Another reason for Ooligan to be excited

In thinking about the Ooligan website and what sort of redesign it's going to end up getting, it occurred to me that we might want to have a look at the websites of other publishing programs in the country. I knew that there was a publishing degree available at NYU; their flyers show up in the halls of PSU sometimes, and I actually got to chat with oneof their instructors at the conference I was at recently. I had a vague idea that there might be another one or two around, but exactly how many, I didn't really have any idea of.

Well, a bit of googling brought me seven US programs that at least claimed to be about publishing, and another two that claimed to be in the US despite addresses in Aberdeen, Scotland. In no particular order, those are:

• Columbia's Publishing Course. They bill themselves, apparently with pride, as being "the shortest graduate school in the country." It's six weeks long; you spend 3 on books, 2 on magazines, and one on "new media."
• NYU's MS in Publishing. This looks to be a more serious sort of program than Columbia's, though their list of courses makes me think the emphasis of the program is on publishing as a business--I would expect the people who come out of this program to want to be publishing executives in big companies, rather than the well-rounded publishing generalists that we tend to turn out at PSU.
  
• George Washington University's MPS in Publishing. This is a two-year program that, like NYU's program, has a very stron business emphasis; shockingly, they have no courses on editing on their curriculum, though at least they offer one on design.
• Emerson College's MA in Publishing and Writing. They claim to deliver "an overview of the publishing industry from writing and editing, through design, production, promotion, and distribution," and their course selection looks reasonable enough--they seem to offer most of the courses that we do here at Ooligan, with a fair few additional ones devoted to magazines.
• University of Denver must be having a competition with Columbia--they have a program called The Publishing Institute that beats out the Publishing Course by a third--that's right, their course is only four weeks long. 'Nuff said on that, I think.
• Pace University offers an MS in Publishing that also seems to have a fairly decent course selection--there are plenty of courses on editing and design, and like Emerson a fairly full selection of classes on magazine publishing. They also have a number of classes on technology in publishing.
• Harvard's Extension School offers a publishing certificate, but there don't seem to be too many classes offered that are publishing specific--in fact, it looks like there are two (Principles of Editing and Survey of Publishing: From Text to Hypertext), and the rest of the courses are electives from various writing and journalism fields.

So, there are some other publishing programs out there, and some of them actually look like they're pretty decent. But none of them have what we have with Ooligan: A student-run press. Actually being able to work on books that are really going to be published in the real world is a huge thing. I can't say for sure, of course, but I would think that this gives those students who really take advantage of Ooligan a world of experience that students at other schools won't get.

So why should we be excited? Well, it seems to me that we're in a really good position. There is apparently a fair bit of interest in publishing--enough to support eight programs in the States, even if some of them last for weeks rather than years. And we have a lot of experience with teaching publishing by publishing; we're even going to be putting out a book about it soon. We have the chance to start a dialogue with all those other students and teachers of publishing, and we can use that conversation to expand our web of contacts, share a lot of information with the industry in general, and get ourselves some good name-recognition. There are lots of possibilities here, and I'm excited to try to grab some.