The start of the school year is commonly associated with the struggle to find reasonable priced textbooks, and the Academic Senate has questioned if there is a way to make that process more reasonable.
At last week’s Academic Senate meeting, members discussed to what extent instructors should be able to profit off published works they are assigning their classes. The political purpose was to avoid conflicts of interest, which eventually could end up affecting the interest of the students themselves.
The right of faculty to decide what course material should be used is protected under the principles of academic freedom. But the question of how such works are considered legitimate has come up.
Douglas Domingo-Forasté, president of the California Faculty Association and a classic literature professor, said that the Council on Educational Policy and Curriculum put a proposal about this forward.
“They have decided that if you are going to publish and use a book in your own class that you have written, it has to be published by a mainstream publisher,” Domingo-Forasté said. “In other words someone is going to look at it beforehand; particularly an editor or a publishing company.”
As far as policy states, instructors are able to profit on their own materials as long as its legitimacy has been supervised.
Other universities have already taken issue with this practice, and Domingo-Forasté said schools have changed policy to require faculty to donate such profits. California State University, Long Beach has not proposed any kind of policy change yet. Domingo has published two works himself and said that the profits made are very minimal.
“I do not think it is that big of a deal,” Domingo-Forasté said. “But if it makes people feel happier to give the money to a scholarship, I do not have any problem with that either.”
Among the students, there are different opinions whether faculty should have the right to assign their preferred material or not.
“If the faculty is running the class, then they should be able to assign their own works in order for the students to learn,” criminal justice major Jazlyn Celeste said. “I think any way to save money, and not [have] the students go to the bookstore to buy the books for hundreds of dollars, is the most efficient way.”
Aside from the textbooks, there are also other types of material that faculty members are publishing and assigning, such as instructional manuals, prepared course packets and electronic reserves.
Philosophy Professor Charles Wallis has written his own works for his courses, which he makes freely available to the students through his course site. He said that he believes that it is a balance between the publisher’s right and the needs of the students.
“Faculty who put out the significant amount of effort to create something, feel in some sense that they should get anything in form of recompense,” Wallis said. “But they also do not want students to pay ridiculously high prices for those materials. I feel that any solution that can satisfy those perimeters, I am at least initially in favor of.”