Textbooks? Pain in the ass. Engaging if you’re taking the right classes, and educational, of course, but most definitely a pain in the ass.
Often thicker than the blood of the freakin’ covenant and pricier than Tutankhamen’s sarcophagus, textbooks define old-world charm in its soul-snatching glory. Some professors see it as a worthy exchange and continue to prescribe them. Others expedite everyone’s lives and go for easily accessible Canvas readings.
But whatever the strategy, I starkly disagree with one aspect of textbook assignment: professors who tell you to buy materials which they themselves have written. At times, it can be outright detrimental to a student’s ability to get the most out of a class.
Many classes deal heavily in critical thinking and analysis, such as media-related courses and almost any English class. Even if you’re just looking at raw data from an experiment your professor once conducted or helped conduct, there might be aspects to the experiment that skewed the result unfavourably. Or maybe your professor has some sort of fictional anthology that you take issue with.
If the course isn’t asking you to critically think about the course material, you should be doing it on your own. If we’re unable to evaluate the course texts in a critical and unbiased way, it’s hard to gain meaningful intellectual growth from them. The relevance here is that it’s really difficult to do that when your professor is the one who wrote the materials.
This cuts two ways. The student might be scared that disagreeing with their professor is going to land them in the teacher’s bad books. Meanwhile, the professor is, naturally, going to have more criticism for the person who disagrees with them than the person who agrees.
This is not intentional, and it’s not even necessarily out of any sort of bias. But the professor obviously has good reasons to believe in whatever they espouse in the text they wrote. While I don’t think that any professor is going to get personally offended about a student disagreeing with them (especially because I’ll grant, of course, that the professor most likely does have better analytical skills than the student), it does make the student’s mistake, if they make one in their argument, seem more egregious.
Even if it won’t actually influence the professor, it’s very easy for students to think that it will, which impacts their work accordingly. It could definitely be said that professors can’t be expected to bend over backwards to perfectly assuage students’ worries, and I agree, on that score, but this is a fairly easy thing to work around. I’m sure there’s no shortage of other scholars you could be assigning us.
It also seems like a conflict of interest, financially, if they’re asking you to purchase their material from a bookstore rather than providing it to you for free. If they wrote it, they surely have the power to provide it to you, especially now that we’re moving into an age where there are digital records of practically everything. They shouldn’t need to order copies for you if they can just circulate a digital version of the text via email or Canvas.
There are probably dozens of texts regarding the subject matter you’re teaching (more so for long-standing lower-division courses than newly created and/or upper-division ones, I’ll grant), but you’re choosing to make students pay for the one that you get money in your pocket for.
In fact, as this statement from the American Association of University Professors mentions in 2004, schools like the University of Minnesota and Virginia Tech actually have policies that prevent professors from assigning materials that they stand to profit from. The same statement claims that “more often than not, the profits [from assigning material you’ve written] are trivial or nonexistent.” However, particular numbers are not given here, which leads me to question this statement. Money is money — if you bribe Justin Trudeau for $100, he’d be an idiot, but it’d still be a bribe.
Of course, one could make the argument that there always is inherent bias in any professor’s teaching style, unavoidable bias that plenty of students have managed to survive. The professor’s teaching style will, no matter what they do, be naturally better-suited to some pupils’ learning styles than others.
But, if we can’t even things out everywhere, we should do it where we can. Don’t assign your own stuff unless you have to do so. If you do, in fact, have to do so, or if you have real reason to feel that it offers something unique, that’s fine, but then make it available without extra cost.
Because let’s be real: there’s a good chance students wouldn’t be buying your work at all if you weren’t making them.
