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Math professor forced to use $180 textbook written by his boss
- aet 11y agoLast I heard you couldn't "force" a tenured professor to do anything. Dismiss over a text book? laughable
- dougmccune 11y ago51% of Cal State Fullerton profs are adjuncts [1], so I'd assume this professor can be fired fairly easily. [1] http://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/california-state-university-fullerton/academic-life/faculty-composition/ http://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/california-state-univ...
- theOnliest 11y agoI had the same thought, but he appears to be tenured (has taught there 9 years, and is an associate, rather than assistant, professor): http://math.fullerton.edu/people/full-time-faculty/item/bourget-alain http://math.fullerton.edu/people/full-time-faculty/item/bour...
- dougmccune 11y agoThanks for digging, I was surprised his employment type wasn't mentioned in the article, since it seems like it would play such a huge role in this.
- cowsandmilk 11y agoFor confirmation: http://calstate.fullerton.edu/inside/2012su/Promotions-Tenure.asp http://calstate.fullerton.edu/inside/2012su/Promotions-Tenur...
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- coherentpony 11y agoTenured professors work for a department head.
- jo909 11y agoI would guess they can "force" him to no longer teach that class, even if they can not dismiss him. I don't think its bad that the university has the final say in what and to a certain degree how certain elements of the ciricullum are taught. It's not hard to imagine how a bad math course can very seriously compromise the students ability to follow other classes. Not to say that this applies to this case, the professor proably made a good and ethical choice in class materials and is pressured for other reasons.
- Ductapemaster 11y agoStrang's textbook is fantastic. One of the rare cases in college where I actually enjoyed reading a textbook. His lectures are available for free on YouTube as well, and I can't recommend them enough!
- jsprogrammer 11y agoIt's probably past time to be recording all audio and as much video as possible when you are not in your home.
- fiveoak 11y agoFor anyone wondering since I didn't see it in the article, it seems like the $76 book is "Introduction to Linear Algebra" by Gilbert Strang. Not sure about the free book though.
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- DArcMattr 11y agoThe article said he used two books, one of which was free. Ordinary Differential Equations make use of linear algebra concepts, but can be self-contained. It's entirely plausible to go with Strang, and another book for this type of course.
- verytrivial 11y agoThe article has a photograph of Professor Bourget cuddling a copy of Strang. https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Introduction_to_Linear_Algebra.html?id=M19gPgAACAAJ&source=kp_cover&hl=en https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Introduction_to_Linea...
- fiveoak 11y agoIn the picture of the linked article he's clearly holding Strang's book - see a picture of it on Strang's site here: http://math.mit.edu/~gs/linearalgebra/ http://math.mit.edu/~gs/linearalgebra/. Also, the campus newspaper reported that the book was Strang's here: http://www.dailytitan.com/2015/10/math-textbook-drives-divide-in-department/ http://www.dailytitan.com/2015/10/math-textbook-drives-divid...
- spectralblu 11y agoI'm actually surprised that there's no policy on conflict of interest for these universities. It's one thing to be charging through the nose tuition, that's just further exacerbated by these professors that wring students for personal gain. Writing your own book is fine, but manipulating these books EA style (where you buy a game that comes with a one time use multiplayer key, neutering your ability to sell it afterwards) on the thinly veiled "improvements" is just downright shady. I commented about this on the other math book to pdf submission, but I had a professor did just this. He basically shuffled chapters around and renumbered problems, making the previous year's book worthless because the problems he assigned are numbered out of the new book, and he refused to provide any mapping of new problem sets to old problem sets. I had mentioned this to the department heads and none of them really cared at all about this practice.
- oxide 11y agoI've only just heard of the "online-pass" used game style of putting the squeeze on the used textbook market yesterday, from that post you mentioned. My jaw is a little agape about the whole thing. online passes died in games after awhile, but it almost seems like the college textbook racket could probably get away with doing it forever. The biggest difference between this application of it and the way it worked in games seems to be that it's designed to force your hand a little more. With games, you just got screwed out of the online features. With this, it sounds like you can't even complete the course without the online pass.
- wahsd 11y agoYou are surprised? Have you been to an American University? It would be far more plausible if you had said "that's exactly what I would have expected"
- Pinckney 11y agoI graduated four years ago, and am currently in grad school. As an undergraduate at a small private college, I can only recall two professors who required their own books. One was a paperback physics reader for a very large class, available from the department for $20 (or from upperclassmen for less). The other was for a small math class, was not unreasonably expensive, but also was not very good, but when the professor left halfway through the semester with health problems, the department bought us all copies of the new book. My professors were always accommodating to anyone who wanted to buy an older edition, and in one case explicitly told us not to buy the expensive new edition. In my current department at a large public university, I know of only one professor who requires his own book. It's about $40 and has only had one edition since it was published 15 years ago. In most lower division classes we use an in-house online homework system, although we don't have a good database of problems for differential equations, so we've typically required the latest edition of Boyce and DiPrima so students can use the publisher's homework system. But we've started work on our own problem sets, and we are at the point where we can use our own in-house homework system for it, if the professor is willing to put in a bit more effort organizing and debugging homework. Anyway, this sort of exploitation is not typical in my experience.
- spike021 11y agoThis is normal at my school as well.. Typically if I bought everything on the syllabi of the courses I'm taking, my bill would easily be greater than $300. Probably even closer to $500. Pretty much books that cost anywhere from $150-250 or so each, with even used copies at least half if not more of the price for a new copy.
- grandalf 11y agoI had a math prof in college who would create a custom textbook for each class week by week in latex... it was amazing.
- cowsandmilk 11y agoI had a couple professors in college that created their own textbooks for teaching and didn't charge students for them. Some of them were good, but some were obviously poorly edited and explanations were identical to lectures.
- stevenmays 11y agoYup, I had an anthropology professor charge us $20 for a textbook he wrote. He said it was what kinkos charged him - give or take. Awesome professor.
- m3rc 11y agoAs a student right now I staunchly refuse to ever pay full price from a textbook, and if possible to not pay for one at all. The prices we're charged are ridiculous, and the way professors profit even more so. The worst example of this is, and I have no qualms about publicly calling out this professor, is Dr. Alan DeSantis at the University of Kentucky. DeSantis is rather prolific, he gets a lot of press for the university, and I'm pretty sure he's our highest rated prof on RateMyProfessor, so I'm sure he knows he can basically just do whatever he wants. But for his freshman COM101 class, a class where you can basically get all the content out of by just reading the Wikipedia entry on a handful of pop psychology phenomenons, he required us to purchase a $40 "workbook" for taking notes in. But this "workbook" was, quite literally, just his lecture powerpoints with random gaps in sentences. During lectures we had to fill in the blanks as the slides came up, or else we'd have no idea what was going on because he used his own terms and names for pretty much everything he was talking about.
- ncr100 11y agoWow that sounds like an insulting educational experience. As if the teacher was really teaching "How To Be A Jerk." or "How to Copy And Paste."
- rz2k 11y agoHmm: >“You acted contrary to department policy when you did not use the single assigned textbook for MATH 250B sections,” the school reprimand states. Universities may be large institutions that require many decisions to be put on autopilot with official policies, but this issue seems like a clear example of something that is not unimportant enough to be handled with use of "policy" as a magic word. As colleagues that hopefully possess some intellectual sophistication, they should at a minimum explain their interpretation of the relevant policies and why their impact is positive, or alternately explain why the policy is worth preserving in the face of producing a worse outcome in this specific instance. Considering that according to the article, the past two governors of the state for the entire university system have pushed toward a greater attention to textbook prices, it seems even less likely that a department can get away with undermining the ethical standards of the American Association of University Professors by using the word "policy" like some talisman.
- glitcher 11y ago>However, with a multi-section course, which is the case in Bourget’s situation, “the individual (faculty member) would have to work with the other people ... to make the best decision together on what those materials would be,” What exactly do they mean by multi-section? In college I had a very large, expensive calculus book that covered 3 semesters of calc classes. In that case I appreciated the uniformity of using one mandated textbook. But if that is not what they meant by "mulit-section" then I question why such strict enforcement. By and large most college textbook requirements do feel like a scam, and it only seems to be getting worse over the years.
- siegelzero 11y agoMulti-section most likely means that there are several different sections of the same course running simultaneously. In addition, there are probably different professors teaching these sections. I can understand part of the argument here - it would be important to maintain consistency among the different sections, so that students who take the class from Professor A learn basically the same material as students who take Professor B. That being said, the material presented in a low-level class like this hasn't changed in a long time, so any book should suffice.
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- bsder 11y agoI did have a professor that taught the class with the textbook he wrote. To prove that he believed in the book and not the revenue, he donated the royalties from our class from the book into the student fund.
- micwawa 11y agoAny professor who understands the first thing about marketing and adoption should do this. Jack Lee taught me smooth manifolds out of his own book that he gave to us for free. 10 years later, I'm teaching out of that book, so my students are paying for it.
- ivan_ah 11y ago> soaring textbook prices Yeah textbook prices are really out of order --- the calculus text at my university is $130+, which is just insane. <selfplug>Anyone interested in a cheaper option for mechanics + calculus should check out my text: http://noBSgui.de/to/MATHandPHYSICS/ http://noBSgui.de/to/MATHandPHYSICS/ </selfplug>
- micwawa 11y agoI'm currently teaching out of Stewart because that's what the general curriculum for our department is. Stewart died an insanely rich man, and I'm sure will keep making slight modification of his calculus textbook from the grave. However, I tell my students in the syllabus, which I post online well before the class starts, that calculus is centuries old and that they are not required to pay through the nose for this textbook. I regularly go out of my way to facilitate using older textbooks.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- imaginenore 11y agoStudents should pitch in for one copy, scan it, make a PDF. And then just to be a dick, post it online on some Chinese/Russian server and email the link to the professor anonymously.
- imaginenore 11y agoI wonder what stops a professor of a required class to charge $1,800 per book. Or $18,000.