A textbook case …
Written by Steven Schwartz on July 23rd, 2008
Should students be required to purchase textbooks authored by their instructors? Does it matter whether the textbook is “self-published” or commercially published? These questions are currently being debated at many universities (see here for example).
For trade books (the books found in bookshops), self-publishing is known as “vanity” publishing because the only people who do it are those who cannot find a commercial publisher to put up the money.
These authors are so keen to publish that they are happy to pay the costs of editing, printing and distribution just to see their books listed on Amazon. The vanity publishing of trade books is almost always a losing proposition.
It’s different for textbooks. If you know that you can count on 1000 students buying your textbook (at a price you set), then you really can’t lose. You may as well pay the upfront costs because you are guaranteed a profit from sales to your own hapless students.
No bookshop needs stock it, no other university needs assign it and no libraries need buy it - the authors still come out well because it is required reading for their students. This is why, in the vast majority of cases, the only sales of these self-published books are to the author’s own students.
Academics who engage in assigning their own books to students could be viewed as exploiting their students for personal gain. Given that no other university uses their books, the claim that they assign their own book because no other textbook is as good as theirs is dubious at best. However, even if their book was commercially published and used at universities around the world, making money by requiring students buy your book would still be a clear conflict of interest.
Decades ago, at the University of Texas, we got around this problem by not allowing academics to profit from sales to their own students. In other words, if your book is really the best, you can make it required reading but any royalties or profits you earn from sales to your own students must go to a student hardship and scholarship fund.
This eliminates the financial conflict and allows students to benefit twice - once by being exposed to their instructor’s brilliance and then again by being the beneficiary of their beneficence.
I saw the report on this in the Australian and wondered if you would comment on it.
I think it’s an excellent topic for discussion in the university in the context of our ethics statement, and it would be good to see some discussion of it here too.
Firstly, I want to make clear that I am not making a judgment of individuals who are merely continuing established practices, nor am I going to buy into disputes between the university and staff arising from situations in which someone decides that long-established practices are no longer acceptable and proceeds to make accusations under codes of conduct and so on. Those disputes have their own arenas for resolution and this ain’t one of them. So these are my personal views and not based on any legal or industrial considerations.
Secondly, I should say that I have been involved in devising material for a text, lecture notes package and CD-ROM that was published by my DEPARTMENT and sold to students in a very large first year unit as the prescribed text. I always had some discomfort about this captive market, but assuaged my conscience through reminding myself that a) the whole package was still cheaper than most first-year texts; b) the money went to the Department, not the team who produced the material (although as consolidated Departmental income it was pretty much redistributed to all staff in the Department via salary supplementation); c) of course it exactly covered the material we wanted to cover and d) it was pretty bloody good and the result of a true collaborative effort by staff. The writing and sale of this text was established practice long before I joined this department, and I believe it continues today, long after I left it.
So, having that out of the way, I can go on to say that I personally have a real problem with the practice of selling self-published texts and notes to students where the individual author receives direct income from it. There is just not enough of an arms-length relationship for it to be ethical.
Apart from the fact that our students have already paid (or have taken on substantial debt) to access our minds as teachers, it is simply an abuse of position to use our students to enrich ourselves. If you are not earning enough as an academic, join the fight for better salaries and conditions rather than seeking direct supplementation of your income from students!
Apart from the dodgy ethics of profiting from your students, there is also the issue of the quality of the text.
I don’t think we should assume that anything that has been self-published is not good enough to be taken on by a publisher and is therefore substandard work. It’s just that it’s untested by an independent process. Now, the available evidence (the academic standing of the teacher and their experience and reputation as a teacher) might lead us to an initial assumption as to the quality of the text. But until it’s properly evaluated, edited and published as an academic text, can we really be sure?
Well, to be honest, even if it is published properly by a reputable publisher, it could still be rubbish! But the proof of the pudding etc etc… that is, if others take it up and use it and find it appropriate to their needs, we would normally conclude that it’s a good text. And if it is proven in this way, why should it not be a prescribed text for our own courses?
I think that in this situation, the length of the arm (via editor, publisher, bookshop etc), the reputation of the text AND the fact that it can be made available through the Library (so students aren’t FORCED to buy it) probably overrides the conflict of interest problem.
Nevertheless, I must say I quite like the idea that that proportion of the royalties gained from ones own students should be directed towards a fund that benefits students, like a scholarship fund, for example. That would certainly take away any remaining disquiet about the ethics of it all.
By the way, do we have any idea how prevalent the practice of selling self-published texts and notes is here at Macquarie? And what happens to the income from them? I suspect in most cases the publishing is done at a department level and that’s where the money goes, but I would be interested to know how embedded this practice is in our culture.
Would love to see more discussion of this, here and in the tearooms of the world…
‘if your book is really the best, you can make it required reading but any royalties or profits you earn from sales to your own students must go to a student hardship and scholarship fund.’
What a fantastic idyllic sentiment, but I sincerely wonder about the practicalities behind it.
The fact of the matter is that on the one hand, the university presses for academics to publish prolifically (certainly at the expense of coursework teaching), and yet expects the same academics to what… Not set these works as required readings?
If an academic publishes a work, it is most likely that they are a smarter for it. This work should be funnelled back into the coursework of our university, not skated around by vague sentiments of (yet more) pointless, obscure, and unrealistic expectations from the lofts of the university administration.
This is not high school. If a convener sets their own work as texts, tough. If the texts are unimportant, then students can do without them. Otherwise, we are shying away from the very necessity of all successful universities: That students are up-to-date, aware, and even involved in their colleague’s work. Creating another politically-correct policy for the sake of media exposure should not be a priority for the university at the moment.
If the university is worried about academics taking advantage of students’ pockets, perhaps there is a much larger issue that needs to be addressed?
This is not the only context in which the matter of prescribing texts by academics raises ethical questions. For example, if a publisher offers to sponsor a subject prize, but only wants to sponsor a subject in which the publisher’s book is prescribed, that raises a different ethical issue.
If we’re going to advance towards a University position on this, then (a) it needs to be positioned within the overall ethics framework and conlict of interest policies, (b) it needs to cover at least the two different ethical contexts above, and (c) there needs to be a common framework of principes and guidelines.
On the main issue raised by the VC, here are some suggested principles to move us towards a framework:
1. In all cases, the practice of prescribing one’s own text raises at least an ethical issue, for the staff member, their School, and the University, in terms of a perceived or actual conflict of interest. There is at least an apparent conflict (which cries out for an explanation) between the personal financial benefit to the academic who sets their own text and the interest of the student and the School/University in having students using and perhaps buying the best text for their needs in that particular course.
2. In some circumstances, prescribing one’s own text is potentially anti-competitive, with implications at least under the spirit (if not also the letter) of trade practices law, for academics as well as universities. (But let’s not go there for now …)
3. Just because there is a conflict of interest, it does not follow that the practice is never justified or must be abandoned in every case. The commercial and legal worlds are used to handling conflicts of interest - establishing that there is one is only the first step. Otherwise, boardroom directors who have a personal interest in matters before the board might be precluded from doing anything! Of course, a suitable framework for addressing the ethical issue must provide meaningful guidance to assist academics, their students, and their host Schools/University to identify conflicts of interest. There will be situations where the text is the best text and can be demonstrated to be so. There may be no other text that covers all of the material in the subject, or from the necessary angles. There might be evidence of the text being used in similar courses across the country or overseas.
4. The source of the publication (eg academic/commercial publisher v self-publishing) is not alone determinative. Commercial publishers have market audiences and requirements that do not always coincide with everything that is taught. The publication cucle might mean that material cannot be published commercially in time for the subject. However, the source and status of the publisher might be relevant in substance to the case for why a particular text might or might not be the best - eg it might be relevant to ask why a self-published text is better than others if all others are published commercially. There might well be a good answer - the others might all be out of date; the market might have shifted away from commercial publishing in the topic area; the material might be so fresh that self-publishing is the only way in which the material can be made available to students benfore the next commercial publishing cycle; and so on. Again, it all points to the process that is followed and whether there is any process in place - for identifying material conflicts of interest and then responding to them.
4. So, the real question is how the conflict is addressed, and through what evidence-based process that is at arm’s length from the academic involved. This is where discussion needs to focus, within an overarching University framework. Options include: (i) a presumption against the practice (as highlighted in the media commentary), which can be displaced through an evidence-based process (eg (a) School/Faculty approval processes, (b) evidence of the text’s widespread use and authoritative standing elsewhere, and (c) pedagogical and comparative analysis of how and why the proposed text better meets the subject’s and students’ needs better than others available); (ii) enforced donation of royalties (as the VC canvasses, although strictly speaking stripping the academic of the financial fruits of their action mitigates the harm and acts as a sanction but does not remove the conflict - the students might lose from not being exposed to the best text, regardless of where the money goes); (iii) making sure that suitable numbers of prescribed texts are available to all students through the Library, and not requiring students in form or in substance (eg through active lecturer words, behaviour, and subject work) to face buying the lecturer’s text as the only means of accessing the set text for the purposes of the work in the subject; (iv) mandatory requirements to disclose in study guides that lecturers personally benefit from royalties, and to outline the case for the set text being the best for student purposes for the relevant subject - without unjustly criticising or defaming other textbooks (which presents its own set of problems); and (v) individual and School/Faculty self-regulation against a University framework for ethical practices concerning prescribed texts.
A blog topic that is no doubt as timely now as it was when I was doing my undergraduate degree almost two decades ago. I well remember how infuriated a lot of us first-years were when we realised that our lecturer - who was also the head of the department - had set his text as one of two primary texts for the subject, and that the book was next to useless. Despite paying the better part of $130 for the privilege of holding a large chunk of paper, we hardly referred to the book at all. Even the author rarely referred to his own work in the lectures, instead preferring to cite the other primary reference.
Such practices make students feel deeply cynical about the use of lecturer’s textbooks in courses - I know that as for me, I certainly tended to view prescribed texts with a warier eye and was a lot more reluctant to shell out what, for a university student, were large sums of money on useless resources.
I would argue that the ’self-publication’ of journals funded by a particular university department presents a similar ethical dilemma particularly as it often allows the managing editor to grant favours to authors/reviewers and to boost the number of publications the editor can claim (e.g. an ‘editorial’ preface/comment can be counted as a publication). Editorial boards, those long lists of the good, great and titled that appear on the inside cover, are supposed to mitigate against such self-publishing practices but it is arguable whether they are truly aware of the operational decisions made by managing editors or whether there is a quid-pro quo at play.
John Hechinger in The Wall Street Journal July 10th, “As Textbooks Go ‘Custom,’ Students Pay” (referenced in “A textbook scam,” by Andrew Potter, http://www.macleans.ca, July 11) noted “A Writer’s Reference,” by Diana Hacker, as an example of a custom-doctored text.
The points made in the posts above are good ones, but the problems remain intractable. How much money is being spent internationally on factitious English, TOEFL, IELTS, Kaplan, Azar “grammars”? The market is huge–even Cambridge is deeply into bogus or inferior English–witness the popularity of the grammar in use books by Raymond Murphy.
By now, we should have had a comprehensive study of the size of the trash English market in at least Australia, the US, and the UK (including opportunity costs). We should be asking why somewhat enlightened universities such as Macquarie have been unable to focus why the COBUILD Intermediate English Grammar and English Grammar, the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, and the Longman Language Activator have not become the high school and first year university standard to replace composition handbooks. All English tests should be based on a curriculum of corpus tools taught in an integrated way. We should triangulate by teaching literature so as to reinforce the language teaching: “Great Expectations” is excellent for counterfactuals; “No Country For Old Men” for future conditions and reported future conditions. How is it possible that universities such as Macquarie and Cambridge have failed to form an international working group to solve the English language pathology represented by farcical tests and senseless handbooks?
The best forum for discussion of academic issues is the TLS website. Unfortunately, The Australian, although it has the world’s best higher education section, and an interesting book review, has been unable to manage comment as well as Stothard and Beard at TLS. The issue of higher education comment at the WSJ should also be met head on this fall.
Schwartz has the sense to run an acceptable blog, but many academic administrators do not. Also, there is the pervasive failure to collate information. Anyone who reads a lot of Australian, US, and UK media will see the same higher education stories appearing again and again over the continents with the usual lack of integration of the information.
Macquarie should teach students how to keep track of this information so that the lessons of one continent could be applied to the problems of another, in real time. Academics are apparently quite shy of maximizing time zones: nothing except inertia would prevent Macquarie from establishing a 24-hour a day analysis center with Cambridge and a North American university to work on practical projects to alleviate the many stresses that have been emerging in such symptoms as malpractice in textbook assignment.
As I indicated in Mary Beard’s blog at the TLS, I would like to see an Internet poetry database constructed so as to revolutionize practices in teaching listening (you will find my comment at Mary’s recent “rant” on a politician-type who dared make some modest objections to the ways of Oxbridge). I can’t see why it would be impossible to consider the WSJ story on texts and the TLS matters in the context of the comments here.
I would also like Macquarie to consider the idea of a dictionary of spectra. One of the saddest hoaxes in the “teaching” and “testing” of English is SAT vocabulary “learning.” Many students want to absorb large chunks of well-organized vocabulary. The best way to do so would be through a spectrum approach: you may be refractory, intransigent; adjusted, temperate; or malleable and pliant–yet we have no such reference tool.