Thursday, March 18, 2010
Tennessee Bill Would Ban Faculty Authors From Earning Royalties ('Kickbacks') on Books Assigned to Their Students
The Tennessean, TN Professors Fume Over Bill Banning Textbook Royalties; Legislator Wants to End 'Kickbacks':
[T]o at least one state representative, those book royalties are "kickbacks" to state university professors, earned by "forcing their students to purchase certain books." And that representative, Knoxville Republican Stacey Campfield, wants the practice stopped.
Campfield's bill, stalled in a House subcommittee, would discourage professors from assigning their own textbooks to their students by banning them from collecting royalties on those sales.
Appalled academics have blasted the bill from one side of the state to the other this week.
"You just tell this guy that writing a textbook represented 10 years of full-time and Saturday work," said [Janet] Belsky, a professor of psychology at Middle Tennessee State University and an expert on aging issues — an expertise she poured into her book. "The idea that somehow I am ripping off my students is crazy." ...
"These professors are lining their pockets," said Tres Wittum, a senior at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, who was required to purchase a professor's book for a class. "They are not well known, and they are probably not going to sell a bunch of copies."
Campfield, whose district includes the UT-Knoxville campus, drafted the bill after hearing complaints from students who were tired of being assigned textbooks written by their professors — textbooks that were constantly being updated, forcing them to buy new, instead of used. ...
We are not bloodsuckers out for the money" [Belsky] said. "If I didn't revise my textbooks, the information would be hopelessly out of date. Particularly in behavioral sciences, the landscape changes so quickly, textbooks have to be revised."
At a recent meeting of the UT Board of Trustees, the board's government liaison scoffed at the legislation, saying professors who have written textbooks should be prized, not punished.
(Hat Tip: Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed.) Yale Law Prof Ian Ayres notes (here and here) that he rebates to his students the royalties he earns on the books he assigns in his classes.
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2010/03/tennessee-bill-.html
Comments
My campus in http://www.ncsu.edu/policies/governance_admin/gov_gen/REG01.25.1.php
considers this a possible conflict of interest and in 6.2.2.2(a) says that Reporting and Review is required. I know of cases where the conflict of interest was resolved by the faculty member donating the royalties from those courses to the scholarship fund.
Posted by: Henry | Mar 18, 2010 6:49:33 PM
I ran into this issue all the time at Purdue some years ago, so I can see where the legislature is coming from. Math professors, in particular, would 'rewrite' their calculus books every two years (IE, change a few problems) in order to force students into new books. They got a substantial royalty on all these books, which were REQUIRED for REQUIRED courses.
Posted by: Neale | Mar 18, 2010 2:18:43 PM
Back in medical school one a$$hole prof made 200 of us buy a $103 (1978 dollars) cell biology text of his, to which he referred once in the course, to two pages.
Don't know if that's a "kickback", but I do know it was corrupt.
Posted by: Dr. Smith | Mar 18, 2010 2:00:34 PM
Below is the mail I sent to Instapundit in response to his commentary on this post:
It is not the conflict of interest that worries me when professors assign their own texts. It is the one-dimensionality of instruction. A good professor should be able to present his ideas in lectures, and then support those ideas using written material from other experts in the field.
If a field is so narrow - such as space law - that the professor's own text is the only useful text, then it could be exempted from this general rule. However, if the field has value, I would hope that it wouldn't be long before other professors joined in and published their own useful texts.
Posted by: gullyborg | Mar 18, 2010 1:50:13 PM
I work in college publishing, and it is not the professors that insist on coming out with new editions, but the publishers. They do this to kill the second-hand market for books and force the schools to adopt the newer versions of the texts.
Of course, there are plenty of cases where professors assign their own books and then only refer to the text once or twice in a semester... but then the students can protest to their school ombudsman.
Posted by: Alex | Mar 19, 2010 10:45:36 AM