The Call to Adventure
Over 3,000 years ago, the I Ching, or Book of Changes (an all-time best-selling Princeton University Press book published under Bollingen Series XIX) was one of the first efforts of the human mind to place itself within the universe. I published a book on how that intellectual work, born across a number of cultures around the same time, was one of humanity’s Two Greatest Ideas. So when my wonderful colleagues asked me—a junior editor of philosophy, political theory, and ancient world, at the time—to consider getting more practical in my publishing and take on leadership of our budding Skills for Scholars series alongside the eminent former PUP director and editor-at-large, Peter Dougherty, I knew I needed to figure out how to find my philosophical mind within the universe of practical guides. I began thinking about this over sunrise meditative walks and golden hour sunset runs along the shoreline of my sleepy beach town, with the aim of channeling myself through these brooks of books. It isn’t just that I was leaving my philosophical fun house, it was a venture out into an unfamiliar and unchartered territory. But I’ve learned that when I let go of knowing everything, or even anything, a stream of inspiration flows through me like rain.
Confucius once said: “They must often change, who would be constant in happiness or wisdom.” What he meant was, if our aim is to be in a consistent state of happiness and wisdom, we must constantly change. My publishing portfolio has long sprung through books that challenge us to change (especially to change our minds). From understanding under-appreciated dream worlds; to embracing weirdness; to questioning immersive technology (individually and socially); to confronting systems of oppression. I’ve always moved like rainfall toward areas where a change in the weather would do wonders. To be happy and wise requires us to change and in the wisdom of Heraclitus, we can never step in the same river twice, since everything, everywhere, is changing all the time.
Crossing the Threshold
Skills for Scholars is a collection of books on the broad, interdisciplinary subject of education, in particular the practical knowledge and skills in the art of higher education. In my constructed view, this includes books celebrating the finest practices, methods, techniques, talents, knowledge, philosophical reflections, history, culture, and diverse experiences and expertise in the scholarly universe. More concretely, the list focuses on the wide-ranging categories of scholarly communication, research, professional development, and teaching and learning.
A New Yorker review of the English translation of Umberto Eco’s book, How to Write a Thesis (MIT Press, 2015), written by writer and literary scholar Hua Hsu, captures the spirit of this kind of publishing:
How to Write a Thesis is ultimately about much more than the leisurely pursuits of college students. Writing and research manuals such as The Elements of Style, The Craft of Research, and Turabian offer a vision of our best selves… engaging difference and attempting a project that is seemingly impossible, humbly reckoning with ‘the knowledge that anyone can teach us something.’
The aim of this five-year-old series has always been to develop our best selves through the best academic practices. These how-to handbooks and guides revolve around how to be a good, exceptional, or even mere passing academic—be that a student, grad student, post doc, early career faculty, mid-career researcher, seasoned professor, university leader, or independent scholar.
These books are concise, accessible, engaging, often exploratory and innovative, and always practical. They aim to provide essential guides for a new generation of scholars, teachers, students, and life-long learners, with the aspiration of becoming classics and/or must-read references and resources in the ever-evolving world of education and higher learning.
But as I’ve cultivated the series, engaging in rich conversations with scholars across the full spectrum of academic fields, I’ve seen how these practical guides represent something deeper and more wholesome. They are not only books on how to be an academic; they are books on how to live a life of continuous learning.
Framed in this way, the series is a rare treasure in the world of popular reference and self-help publishing. Skills for Scholars is self-help for intellectuals. Many of the books are explicitly self-help, and some are stealth help, but all are about learning how to live/work well in our intellectual world. Although the books are grounded in specific subjects and technical practices, the general upshot is that there’s always room to grow as educated persons and professionals, that we can always strive for better—for ourselves and those around us—and that (evoking Hua Hsu) anyone can teach us something. And I’ll take the editorial freedom to change that to everyone can teach us something.
Wherever there is higher education, I aim to explore, honor, and rejoice in that perspective and practice. The academic experience, its toolkit of skills, the practice of teaching and learning, searching and researching, and the passion for knowledge, is truly universal, wherever colleges and universities exist (and importantly, where they don’t exist).
The Road of Trials
Venturing out to chart the change of this series, and with an eye towards inspiring bookish guides, I opened my mind and body of work to another Eastern virtue: practice. Yoga, meditation, and martial arts are practices that honor and trust the journey of being present in daily activity and habitual routines in order to find peace of mind, and to place the body and soul in harmony. When we practice something, we can be both ambitious and modest; we can benefit from expertise as well as from a beginner’s mindset; we can value progress in the process as well as take stake in our mistakes. This also brought me to Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the breakage with a mixture that includes gold, silver, or platinum. It treats breaks and repairs as part of the history of an object, even the highlight of an object, rather than something to disguise.
Drawing on these Eastern traditions—embodied in process, imperfection, non-attachment, and change—I crafted an eight spoked vision of the series for guiding me towards fresh books that can impact the world of scholarly ideas and affairs. My framing is influenced by The Noble Eightfold Path, a set of Buddhist practices that lead one from the painful cycle of rebirth to liberation through nirvana.
I’ll share a couple of those spokes. One is Right Viewing of Higher Education. The series is formulated around the idea of best academic practices, something I plan on preserving. But “best” suggests hierarchy and solidification, whereas “practice” contains multitudes and is dynamically an ongoing process. I aim to create more space for scholars to offer new narratives, experimental perspectives, and innovative comparatives that contrast with presumed academic “best practices.” A broader understanding of what is valuable in learning will serve us all well, as books like bell hooks’s Teaching to Transgress (Routledge, 1994) and Kevin Gannon’s Radical Hope (West Virginia, 2020) have done before.
Here’s one more: Right Resolving of Explicit Content. This title is partly inspired by the history of hip-hop culture, where advisory labels have long been plastered on records, intended to signal that the music features graphic language (typically words considered curses, ideas considered vile, and behavior considered criminal). In an age where difference and diversity are under attack, we shouldn’t shy away from critical human differences but embrace their importance. The goal here is to explicitly centralize and emphasize efforts from scholars of underrepresented and historically marginalized groups. Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Belonging, and Justice (DEIBJ) work for me includes, but is not limited to, work from BIPOC scholars, women, LGTBQ+, scholars of institutional differences, locational variety, differences in job title and academic background, and so on. Books like Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Herder and Herder, 1970) and Bettina Love’s We Want to Do More Than Survive (Penguin, 2020) are inspirations.
The Road Back
Often in life, to move forward, we need to look backward, and remember who we are. I come from the land of the first recorded sound and popular artificial light; just a few miles from Thomas Edison’s first industrial research lab in Menlo Park, New Jersey (1876), in a town now aptly named after him. Among Edison’s developments at this lab were the phonograph, the telephone, the electric railway, and the incandescent light bulb. One interesting tidbit, humorously reflecting on his work in light of mine with the Skills series: nearly all of Edison’s 1000+ patents were utility patents. This tells us that Edison’s patents protected how the inventions functioned—usually by electrical, mechanical, or chemical means—which is a delightful connection to my current circuit board of book development in the intellectual property of how to books.
But perhaps most interesting to me, is that Edison reportedly wanted his lab to have “a stock of almost every conceivable material,” which an 1887 newspaper article reported as: “eight thousand kinds of chemicals, every kind of screw made, every size of needle, every kind of cord or wire, hair of humans, horses, hogs, cows, rabbits, goats, minx, camels … silk in every texture, cocoons, various kinds of hoofs, shark’s teeth, deer horns, tortoise shell … cork, resin, varnish and oil, ostrich feathers, a peacock’s tail, jet, amber, rubber, all ores …” and so on.
If Edison’s research and development lab in my hometown of Edison, New Jersey is a model and inspiration for general invention and innovation, I aspire for Skills for Scholars to be a model for the research and development of invention and innovation of ideas across the academic world. Let it contain materials on every intellectual tool yet known to humankind. Let it embrace and celebrate the learning process, and the joy of experimentation, exploration, and discovery; and give us the scholarly skills to record out loud the intellectual music in our heart, and fill everything with light.
A Return Home
I’ll end my journey (for now) with this. There are different ways of knowing and learning and being. Skills for Scholars, for me, is fundamentally about academic community building. It’s about bringing more people into my intellectual family, under the umbrella of my kin. It’s about providing for each other, in tandem with seeing how we really need each other. It’s about self-guidance and guidance counseling. It’s about empowering a new generation of academics with fresh skills, while inviting scholars to rediscover what drew them to academia in the first place: a love of learning and the intellectual conversation. It’s about uncovering the hidden curriculum, reconciling inequity and injustice, transformation for first generations, and deep, authentic connections with everyday life—in higher education, and higher above. It’s about learning as a way of life, and a way of love. After all, the word “school” comes from the Greek ‘schole’, which means “leisure.” I learned this from Jonathan Malesic, who cites Josep Piper’s 1948 book, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, which points to Aristotle; and it is Aristotle who saw contemplation as the highest human activity and essential to happiness, something we’re all pursuing.
And in pursuit of that, these brief, engagingly written advice books go beyond dry, how-to manuals. Each has a unique alchemy of practical, critical, and reflective material to provide durable, malleable, and remarkable gold to its intended readers. At the core of everything we do here at Princeton University Press is our mission, to bring scholarly ideas to the world; to help authors carry life-giving oxygen and nutrients to other cells in the scholarly body. Skills aims to be the DNA blueprint for how anyone, anywhere, can be the beating heart that brings an important scholarly idea to the world.
One of the thrills of Skills for Scholars is how unlimited and unchartered it is. There are some similar, excellent, publishing endeavors, but there isn’t precedent for a single broad series like this. Likewise, there are no skills departments across academia, yet most scholars could benefit from engaging with such books. So what am I looking for as I continue to grow the series? Books that support this charting and changing, exploring and expanding, of higher education. Books that reflect the inspirations and insights that emerge from a path of constant learning, from those before us, and those around us. I hope readers will find, in the series, voices that help them reflect on how a life of learning is an authentic life, a dynamic life, and one best shared as widely as possible. With that, I welcome fruitful collaboration from the academic world in helping make shape of it.
Speaking of shape. Last year was the 25th anniversary of the New York Times bestselling PUP title, The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions. Standing on the bank of what was, perhaps, PUP’s first major contribution to higher education publishing, and looking down stream at the long-term possibilities in Skills for Scholars, I can say with hope and gratitude that the river is long, but (in my grand view) its shape will bend towards all of us.
Matt Rohal is an associate editor of higher education at Princeton University Press.