reform in New Orleans, I contend that the hurricane merely sped along and expanded the scope of the already existing reform movement in the city. The book spotlights the decade prior to Katrina to reveal and examine the incremental policy changes that made it possible for the state to seize control of the city’s schools. In this period, state legislators—including many of New Orleans’s representatives—passed a school grading system, mandated annual standardized tests, eased the pathways to alternative teacher certification, created multiple types of charter schools, approved a state “recovery” district that could take over “failing schools,” and ultimately, in the year before Katrina, stripped the elected board in New Orleans (and only New Orleans) of most of its authority. By the time the city was draining the floodwaters in Fall 2005, all the state had to do was change the definition of a failing school for it to seize all but a handful of the city’s schools.

This movement largely excluded those who worked in the schools, as well as the parents of school children. This exclusion continued in the wake of Katrina and I show that it continues to the present day. In the all-charter system, parents theoretically have choices about where their children enroll in school. They must rank preferences in a Common Application and there are no neighborhood schools to which kids are assigned. They can go anywhere—in theory. However, in reality, as shown in my book many parents are confused by the system and do not believe it is fair. In particular, they see that the racial disparities that have long been a hallmark of New Orleans public schools continue in this new, supposedly better system. The few white children who attend public schools are enrolled in selective admission schools that require admission tests and other barriers to entry. Meanwhile, the Black children who make up most of the public school district  continue to attend low-performing schools that are predominantly Black institutions.

Although a generation of children have now gone through the new system, the district’s scores have remained well below the state average and only a small minority of schools are rated as “A” or “B” on the state’s A-F scale. Though overall test scores have improved slightly, Black parents do not believe their children are getting a great education and they believe they have little recourse to do anything about it. The elected school board is essentially a mere charter authorizer, and while it has opened and closed dozens of schools over the last 17 years, parents long for high-quality, neighborhood schools staffed by experienced teachers who understand and appreciate New Orleans culture and history. This elected board has almost no authority over school operations. Rather, privately selected charter boards govern school finances, select school leaders, and establish policies. My research shows that these boards are not representative of the city; they cannot be held accountable by voters, they display disdain for parents, and they do not comply with state laws about public bodies. They routinely withhold information they are required to disclose and yet the elected board never sanctions schools or networks for these violations.

For states that are considering an expansion of school choice due to the Covid-19 pandemic, my book offers a warning about the effects of considering schools as consumer goods. There is little improvement in overall school quality, but there is devastation to the local democratic character of public education.

Making a case for the “power” of theory

This week in North Philly Notes, Grant Farred, editor of Africana Studies: Theoretical Futures, writes about the precarity of Black life.

The precarity of Black life. In the U.S. we are reminded of this every day. At least that is how it seems. Police shootings are the worst of it, but not the whole truth of it by any means. In the Black diaspora at large, a similar situation obtains. Unseaworthy vessels sink and African migrants drown as they go in search of a better life in Europe. If they survive, new modes of hostility await them. The stranger is not welcome.

To think a theoretical future for Africana Studies under these conditions seems, if not pyrrhic, then Wordsworthian in tenor. It would be dissembling to suggest that Africana Studies: Theoretical Futures was not conceived against precisely this backdrop, one which recalls the Romantic poet’s lament. Wordsworth writes:

The world is too much with us; late and soon

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers

Against just such a world, where everything mitigates against Black life, Africana Studies: Theoretical Futures makes a case for the “power” of theory. That is because in this collection, theory is not understood as an abstraction or as a rarefied mode of thought. Instead, theory is mobilized in this collection as the work of imagining—of thinking for—a future for Global Black life where precarity is not the order of the day. Africana theory is providing, if not a blueprint, then a first sounding board for how combat the violence that so threatens Black life; a platform for not only resisting the onslaught against Black life, but for ensuring a future that can sustain and nurture Black life. Where Black life might even thrive.

The work of theory is thus to harness the “power” of Black thought in all its manifestations. This collection includes poetic reflection, philosophical contemplation, geo-political analysis and quasi-memoiristic recollection. The work that this collection assigns itself is to think for the futures of Black life. Futures rather than the singular future. That is, in order to create the conditions under which Black life might be sustainably lived there can be no one, single future that will speak to and address all Black needs. It is therefore necessary to think for the plurality of futures. To propose the logic of plurality rather than singularity is, a priori, to anticipate a series of new challenges in those futures. That is, the work of making a future(s) in which Black life can be sustained is, by its very nature, an incomplete project. Every new imagining of Black life, to say nothing of every new making of that life, will generate its own set of possibilities and difficulties.

It will thus always be necessary to develop new theoretical tools, to hone new philosophical skills, to produce new poetic insights, to imagine new geo-political formations and configurations, in order to sustain Black life. In this way Africana Studies: Theoretical Futures recognizes its historical location. It speaks out of, and for, a particular historical conjuncture. It understands its speaking as emerging out of the institutional facticity that is the 50^th anniversary of Africana Studies in the American academy.

Rather than being declarative, then, the book offers itself as an invitation. The invitation to think for new theoretical futures, to produce new modes for Black being, to create new poetic articulations. The future of Africana Studies as a discipline is charged with always addressing the challenges that confront Black life, which history has shown to always be a condition overwritten by precarity—a way of being in the world that has always been “too much with us.”

Because Black life in the present is lived as an existential threat, the effect of such precarity is to lend urgency to thinking for theoretical futures. If nothing else, however, Africana Studies: Theoretical Futures reveals the many modes, the multiple registers, the variegated disciplines, in which this thinking might take place. And in this multiplicity, this collection makes evident, there is the imaginings of how Black lives might be lived.

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Celebrating Women’s History Month

This week in North Philly Notes, we celebrate Women’s History Month. Use promo code TWHM22 for 30% off all our Women’s Studies titles. Sale ends March 31, 2022.

New Titles

Elaine Black Yoneda: Jewish Immigration, Labor Activism, and Japanese American Exclusion and Incarceration, by Rachel Schreiber, recounts the remarkable story of a Jewish activist who joined her incarcerated Japanese American husband and son in an American concentration camp.

Are You Two Sisters: The Journey of a Lesbian Couple, by Susan Krieger, authored by one of the most respected figures in the field of personal ethnographic narrative, this book serves as both a memoir and a sociological study, telling the story of one lesbian couple’s lifelong journey together.

From our Backlist:

Anna May Wong: Performing the Modern, by Shirley Jennifer Lim, shows how Anna May Wong’s work shaped racial modernity and made her one of the most significant actresses of the twentieth century.

The Cost of Being a Girl: Working Teens and the Origins of the Gender Wage Gap, by Yasemin Besen-Cassino, traces the origins of the gender wage gap to part-time teenage work, which sets up a dynamic that persists into adulthood.

Feminist Post-Liberalism, by Judith Baer, reconciles liberalism and feminist theory.

Feminist Reflections on Childhood: A History and Call to Action, by Penny A. Weiss, recovers a history of feminist thought and activism that demands greater voice and respect for young people.

Good Reasons to Run: Women and Political Candidacy, edited by Shauna L. Shames, Rachel I. Bernhard, Mirya R. Holman, and Dawn Langan Teele, how and why women run for office.

Gross Misbehavior and Wickedness: A Notorious Divorce in Early Twentieth-Century America, by Jean Elson, a fascinating story of the troubled marriage and acrimonious divorce of Nina and James Walker elucidates early twentieth-century gender and family mores.

Motherlands: How States Push Mothers Out of Employment, by Leah Ruppanner challenges preconceived notions of the states that support working mothers.

Savoring the Salt: The Legacy of Toni Cade Bambara, edited by Linda Janet Holmes and Cheryl A. Wall, an anthology that celebrates the life and work of a major African American writer.

Their Day in the Sun: Women in the Manhattan Project, by Ruth H. Howes and Caroline C. Herzenberg, tells the hidden story of the contribution of women in the effort to develop the atomic bomb.

Undermining Intersectionality: The Perils of Powerblind Feminism, by Barbara Tomlinson, a sustained critique of the ways in which scholars have engaged with and deployed intersectionality.

Women Take Their Place in State Legislature: The Creation of Women’s Caucuses, by Anna Mitchell Mahoney, investigates the opportunities, resources, and frames that women utilize to create legislative caucuses.

Women’s Empowerment and Disempowerment in Brazil: The Rise and Fall of President Dilma Rousseff, by Pedro A.G. dos Santos and Farida Jalalzai, explains what the rise and fall of Brazil’s first and only female president can teach us about women’s empowerment.

Announcing Temple University Press’ Spring 2022 Catalog

This week in North Philly Notes, we are pleased to present our forthcoming Spring 2022 titles (in alphabetical order).

Africana Studies: Theoretical Futures, edited by Grant Farred
A provocative collection committed to keeping the dynamism of the Africana Studies discipline alive

Beethoven in Beijing: Stories from the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Historic Journey to China, by Jennifer Lin, with a foreword by Philadelphia Orchestra Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin

An eye-opening account of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s unprecedented 1973 visit to the People’s Republic of China

Before Crips: Fussin’, Cussin’, and Discussin’ among South Los Angeles Juvenile Gangs, by John C. Quicker and Akil S. Batani-Khalfani

A historical analysis of South Los Angeles juvenile gang life as revealed by those who were there

Elusive Kinship: Disability and Human Rights in Postcolonial Literature, by Christopher Krentz

Why disabled characters are integral to novels of the global South

Ethical Encounters: Transnational Feminism, Human Rights, and War Cinema in Bangladesh, by Elora Halim Chowdhury

Illuminates how visual practices of recollecting violent legacies in Bangladeshi cinema can generate possibilities for gender justice

Exploring Philly Nature: A Guide for All Four Seasons, by Bernard S. Brown, Illustrations by Samantha Wittchen

A handy guide for all ages to Philly’s urban plants, animals, fungi, and—yes—even slime molds

If There Is No Struggle There Is No Progress: Black Politics in Twentieth-Century Philadelphia, edited by James Wolfinger, with a Foreword by Heather Ann Thompson

Highlighting the creativity, tenacity, and discipline displayed by Black activists in Philadelphia

It Was Always a Choice: Picking Up the Baton of Athlete Activism, by David Steele

Examining American athletes’ activism for racial and social justice, on and off the field

Just Care: Messy Entanglements of Disability, Dependency, and Desire, by Akemi Nishida

How care is both socially oppressive and a way that marginalized communities can fight for social justice

Letting Play Bloom: Designing Nature-Based Risky Play for Children, by Lolly Tai, with a foreword by Teri Hendy

Exploring innovative, inspiring, and creative ideas for designing children’s play spaces

Loving Orphaned Space: The Art and Science of Belonging to Earth, by Mrill Ingram

Providing a new vision for the ignored and abused spaces around us

Model Machines: A History of the Asian as Automaton, by Long T. Bui

A study of the stereotype and representation of Asians as robotic machines through history

Public Schools, Private Governance: Education Reform and Democracy in New Orleans, by J. Celeste Lay

A comprehensive examination of education reforms and their political effects on Black and poor public-school parents in New Orleans, pre- and post-Katrina

Regarding Animals, Second Edition, by Arnold Arluke, Clinton R. Sanders, and Leslie Irvine

A new edition of an award-winning book that examines how people live with contradictory attitudes toward animals

School Zone: A Problem Analysis of Student Offending and Victimization, by Pamela Wilcox, Graham C. Ousey, and Marie Skubak Tillyer

Why some school environments are more conducive to crime than safety

Warring Genealogies: Race, Kinship, and the Korean War, by Joo Ok Kim

Examines the racial legacies of the Korean War through Chicano/a cultural production and U.S. archives of white supremacy

Water Thicker Than Blood: A Memoir of a Post-Internment Childhood, by George Uba

An evocative yet unsparing examination of the damaging effects of post-internment ideologies of acceptance and belonging experienced by a Japanese American family

What Workers Say: Decades of Struggle and How to Make Real Opportunity Now, by Roberta Rehner Iversen

Voices from the labor market on the chronic lack of advancement

University Press Week Blog Tour: Innovate/Collaborate

University Press Week is November 8-12. The UP Blog Tour will feature entries all week long that celebrate this year’s theme, “Keep UP.” This year marks the 10th anniversary of UP Week, and the university press community will celebrate how university presses have evolved over the past decade.  

Honoring today’s theme, Innovate/Collaborate, we post about Temple University Press’ imprint, North Broad Press, a University Press, Libraries, and Faculty Collaboration for Open Textbooks.

For well over a decade, Temple University Press has been reporting to Temple University Libraries, and in 2018 we partnered to launch the collaborative imprint North Broad Press. 

North Broad Press (NBP) publishes open-access works of scholarship, both new and reissued, from the Temple University community. Our current focus is on open textbooks. NBP supports Temple faculty in the creation of a textbook specifically tailored to their course that is free for all students. NBP titles decrease the cost of higher education and improve learning outcomes for students. All books are peer reviewed and professionally produced with print-on-demand copies available at cost.

An important part of the Press’s mission is to educate, and with NBP we are shaping the approach to teaching and learning at Temple through the creation of custom textbooks. Authors write, organize, and present content in a way that aligns with teaching methods they know to be successful. In addition, we hope NBP titles will be used in courses beyond Temple, and peer reviewers are asked to consider this as they assess the projects.

NBP is part of the Libraries’ Center for Scholarly Communication and Open Publishing.  Its creation supports the Libraries and Press in achieving and advancing a strategic action named in the current strategic plan: “Explore new opportunities in publishing and scholarly communication: The Libraries will engage in deep collaboration with Temple University Press, with Temple faculty, and with other organizations and academic institutions to identify and adopt new approaches for sharing scholarly products, for exploring sustainable economic models for university publishing, and for connecting local publishing initiatives with Temple’s faculty.”

NBP’s work is based on the following core principles:

• We believe that the Libraries and the Press are critical resources for publishing expertise on campus.
• We believe that the unfettered flow of ideas, scholarship and knowledge is necessary to support learning, clinical practice, and research, and to stimulate creativity and the intellectual enterprise.
• We support Temple faculty, students, and staff by making their work available to audiences around the world via open access publishing.
• We believe that the scholarly ecosystem works best when creators retain their copyrights.
• We believe in experimentation and innovation in academic publishing.
• We work to decrease the cost of higher education and improve learning outcomes for students by publishing high quality open textbooks and other open educational resources.
• We believe in the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and promote these values through our publications.
• We commit to making our publications accessible to all who need to use them.
• We believe place matters. Our publications reflect Temple University and the North Philadelphia community of which we are a part.

NBP has filled a previously unaddressed need. We issued annual calls for proposals in 2019, 2020, and 2021 and the response from Temple faculty has been enthusiastic. We received 58 proposals over the three calls; 20 were selected for publication, an acceptance rate of 35%. Of these, three titles have been published and 17 are in process.

Temple faculty are committed to  improving student success by authoring  textbooks that are better suited for their courses than what’s currently available. They understand the financial challenges posed by expensive commercial textbooks and they have jumped at the opportunity to collaborate with the Press and Libraries.

A Transition From Purchasing to Collaborating: The Relationships Behind Open Access 

This week in North Philly Notes, we celebrate Open Access week with a post by Ryan Mulligan, acquisitions editor at the Press, about our open access initiatives.

This week is Open Access Week, which celebrates the producers and distributors of information who remove the barriers to entry, namely cost but also legal apparatus, facing the potential readers who are trying to access scholarly work. There are plenty of open access models that attempt to resolve the impasse of cost-bearing, turning from readers as bearers of those costs to libraries, grant institutions, and universities themselves, the institutions that ultimately hold the standard for scholarly productivity. Temple University Press is acutely aware that the benefits of book publishing as a means of public scholarship—editing, design, and marketing, that work to lift the most urgent and rigorous signals above the noise in the sea of information available to seekers— come at a cost. In traditional publishing, costs lie with the reader, often represented by a library, seeking the information. As library budgets have either shrunk or been allocated to high-priced journal subscriptions, individual readers—be they scholars or students—have had to cover more of the cost. Unsurprisingly, many readers find themselves unable to bear that cost and the gap between those who can and cannot furthers inequality in academia.

To that end and with an eye towards the future of scholarly publishing, Temple University Press engages with a number of open access publishing initiatives in an attempt to lift those costs from the shoulders of readers. The Press submits books each year to the Knowledge Unlatched program, in which participating libraries select the books to be added to the collection. Publishers are then paid a set amount to help subsidize production costs in order to release the book in an open access ebook edition. Temple University Press also embraces TOME’s Open Monograph program, in which academic authors are subsidized by their participating universities to publish with a participating university press like Temple. I personally love the concept of this program, because in many disciplines, it is the university itself that holds book publication as a standard for tenure and promotion. TOME reconciles the cost of that standard. Temple also has been able to publish books open access through funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities through their open books program, in particular books in the Press’s excellent labor history backlist. All of the Press’s open access books are available on our Manifold platform. 

University presses are non-profit, mission-based publishers who want to see the good scholarship they publish in as many hands as possible, just as readers and the librarians who serve them want to access that scholarship, and just as authors want to be widely read and cited. Scholarly authors may not typically derive much income from their royalties, but their institutions reward them for having vetted and published their work. Institutions want to have the best published, most knowledgeable faculties to offer their students, and the healthiest knowledge environments in which their students and scholars can share and communicate. Similarly, institutions have a role to play in preserving the scholarly publishing apparatus necessary to vetting and broadcasting the work of their scholars. The scholarly ecosystem continues to need the backing that once came through university library purchases to fund the production and circulation of knowledge. Open access publishing acknowledges that the onus on facilitating the continuation of good scholarship is not on the individual buyer of a book but on the full scholarly community. 

As our authors compose their books, they depend on a lack of barriers to engage with and build on the knowledge base of their discipline. No one produces knowledge out of whole cloth and no scholar is taken seriously who does not draw on the work of others with the expectation that others will draw on their work. They quote short text excerpts and create tables of data collected by their fellow researchers. They cite established theory or build on promising new hypotheses. They illustrate their books with maps and illustrations released into the public domain or Creative Commons by creators who don’t depend on individual sales to continue their work—they have an institution backing them up. Scholarly book publishing already depends on open access scholarship on some level. If the scholarly ecosystem that institutions depend upon is going to continue to be healthy, that level is going to rise and institutions are going to have to meet that cost, if not through individual purchases, then through open access funding. 

There is risk in shifting power and responsibility from a market to a collaboration. Readers’ needs and interests must continue to be protected even if their power in bearing costs shifts. The potential in that shift is in rethinking the responsibilities of the many organizations and institutional parties who have a stake in the knowledge ecosystem.

Celebrating Banned Book Week

This week in North Philly Notes, in honor of Banned Book Week, we highlight Temple University Press’ Critical Race Theory titles.

Crossroads, Directions, and a New Critical Race Theory, edited by Francisco Valdes, Jerome McCristal Culp and Angela P. Harris

Its opponents call it part of “the lunatic fringe,” a justification for “black separateness,” “the most embarrassing trend in American publishing.” “It” is Critical Race Theory. But what is Critical Race Theory? How did it develop? Where does it stand now? Where should it go in the future? In this volume, thirty-one CRT scholars present their views on the ideas and methods of CRT, its role in academia and in the culture at large, and its past, present, and future.

Critical race theorists assert that both the procedures and the substance of American law are structured to maintain white privilege. The neutrality and objectivity of the law are not just unattainable ideals; they are harmful actions that obscure the law’s role in protecting white supremacy. This notion—so obvious to some, so unthinkable to others—has stimulated and divided legal thinking in this country and, increasingly, abroad. The essays in Crossroads, Directions, and a New Critical Race Theory—all original—address this notion in a variety of helpful and exciting ways. They use analysis, personal experience, historical narrative, and many other techniques to explain the importance of looking critically at how race permeates our national consciousness.

Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge, Third Edition, edited by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic

Critical Race Theory has become a dynamic, eclectic, and growing movement in the study of law. With this third edition of Critical Race Theory, editors Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic have created a reader for the twenty-first century—one that shakes up the legal academy, questions comfortable liberal premises, and leads the search for new ways of thinking about our nation’s most intractable, and insoluble, problem—race. The contributions, from a stellar roster of established and emerging scholars, address new topics, such as intersectionality and black men on the “down low.” Essays also confront much-discussed issues of discrimination, workplace dynamics, affirmative action, and sexual politics. Also new to this volume are updated section introductions, author notes, questions for discussion, and reading lists for each unit. The volume also covers the spread of the movement to other disciplines such as education. Offering a comprehensive and stimulating snapshot of current race jurisprudence and thought, this new edition of Critical Race Theory is essential for those interested in law, the multiculturalism movement, political science, education, and critical thought.

The editors also published Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror, edited by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic