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 Monday, May 3, 2004
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[This comment originally appeared on my blog, #328, on April 26, 2004.]
Last week in La Voz, our student newspaper, a colleague who serves on the Academic Senate declared that it was a conflict of interest for any faculty member to assign their own textbook to their own classes. Here's the passage from page 5 of the April 19, 2004 edition.
Senator Constance Cole said that it is always unethical for professors to benefit professionally and financially from assigning their own texts in their courses.
"We owe it to them to use a different source," she said of students. "You're already paid for teaching. You shouldn't double your profit by using your own book."
[The full news article hasn't been archived yet, so I can't link to it right now. Above quote added on April 27, 2004.]
The general tenor of the discussion implied that faculty were exploiting students by making them read their own textbooks and reaping huge profits. This plays into a current controversy on campus about the cost of textbooks sold through the bookstore. But I want to focus strictly on the notion that it's ethically wrong for a scholar to assign his own intellectual work to students. There's a part of me that struggles to see this as any kind of legitimate position. But since I can imagine circumstances where a faculty member would self-publish material and then charge exorbitant prices for those materials, there's room for ethical debate here.
To start with, I'll argue from personal example. In 1996, HarperCollinsCollegePublishers published my textbook Experiences. The idea for this textbook first developed about 1986 when I found no satisfactory readers for our "English 100b" course. I toyed with the idea of developing a reader and wrote a list of possible topics for the readings. While I clipped articles that fit my topics, I really didn't get serious about the project until after 1990. I first proposed collaborating with two colleagues, but we couldn't find common ground. Then, as various publisher's reps came to the office, asking if I was working on anything, I'd mention my textbook idea. Several encouraged me to prepare a prospectus. I finally did that and sent it off to six publishers whose reps had indicated interest. Four of the publishers sent it out for review. Two responded positively, though one wanted a second round of reviews. I signed a contract with Harper Collins and started serious work on the manuscript, testing lessons and readings in my classes as I went. I worked actively on the book from 1991 to 1995--editors changed three times during this process, which resulted in a year's delay in publication. It appeared late in 1995 with a 1996 publication date.
The contract provided a good advance for a first book, one that was not earned back by sales. I would use the book whenever I taught "English 100b" because it was the best book available for the course and I knew the material inside out. I would teach two sections of this course each year, with a total of 50 students. The contract provided a 12% royalty on each book, which initially sold for about $25. That meant that in a given year I would earn $150 from my own students, a sum that I never saw since it was simply credited against my advance. But even if I taught my entire load with this course and sold 200 books, I'd make $600 for the year. As a senior faculty member, my total yearly income is now over $100,000, including summer teaching. The only way I could earn significant income from a textbook would be if OTHER faculty adopted it. The notion that a faculty member is ripping students off, $3 at a time, is laughable. What the publisher is doing with the other $22 is worth a different conversation.
The book is now out-of-print. I've written another textbook which is now looking for a publisher. So last fall, I used part of my reader and part of my new text with my "English 100b" class. The bookstore sold the writing book which was produced at our Print Shop. Because both Longman's (they bought up HarperCollins just as my reader came out) and the bookstore would not risk a copyright violation, I provided xeroxes from the reader to students at cost. The results? Normally the class is capped at 25. I admitted 30. 28 completed the course. 24 passed the Writing Assessment Test outright. Three others missed by one point and successfully appealed. That means 27 of the 28 completers became elibible for First-Year Composition in a course that relied entirely on my own text material from which I received nothing, not even the $3 credit against royalties. So what's the ethical issue?
I'm a member of the "TYCA" Teacher-Scholar Committee. We are trying to expand the notion of scholarship for two-year college faculty. Certainly one significant, and worthy, form of scholarship is writing and publishing a textbook in your field. Spending 4 to 6 years developing a textbook and getting it reviewed positively by your peers and having a commercial publisher take it to press seems a laudable effort, something we should encourage all community college professors to do.
Professors who have thought through their field and their courses clearly enough to succeed in publishing a textbook should be particularly effective in those classes. How would students not benefit from a professor working with material he or she knows thoroughly and feels committed to?
Where's the ethical problem?
| Posted by jocalo@a... on 5/3/04; 2:00:18 PM |
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| Saturday, April 3, 2004
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A Chronicle for Higher Education story led to an on-line colloquy with Clifford Adelman. I've blogged this discussion today, with some reflections on implications for De Anza. Check it out.
John Lovas
| Posted by jocalo@a... on 4/3/04; 11:39:48 PM |
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| Saturday, February 28, 2004
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"Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality." Bertrand Russell. [Quotes of the Day]
For some reason, this quote struck a chord this morning.
- Dan Mitchell
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| Friday, February 27, 2004
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| Wednesday, February 25, 2004
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NOTE: The following article was written by De Anza faculty member John Perry of the Department of Computer Information Systems.
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Why De Anza Math Marchers Are "Wack"
I have been an instructor in the Computer Information Systems
Department at De Anza for 15 years. The first five years, from
1989-1994 were the "salad days" -- six or seven real wizards per class,
excellent attendance, diligence even among mediocre students, and few
behavioral problems.
Then something happened. I do not know what it was, or is, but
it is so palpable that Faculty are talking about it in hushed tones
behind closed doors because it is so "politically incorrect". That
"something" is that student performance AND behavioral standards are
in stark decline.
Frankly, I blame part of this problem on student reviews of Fac?
ulty as a point of leverage for or against Faculty. Many students are
not even aware of the benefits of a highly rigorous and demanding
instructor until they reach advanced courses or even the job market.
Personally, I cannot tell you how many students have come back to me
months or years after a course I have taught to thank me for being
such a "hard ass".
Just as children don't get to "rate" their parents and submit it
to the State of California for the obvious reason that parents have
lived longer, experienced more, and use this wisdom of acquired expe?
rience to guide their children -- even if it means they don't get to
be the "hip" mom or dad in the neighborhood. The wisdom of student
ratings of Faculty rests on a shaky ground and becomes a mere popular?
ity contest.
There is no denying that, just as there are good and bad parents,
there are good and bad teachers. However, a college teacher is not
there to correct slackers or carry out other pseudo-parental roles.
They are there to teach. I can well imagine that Math instructors
themselves are finding the skill levels of students alarmingly poor --
and possibly their behavioral standards as well.
If students feel cheated, let them do the research to look at
average grades from the 1970s and 1980s and see if they sing the same
tune. As it is, I am in TOTAL solidarity with the Math Department and
their resolute stand on minimal levels of student competency. The
students who find the Math Department 'wack' ought to look at the true
source of the problem by holding up a mirror.
I implore Ann Leskinen to uphold her Department's standards and
not give an inch on this matter. Another regrettable aspect of all of
this is that I can also well imagine that student allegations of "lack
of care" amongst Math Faculty means that Faculty members aren't giving
poor students tons of individual time in classes of size 40 or 50. If
these same students came from a FAMILY of 40 or 50, they would under?
stand without an explanation. Why not now?
De Anza Faculty would do well to stop the erosion of academic
standards by standing fast with their Math Department colleagues. A
lot is at stake.
John Perry
Department of Computer Information Systems
| Posted by jocalo@a... on 2/25/04; 3:59:15 PM |
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| Monday, February 23, 2004
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On Thursday, February 19, I attended two division meetings (Language Arts and Biological and Health Sciences) so this seems a good time to talk about meetings and their function in an academic institution. In the years I served as an administrator, I might have a formal meeting every day, sometimes several in a day. When I was active in faculty politics, I'd have several meetings a week. Now, as simply a faculty member, I have about one meeting a week--a committee, the department, the division. I rarely attend meetings of college governance groups now, though I co-authored a book titled Leadership in Governance which examined decision-making processes in community colleges. What I'm saying here is that I'm something of an expert on meetings of academics. This is nothing to brag about.
The old joke goes that academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small. The two critical terms of that claim ("vicious" and "small stakes") don't really apply to my current meeting experiences, just those of long ago. When I came to De Anza as dean in 1977, I was appalled by the first meeting of English faculty I attended. Two male colleagues came within inches of a physical confrontation. I spent my first two years as division dean trying to figure out just what good could be done at meetings and trying to get us organized so that meetings had a chance of accomplishing some purpose. I was modestly successful, since we reorganized the division into departments. The concept was that departments would discuss matters specific to their discipline and their curriculum and then bring proposals forward to the division for formal action. Division meetings, which used to be dominated by the concerns of English faculty, would be more focused, with a business meeting agenda. Discussion would take place in relation to matters to be decided at the meeting. The meetings also provided for reports from Academic Senate and Union represenatives. I would report on issues from administrative meetings. I was always sensitive to the fact that 45 or 50 faculty in a room for an hour was an expensive proposition. Business should be substantive and time should be allocated fairly and efficiently.
At 12:30 p.m. today, about 45 division faculty assembled in the computer lab to hear a presentation by English as a Second Language faculty and a panel of six ESL students. The meeting had no agenda. It was a repeat of a similar meeting a year ago, though the students on the panel were new. The presentations took nearly 50 minutes (just like a class) with no interaction among the faculty. We all just sat (and 8 of us stood because the room isn't really set up for such presentations) and listened. The students were articulate and sincere, but no more so than the students in my classes. [The orginal ESL curriculum was created by my colleague Phil Stokes (now retired) and me in 1966. When I came to De Anza, I established the ESL department, hired faculty who still lead the department, and oversaw the first of numerous curricular developments that now serve thousands of students every term. However, it has been about 15 years since I have taught an ESL course. At the same time, every class I teach is rich in second-language students. As reported at the meeting, 62 languages are spoken by current De Anza students, with the chief ones being Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Russian.]
The exigency for this meeting never became clear to me. The good news is nothing vicious was said. We are a very civil lot these days, perhaps because where we once were 75% male (30 years ago) now we are about 75% female. Even so, I could see most of my colleagues glazing over after about 40 minutes, just like students do when they are lectured to about material they already are familiar with. At the end of the presentation, I pointed out that the pedagogy of the meeting was not up to our standards and that we did not make good use of all the faculty time and brainpower present. No one challenged that view publically, though one colleague said afterward she thought the presentation was well-designed.
For whatever reason, academics do not apply what they know about learning to their own meetings. We hold many of the key meetings where policy gets developed in the mid-afternoon, the very time everyone should be taking a siesta or having tea. We often load meetings up with information that could be presented in print or online and minimize the conversation among faculty, the one thing you can't do very well in print and has yet to develop effectively online at our campus. My sense is we often don't feel we need to prepare for learning outcomes in meetings in the way that we do for classes. Meetings have ritual purposes. They allow us to say we have met, even if nothing really comes of it. To the degree that happens regularly, faculty come to see meetings as deadly boring chores that one endures.
When I was still dean, I seriously proposed that the entire college cancel all meetings for a month: no one, faculty or administrator, would be allowed to call a meeting. I suggested the experiment could have two outcomes: (1) we would be able to learn which meetings really made a difference, seeing which meetings, if any, were essential to getting our work done; (2) everyone would keep notes on how they got business done without meetings. Of course, everyone was amused and complimented me on my cleverness. And, of course, no one ever tried the experiment. My hunch is most administrators depend on meetings to structure their week the way most faculty depend on classes to structure theirs. The difference is we've got no measures of what comes of meetings: they just happen.
| Posted by jocalo@a... on 2/23/04; 12:20:44 AM |
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Since last spring, I've had at least a dozen conversations with colleagues across the campus in which, in various ways, we noted the lack of faculty-wide discussion of academic matters. Not every colleague analyzed the problem in exactly the same way, but virtually everyone agreed that corporate faculty life has practically disappeared from the campus.
This is not to say that we don't meet in small groups such as committees and departments or even, sometimes, divisions. All of that activity certainly exists. The issue is that we don't seem to have common topics before us and ways of discussing them across department, divisions, and disciplines. The closest we come to such a forum is the letters column of La Voz, which is not really the ideal place for faculty to debate educational policy and academic issues.
One of the people I've had these conversations with is Dan Mitchell, who is our current Academic Senate President and an advocate of electronic discussion forums. And so we bring you FACULTY FORUM, a place where colleagues can raise issues of concern, create campus-wide awareness of issues that affect faculty and students, and engage one another in conversation, maybe even debate.
Another common perception that emerged from those many conversations is that it's politically unwise to have strong opinions and voice them publically at De Anza. I've never figured out what the source of that perception is, but I can report that it is widespread. One good way to dispell the notion will be to participate here. The heart of what we try to teach students, regardless of discipline, is that open inquiry is the heart of building knowledge and that each of us should seek understandings through study of authoritative sources and debate of the merits of those sources and their methods. One of the best ways to teach those values to our students will be to embody them in our own efforts here. Please join in. Each of us can learn from one another's unique perspectives and experience, even when we disagree.
| Posted by jocalo@a... on 2/23/04; 12:13:10 AM |
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| Thursday, December 18, 2003
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What is this?
This web site is the brainchild of several De Anza College faculty members (Dan Mitchell and John Lovas) who think that providing a web-based forum for faculty members could be a Good Thing.
Become a member
This web site is a weblog and, as such, supports participation by numerous contributors. The most basic way to participate is by becoming a member, a very simple process.
- Click on the Join Now link in the Membership area of the sidebar on the left side of this page.
- Complete the form on the next page and click the Submit button.
That's it! As a member you can see all postings in the discussion area and post replies.
Policies
Since this site is something of an experiment we have not formulated strict guidelines for membership or for publishing articles. However, we will apply some common-sense rules and attempt to evolve some working rules as the site develops. Here are a few current guidelines:
- The site is primarily for faculty use though site content is open for all to view.
- Our intent is not to restrict ideas though site founders John Lovas and Dan Mitchell do reserve editorial control at the present time.
- All authors of articles and discussion messages must identify themselves by their actual first and last names.
Publishing at the site
Faculty members who would like to publish articles here should contact Dan Mitchell (mitchelldan@deanza.edu).
Views expressed on this web site are those of the individual writers.
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