UC Press gets new director

 

The University of California Press, one of the nation’s largest and most prestigious academic publishers, is hiring veteran publishing executive Alison Mudditt to be its next director, officials said Thursday. She will take over the job next month, when Lynne Withey, who has been director of the Berkeley-based press since 2002, is scheduled to retire.

"This is somebody who has a deep understanding of scholarly communication and what academic publishing is all about. But she also has this very strong appreciation of commercial publishing," Daniel Greenstein, the UC system’s vice provost for academic planning and programs, said of the British-born Mudditt. Greenstein, who oversees the UC Press, also noted Mudditt’s experience in launching several initiatives in digital publishing, an area that the press has pursued in recent years.

UC Press publishes on average 200 books and 40 journals a year and has 120 employees. It is now experiencing a rush of international acclaim and very strong sales of the first volume of the new version of the "Autobiography of Mark Twain," produced by the Mark Twain Project at UC Berkeley.

Mudditt had been executive vice president in charge of higher education programs for about seven years at SAGE Publications, a Thousand Oaks-based press that has a large business in college textbooks, scholarly journals and electronic media. She has also held positions at such publishers as Taylor & Francis in Philadelphia and Blackwell in Oxford, England.  According to the UC regents' motion approving her hire, Mudditt's annual salary will be $244,900.

Larry Gordon

 

Comments

[lwps]

I guess publishing is no longer in the pits, when UC can afford to pay this person $244,900. Easy come, easy go.

[Transparency]

Is this another Chancellor Birgeneau that UC Berkeley can not afford?Chancellor Robert Birgeneau’s eight-year fiscal track record is dismal indeed. He would like to blame the politicians in Sacramento, since they stopped giving him every dollar he has asked for, and the state legislators do share some responsibility for the financial crisis. But not in the sense he means.
A competent chancellor would have been on top of identifying inefficiencies in the system and then crafting a plan to fix them. Competent oversight by the Board of Regents and the legislature would have required him to provide data on problems and on what steps he was taking to solve them. Instead, every year Birgeneau would request a budget increase, the regents would agree to it, and the legislature would provide. The hard questions were avoided by all concerned, and the problems just piled up to $150 million of inefficiencies….until there was no money left.
It’s not that Birgeneau was unaware that there were, in fact, waste and inefficiencies in the system. Faculty and staff have raised issues with senior management, but when they failed to see relevant action taken, they stopped. Finally, Birgeneau engaged some expensive ($3 million) consultants, Bain & Company, to tell him what he should have been able to find out from the bright, engaged people in his own organization.
In short, there is plenty of blame to go around. But you never want a serious crisis to go to waste. An opportunity now exists for the UC president, Board of Regents, and California legislators to jolt UC Berkeley back to life, applying some simple check-and-balance management principles. Increasing the budget is not enough; transforming senior management is necessary. The faculty, Academic Senate, Cal. Alumni, financial donors, benefactors await the transformation.
The author, who has 35 years’ consulting experience, has taught at University of California Berkeley, where he was able to observe the culture and the way the senior management operates.