Message from Richard Hull, Executive Director

New members and old can take valuable lessons from TAA's noble past
by Richard Hull, Executive Director

Richard Hull TAA Executive Director

This is my third major organizational anniversary celebration, having celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Texas Council for the Humanities and the 30th anniversary of Calasanctius School in leadership positions with those organizations. In many ways this is the most positive and happiest anniversary, for TAA is an exciting organization with a great potential.

Looking back over the years of digitized issues of The TAA Report and The Academic Author, archived on our web site, I am repeatedly struck with the significance and enduring character of both the issues this organization has dealt with and the persistence with which its founders and members addressed them.

Over the years, some of the enthusiasm of members seemed to wane. I don't understand the reasons for that, but I think our range of services to members may help restore that early enthusiasm.

First, we are focusing on providing services to members who are academic authors but not (yet) textbook authors. We have designed several new workshops to help launch academic authoring practices and strengthen them. Now members can not only address issues like writer's block and anxiety over submitting papers and manuscripts in Tara Gray's workshop, they can gain an inside view of what editors look for from Robert Ginsberg, can solicit sound advice on grant writing from Ken Henson, and can understand and even master the intricacies of preparing camera ready copy from Elizabeth Boepple. Further, we anticipate launching a grant program this summer that will provide financial support for publishing journal articles and academic books, helping cover the costs of submitting to and publishing in expensive journals and of getting book manuscripts transformed into publishable copy for publishing houses. Finally, a mix of listservs and blogs enable members to keep current on publishing news, and pose and receive answers to their publishing questions, with useful threads of discussion being spun from the experiences of others.

Second, we are tackling the perennial question of the scholarly importance of text materials by offering competitions for best new texts and texts with the most editions, by genre, in our Texty and McGuffey awards. We have opened these competitions to non-members in order to avoid the appearance of favoring members, and we now will accept entries nominated directly by authors -- necessary in order to circumvent uncooperative publishers and for self-published works. The TAA Council has just adopted a statement, now on line in our website, defending text materials as worthy of consideration for merit increases and in promotion and advancement on the grounds that they can constitute significant contributions to and consolidations of the knowledge base of their respective fields.

Third, our annual conference has been redesigned to recognize the interests of academic authors and text authors as equally deserving of representation in the sessions. Some sessions of interest to writers at both stages of their careers will meet in common; others will group participants around issues of more interest to different career objectives and needs. And social networking events will place aspiring academic authors side by side with text authors that have been extraordinarily successful in writing textbooks of enduring value.

Fourth, our newsletter, The Academic Author, has been redesigned to reflect the wider range of interests and issues of our membership, with articles and reports on the concerns of academics at various stages of their careers. We will soon recommence publishing our journal, the Journal of Text and Academic Authoring, first begun in 2001 but suspended when TAA's financial health took a downturn. The Journal will afford individuals interested in the various dimensions and processes of academic authoring a double-blind refereed resource for their interests, whether in learning more or in offering instruction. The journal will also feature useful, in-depth book reviews on works covering all aspects of academic writing.

Fifth, TAA's affiliated foundation, the Text and Academic Authors Foundation, has launched two research projects and is recruiting prominent and distinguished academics to help guide those projects. One, dealing with the textbook adoption practices in the 50 states, seeks to identify the pressures and factors that determine textbook content in elementary and secondary textbooks (also known as EL-HI or K-12). The other seeks to determine the representation of three ethnic groups among actual textbook authors: African American, Hispanic American, and Native American authors have the potential to help publishers avoid some of the horrendous errors that have appeared in texts in recent years, by virtue of their special interest in the history of their ethnic groups. If, as we suspect, that representation is at most token in many cases, TAA will proceed both to pressure publishers to recruit better scholars to address content issues of their texts and offer individuals interested in becoming authors of text materials workshops to assist them in their development.

Finally, TAA wishes to recruit to its governing bodies, the TAA Council and Executive Committee and the TAA Foundation, individuals who represent the wider range of academic authoring interests described above. Such members are encouraged to run for TAA Council positions and, if elected, to run for Executive Committee offices.

I regard the adjustment of services and representations I've outlined as the realization of a vision of TAA started when it renamed itself, from Text Authors Association to Text and Academic Authors Association, some years ago. My own background is chiefly in academic authoring and not in writing texts, and that personal interest and range of experience was part of what the Council sought in offering me the position of Executive Director two years ago.

During this period of a very steep learning curve, I have come to greatly admire the vision of the founders of TAA. The issues that brought them together still persist: complimentary and used copy sales, problems with publishers, contract negotiations, royalty audits. They recognized, in opening the organization to academic authors in their early writing careers, that fostering the growth of a supply of excellent texts, one of the pillars of American education, should lead the organization to support the development of the craft of academic authoring from its first attempts by the graduate student right through the academic's career: theses and dissertations, journal articles, monographs, grants, editing collective volumes, text materials. TAA, beginning its 21st year, is vibrant, healthy, vitally interested in the needs and aspirations of all academic authors, and well positioned to foster writing's craft.

So we pause to offer out thanks to our founders for their vision and determination. It is a pleasure to take up their challenges for the next twenty years!