University Press Roundup

Welcome to our weekly roundup of the best posts from the blogs of academic publishers! As always, if you particularly enjoy something or think that we missed an important post, please let us know in the comments.

How can a university press remain relevant in the rapidly changing world of publishing? An Akronism, the blog of the University of Akron Press, looks at the recent grant given to the University of North Carolina Press by the William R. Kenan, Jr. Charitable Trust and offers five ways that the University of Akron Press can continue to thrive.

How quickly is the “‘takeover,’ if you will, of text-messaging and similar technology” changing scholarly communication? At the AMACOM Books Blog, Associate Editor Michael Sivilli talks about the role of new words in the creation of the new AMA Dictionary of Business and Management.

At Beacon Broadside, guest blogger David Chura asks “the question that daily confronts every teacher who works with hard to reach students…. ‘How do I do this?'” Chura’s recipe for longevity in teaching is simple: “Don’t take it personally.”

Ronald Reagan first became a national political figure in 1964, while campaigning for Barry Goldwater. However, Goldwater’s candidacy for the presidency met with serious opposition in Reagan’s home state of California. At fifteeneightyfour, the blog of Cambridge University Press, Donald T. Critchlow tells the story of the division between moderate and hard-right Republicans in California that provided the launching pad for Reagan’s political career. (And for those who prefer Ernest Hemingway and food to politics, fifteeneightyfour also has a post of recipes mentioned in Hemingway’s letters from Paris in the 1920s.)

September 19th would have been the 81st birthday of Mike Royko, a familiar columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner in the Chicago news scene. In honor of the occasion, The Chicago Blog has an excerpt from one of Royko’s articles, “written just after Rodney King’s beating at the hands of the LAPD.”

Do bullying laws work? At Voices in Education, the blog of Harvard Education Publishing, Elizabeth Kandel Englander looks at the debate over the many new state laws concerning bullying. As she puts it, “if bullying isn’t typically a crime, does it hurt or help to enact laws designed to reduce it?”

Both British PM David Cameron and US President Barack Obama have failed to generate much popular or political support for military intervention in the ongoing civil war in Syria. This week, the Harvard University Press Blog compares the points of view of Michael Ignatieff and James Whitman, as they claim that there’s a crucial difference between “war by democracy” and “war for democracy.”

September 21 is Alzheimer’s Action Day, and the JHU Press Blog has a couple of posts discussing Alzheimer’s, Alzheimer’s Action Day, and how we can work to fight the disease and change the way it’s perceived.

At the McGill-Queen’s University Press blog, guest blogger Robert Chrismas offers an interesting perspective on how law enforcement agencies are coping with “ever-advancing technology, globalization, and increased demands around managing information.”

School segregation is seen as a relic of the days before the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. However, at the UNC Press Blog, Tracy K’Meyer argues that, as cases in Louisville, KY, as recently as 2007 show, it’s still necessary to fight for school integration.

“If demography were a landscape, what would it look like?” At the OUPblog, Jonathan Minton discusses modern developments in the study of demography, and particularly the development of demographic contour plots and other mapping techniques. In the first of two posts, he discusses how these contour maps show good news in demographic change. In his less uplifting second post, though, he delves into the bad news we can glean from demographics.

Finally, we’ll wrap things up this week with a post from the University of Virginia Press blog on a controversial topic: the ever-rising cost of higher education. In his post, Carlos Santos looks back at Edgar Allan Poe’s cost of education, and points out that Poe suffered much the same tuition cost pain that many students and parents feel today.

Thanks again for reading this week’s roundup! Have a great weekend, and leave any thoughts in the comments!