Educopia’s second interview in its Systems Leadership Series is with Gita Manaktala. Gita is Executive Editor at Large at the MIT Press, overseeing acquisitions in information science and communication. She previously served as Editorial Director for 14 years, building the press’s distinguished book program. Gita has also directed marketing at MIT Press, managing worldwide sales, promotion, and publicity. She co-chaired the Association of American University Presses’ first Diversity and Inclusion Task Force, which led to a standing committee on Equity, Justice, and Inclusion.
What is the system that you are working to change? Is it publishing, higher education, or something in between?
It’s both of those systems. It’s challenging to talk about this at the moment, because these systems are currently under attack. The Trump administration is defunding universities, deporting international students and faculty members, and attempting to dictate what professors can say and teach. While there is much that should change within these systems, there is much more that deserves to be defended. Universities are a major engine of the United States’s prosperity and a source of many of its cultural, scientific, and technological innovations. The country’s leadership will decline if its universities are broken.
University presses occupy a small but disproportionately influential corner of a larger publishing universe, which also includes for-profit academic publishers, trade publishers, and independent presses. Always nonprofit, we partner with exceptional scholars and researchers to publish peer reviewed books and journals that represent the cutting edge of new knowledge in a wide array of fields. At the MIT Press we publish books for both specialized and general readerships. Contrary to what you might think, university presses do not only publish works by faculty members at their own institutions. For example, at the MIT Press, while we’re extremely proud to publish books by MIT faculty, our authors come from universities around the world.
University presses are part of a larger knowledge enterprise, which includes scholars, researchers, administrators, media, and funders—both federal and private—and others invested in the creation of knowledge to address the great challenges the world is facing.
For all of this to happen, you need money, you need expertise, you need education, you need students and teachers, and you need publishers to disseminate that knowledge in ways that are accessible, applicable, and useful to people around the world.
What are the most critical feedback loops in the intersection of publishing and higher education? Specifically, how do you and MIT Press focus your efforts to create change in this system? And how do you understand the relationships between key players—like educators, faculty, researchers, students, funders, and publishers—and how they interact within this broader ecosystem?
The mission of the MIT Press, and I’d venture most university presses, is to advance the kind of knowledge the world needs, whether this is historical, humanistic, technical, or scientific. At the MIT Press, we work with authors to help them achieve the full impact of their ideas and the largest possible audience for them. Our work is known for its iconic design, rigorous scholarship, and creative use of technology. We try to honor the complexity of the research and writing our authors do, publishing provocative and transformative works that cross boundaries—whether geographic or disciplinary.
We cover a wide range of subjects, from architecture and the arts to economics, computing, environmental studies, visual culture, science, technology and society, neuroscience, life sciences, physical sciences, math, engineering, and many more. We also publish journals, which are highly ranked in their fields, many of which are freely available online.
It’s not about gatekeeping or deciding which ideas “deserve” to persist and get broadly disseminated. Instead, we tap networks of expertise—scholars and researchers, our faculty board members, and our own editors—to develop work that needs to be published in book form or in one of the peer-reviewed journals we’re sponsoring.
As an editor, when evaluating a book proposal, I think hard about the potential impact of the author’s ideas—why they matter, and how they can be best communicated to a book-reading audience. If I believe in the project, I bring it to peer reviewers to weigh in—experts in the subject matter in the author’s field or adjacent fields. With their detailed evaluations in hand, I then present it to my publishing committee, which includes colleagues in sales, marketing, and production. Together we assess whether the book will meet the needs of readers, how it fits into the existing literature, how it’s going to compete and compare with other books on the topic, and what it’s going to add that’s unique and valuable. This collaborative process ensures that many voices are part of the decision about which ideas and arguments the MIT Press is best positioned to publish.
One of the components of this system—really, an underlying factor in many systems—is technology. Earlier, you mentioned MIT’s innovative approach to technology in relation to university presses and the broader publishing landscape. Could you speak to how technology plays a role in reaching audiences beyond the core academic discourse. Specifically, how does technology contribute to socializing and presenting ideas before a book is published, and how does it help connect with a broader readership?
Technology has fundamentally reshaped the publishing industry many times over, and at MIT Press, we’ve worked to stay at the forefront of these changes, particularly in how we use technology to develop, publish, and distribute books. One example is a multimedia platform we helped develop with the MIT Media Lab called PubPub (now independent and run by the Knowledge Futures group). It’s an authoring platform that supports text, sound, video, comments, and other media. My authors have used PubPub to post book manuscripts, with our permission, before they’re formally published. Authors can invite colleagues and trusted advisors to read the book online and comment on individual chapters through an open community review process that allows for rich, chapter and sentence-level discussion. I’ve found it very interesting to conduct a traditional anonymous review alongside the open review, as each review method produces distinctive feedback that authors have used to improve their work before publishing it formally.
We’ve also been a leader in open access publishing, which is a form of digital publishing that uses Creative Commons licensing to ensure that books are freely available to anyone in the world with an internet connection. We’re fortunate to be able to offer this to authors of scholarly books who want them to be accessible in this way.
What are some concrete examples of how external influences—such as political, economic, or social factors—are shaping university publishing? And what adaptations are you seeing within the MIT Press and across other university presses?
External factors, including economic pressures and technological changes, impact all publishers including university presses.. We are nonprofit, but we’re affected by the volatility of the external marketplace just like anybody else who’s selling products to consumers. Whether you’re Random House or the MIT Press or a smaller university press, you fund your work by selling books. The environment is tough, particularly because books now compete with so many other information and entertainment options. Even students are buying fewer books than in the past. Professors often tell us they assign shorter readings these days, recognizing that students (like many of us) struggle to find the time and attention for long-form texts.
Economic factors are a major external pressure on university presses also because of the nature of what we publish. Our mission-critical works include specialized, monographic books that tackle scholarly topics. These books build knowledge in unique and valuable ways that would not be possible otherwise. Although they don’t command massive audiences, they are essential.
We’re in an information environment that’s heavily algorithm-driven, where aggregators are the ones profiting. We have an abundance of information but scarce and valuable attention spans. Those who can aggregate knowledge at scale—like Google and social media platforms—are positioned to profit. Meanwhile, content producers doing the craft work, the labor- and time-intensive work, which doesn’t scale easily, are more precarious. And book publishers, including university presses, fall into that category.
Describe the vision for change that you would like to see, or that you see yourself and the MIT Press contributing to in this particular system. Speaking from your pre-MIT experience and/or when you first joined the Press, what did you tell yourself you wanted to change in this role, and how did you want to make that impact?
At the MIT Press, we’re trying to change the system in lots of ways. Open access, for example, is about making scholarship more accessible and usable, or more actionable, as our Director likes to say. And I really like that phrasing, because we want these ideas to be applied by anyone in a position to do so, not just by people who already have access to resources and well funded libraries.
Expanding our readership to include general readers and kids is also important for similarly mission-aligned reasons. Higher education and publishing are often, and often justly, critiqued for their élitism—and that’s an aspect of the system that should be changed from within. Not by using a sledgehammer to destroy the system, but by extending its very real benefits to more people. Publishing books for wider audiences is one small part of this.
Regarding the economic challenges publishers face, we don’t have the means to overhaul the entire system or create entirely new markets for books, but we are partnering more with external funders to support our work, because increasingly, there just isn’t a market-based model that can sustain everything we do.
We’re also working to recognize the peer reviewers who invest so much time and care into this system—providing constructive feedback to authors, helping them develop their work, and ensuring the quality of what we publish. It’s unrecognized labor because it’s anonymous. It’s undercompensated and time-intensive. So we’re exploring ways to better recognize that work. We provide letters for reviewers so they can let their department heads know how much we value their contributions. We’re also experimenting with open review and other forms of peer review that can offer value and visibility in new ways.
Another area of change is in demystifying the publishing process, including for authors whose work has been underrepresented. We’ve worked hard to diversify our author, reviewer, and reader networks—because we ultimately want to reach wider audiences, including readers who need to see themselves and their perspectives in what we publish.
We’re doing all this not only because it’s the right thing to do, but because we believe, and have seen, that diverse networks of authors and reviewers result in higher-quality books. So there’s a real self-interest in doing this work well.
We’re also building new platforms for authors and their ideas to reach readers in an information environment that doesn’t favor long-form content. One example is our magazine, the MIT Press Reader. It features excerpts from books in our backlist that are relevant again because of developments in the world, or newly relevant because they were ahead of their time when first published. Our editor works directly with authors to shape these excerpts into magazine-style articles. Once published on the Reader, they often get picked up and syndicated by outlets like Scientific American, Smithsonian, Time, and Newsweek. These pieces generate lots of visibility for older books and help to surface their ideas for new audiences. It is one more way we’re trying to build platforms that connect authors and readers in a changing landscape.
Given the social and political pressures impacting academia, how do these factors intersect with the core value of academic freedom that drives so many to join the academy—to pursue questions rooted in disciplinary theory, methodology, and epistemology? How are university presses navigating the tensions between political discourse and the editorial independence needed to select and publish works that align with their values?
That’s such an important question now, because academic freedom is in the crosshairs. We’re seeing a chilling effect from federal crackdowns on students and scholars, detentions, mandates regarding what can be taught, and funding cuts. These threats truly endanger the core values of the university, and university presses rely on that freedom to curate the ideas we believe the world needs. I’m deeply worried about that.
MIT has always supported our editorial freedom, which I’m extremely grateful for. It’s an essential value of the institution that scholars and researchers should have this freedom, and that there should be places for them to publish their work. I hope that everyone who values higher education can find a way to stand up for academic freedom as the foundation of the United States’s excellence in research, scholarship, publishing, and knowledge creation.
[Regarding the potential of an uptick in the number of faculty members and researchers from state schools whose budgets are much more proportionally impacted by the current political agenda coming to MIT Press for support] You can easily imagine that university presses might be shuttered at schools that are heavily impacted by budget cuts, especially presses that rely on operational subsidies from their institutions. Those presses really need those subsidies to survive. Fortunately, we don’t have that situation at MIT. Although we don’t receive an annual subsidy, MIT has consistently supported our work, and I believe that support will continue.
If you were writing a love letter to the future of the field, what advice would you give to emerging systems leaders who want to drive meaningful change? What would you share from your own lived experience and vantage point?
Having worked at the MIT Press for my whole career, I’ve had the opportunity to change jobs a number of times within the press. I started out as a publicity assistant and a publicist, then became a promotions manager and eventually the head of sales and marketing. After that, I moved over to the acquisitions and editorial side of the house, and I’ve learned a lot in both of those types of roles.
I would encourage anyone who’s interested in publishing—or other parts of the knowledge economy—to broaden their base of skills. Learn as much as you can. Do more than one job. I love talking with colleagues who are new to the MIT Press; it’s fascinating to hear their observations and questions. What are the things that do or don’t make sense to them? How were those things done in their previous job? They always bring new knowledge and insights because they’ve worked in other places.
I think the best thing you can do when you’re starting out is just to be open to working in lots of different roles and connecting with people across functional areas. You’ll learn so much that way, and you’ll draw on it for the rest of your career.