Anecdotally, I once had a professor who had personally remixed an existing textbook and forced us to buy his version for the class, because he would reference page numbers and chapter headings from his version. Admittedly, this is essentially what most "nth edition" textbooks do anyways, but it was a little jarring to see him personally emulate this so directly and unscrupulously.
Did you buy your copy of the book?
Ever been given a complimentary slide deck?
Ever had a publisher give you suggested questions for tests?
Ever seen a student have to use "online resources" that does the teaching and grading for the professor?
The publishers are doing professors jobs for them, and the students are paying for it. The bribe is you don't have to do your job.
Let's say I'm a professor, and it is an accepted part of my job to set homework, and provide feedback on that homework in the form of grades (or a % score) and some comments.
Assume the subject I'm teaching doesn't change much year to year (as far as undergraduates are concerned anyway). So for the last 10 years my course has been based on the same edition of the same textbook. As it's now 10 years old, there are plenty of used copies available for $20, even though new copies are $50.
Let's say a publisher approaches me with an offer that provides ME with more value: a textbook that comes with a code for online access to homework and automatic grading, good for one student for one year only. The catch? The students need to buy the textbook for $50 and, because it's the only way to get a code to allow students to submit homework, they can't buy a used copy.
If I accept, then:
- my students need to shell out $50 each for a new textbook (vs. the existing one which would have been effectively free, as they could recoup their $20 outlay by selling it at the end of the year)
- I get paid the same, but the textbook company takes over some of my work
If I'm the professor in this case, the textbook is offering me something of value (doing some work that I'm already being paid for through students' tuition fees paid to my employer) in exchange for me forcing my students to give the textbook company money.
How is this different from accepting a bribe?
What if the publisher were to reimburse you $30k/year so you could hire some additional help in grading papers? Would that count as a bribe?
What if you were to spend the time freed up not on additional teaching, but with your loved-ones? Would the money count as a bribe now?
What if, instead of providing $30k/year to hire some help, they provided you with an online tool to do the job. You still spend the time now saved with your loved ones, not on better/more teaching. Is the provision of that tool a bribe?
What if access to the tool costs each student $100 per year (access for one year, via a voucher that comes only with the purchase of a brand new $100 textbook). Would the tool that makes you more efficient, thus allowing you more time with your loved ones, be considered a bribe now?
What if the benefit to you (in saved time) was $20k per year, the additional cost to your students was $40k/year, and there was no change in the quality of education. Would you consider provision of the tool a bribe in this case?
That kind of reasoning is perfectly logically consistent, but it wouldn't track our ordinary understanding of the world very well. It would also condemn almost every situation in which someone uses a third-party tool that they don't personally pay for to make their job more efficient. If you're a developer, and you convince your employer to pay for a license for an IDE so that you can get your work done quicker and spend more time playing with your cat, that's not bribe-taking...
At the time students sign up for college and commit to paying tuition fees, they expect to have to fork out money for textbooks. They don’t expect professors to give them free materials that mean they don’t need to buy their own books. But they also expect that professors will provide some tuition (including grading homework), as that’s what tuition fees are for.
On your last point, if I convince my employer to pay for an expensive IDE that happens to come bundled with $30k of credits for Upwork, and I outsource part of the job I’m being paid to do, then that’s bribe-taking. And it's more similar to the scenarios I outlined than would be the purchase of an IDE without such a bundle.
EDIT: looked at your personal site, and see that you create awesome materials for your students and the world to use for free!
- The professor receives some direct purely personal benefit from a publisher, like cash or a trip to Florida; or
- The professor receives some benefit that allows them to shirk their responsibilities to students, as defined by the common reasonable expectations of the academic process.
Maybe that second one should also have a proviso that the result of this shirking is that the students get less-good instruction, or maybe (being more strict with the professor) that the instruction the students receive doesn't improve, or doesn't improve sufficiently to justify the extra cost passed onto the student.
I think this does some work to track the difference between corrupt and non-corrupt textbook-assigning practices. But it also, unsurprisingly, leaves plenty of grey area. For example, I'm not sure if publisher-provided homework and grading falls into this category, since textbooks in many fields have included assignments and have teachers' manuals with the answers since basically forever. (I know that I had homework assignments out of the book in math-y classes as far back as the 80's and 90's, for example.) So I'd think that this would be part of the ordinary expectation of students.
On the other hand, it does seem fair to suggest that if the professor offloads all, or substantially all, of the course to some textbook publisher, then they're violating the expectation of the students that their own professional judgment will be used to guide their education.
(And yeah, I try my best to provide free materials to my students. I can't do it in every single course, because it takes an immense amount of time to create them, and, often, it's hard to figure out what materials work best for a course until you've taught it a couple of times. But I do it as much as possible.)
I think what bothers me is that the professor is forcing the student to buy a tool with their own money, when buying that tool is neither expected nor optional. And not cheap.
If access the tool were purchased standalone, rather than being bundled with a book, they might not get away with it. Because the students would (rightly) say that they're already paying tuition, so any systems that are mandatory for them to use should be provided by the university.
And apparently "inducements" such as free textbooks or meals occur fairly often: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/13687/do-textbo...
And, frankly, all involved should be prosecuted, at least if they work for the state.
[1] e.g. (paywalled) https://www.chronicle.com/article/Selling-Out-a-Textbook/254...
There's almost certainly no significant mathematical difference as far as the calculus it teaches goes.
If the target audience for the book includes students who aren't really interested in calculus, such as students who are just taking it to fulfill a requirement, and don't expect to use calculus much after they finish the class, then I'd expect the new edition to update exercises and examples to try to make them interesting and relevant to today's youth.
If the target audience is students who actually want to learn calculus, either because it is interesting to them per se, or because they know it is useful for things that do interest them, then there is probably little or no need for frequent new editions.
For example, a few top schools use Apostol's two volume text, "Calculus", either as their main calculus text, or for the more advanced track if they have multiple calculus tracks. Apostol volume 1 is currently all the way up to 2nd edition, which came out in 1967. Volume 2 is also on its 2nd edition, which came out in 1969.
Another example is Spivak's "Calculus", also used at several top schools, which is on its 4th edition, which came out in 2008. According to the preface, "Although small changes have been made to some material, especially in Chapter 5 and 20, this edition differs mainly in the introduction of additional problems, a complete update of the Suggested Reading, and the correction of numerous errors". The preface to the 3rd edition says that the biggest change was the addition of a chapter on planetary motion. It also rearranged quite a bit of material, and added problems. It looks like 2nd edition was a pretty substantial upgrade over 1st edition.
Spivak 1st edition was 1967, 2nd edition 1980, 3rd 1994, and 4th 2008.
So, yeah, I don't think it's bribery, it's just a heady mix of (ignorance of) diminishing returns, moral hazard, and status signaling. Plus its a petty injustice that only hurts people in aggregate, and it only hurts people who already can afford college in rich places, so no-one is really going to care about this to change it.
Yes, but students need to buy textbooks. Is it really for "the best" if students have to worry about paying hundreds of dollars for the latest version of a textbook rather than getting 99% of the benefit from the PDF for edition n-1 they can find online?
> Plus its a petty injustice that only hurts people in aggregate, and it only hurts people who already can afford college in rich places, so no-one is really going to care about this to change it.
No, no, and no :(
No, that's not it at all. Calculus 17th edition is not in any way better than Calculus 16th edition. If anything, the newer one has more typos, weighs more, and is more expensive. A 600-page single-variable calculus text does not help students learn the material, since the small number of wonderful ideas that make up calculus are diluted in a fetid sea of repetitive examples, mindless busywork, pointless "real-world applications" that have no relevance to the real world, and a general tendency to give recipes that guarantee you will get the right answer even if you have no idea what you are doing. That's not math. That's the opposite of math.
New interventions often aren’t tested head to head against their alternatives. Or inadequately tested against them.
So we have no idea if they’re even better, but manufacturers don’t want to risk the embarrassment of evidence that they’re inferior.
The next day I had a severe allergic reaction to it, and the dentist replaced that prescription with plain old penicillin (which cost me $10 for the complete treatment). I was absolutely furious that he didn't go with the affordable and time-tested treatment first.
But surely what's best for patients is the treatment with the best cost/benefit ratio, not necessarily the treatment that is marginally more effective but much more expensive.
It's not just the choice of the bookstore, but of the publisher. Most scummy academic publishers now (maybe 'scummy' is redundant) simply stop printing or selling the old editions.
No bribes, but a tolerable amount of goofiness in the authoring.
Professors either have to grade themselves OR assign a publisher's book, with a one time code, at no cost to them/their department where the publisher will grade for them. All for free from the professor's perspective.
In both cases the professor is likely using the publisher's resource to assign homework, because that's one way publishers encourage expensive book requirements: Allow professors to offload their work to the publisher.
There's 101 classes where the professor only turns up to teach. That's it. No homework creation, no grading, and they just have a TA take the publisher's grade report and import it into their student system.
> > Professors are offered substantial bribes to select the most expensive texts
> I've never heard of this happening, and certainly have never been offered a kickback myself to take a book. Accepting one would be a crime for state university professors where I am, and probably almost everywhere else.
As also a professor, I have certainly never encountered outright bribes, nor anything that I'd call 'substantial', but certainly book reps take every opportunity that they can get to drop off small gifts—small enough that it feels overly fastidious to complain about it—carefully not advertised as inducements to use their products.
(However, there is certainly no shortage of outrage over things professors are imagined to do. My university's student newspaper ran an outraged article a while back on the fortune that professors make by selling off evaluation copies of textbooks. At least in my field, the worst that is done is to give away for free the evaluation copies to pestilential resellers to get them (copies and resellers) out of our offices; but I think it is becoming more common to turn away such resellers.)
In my opinion the solution is easy: to receive subsidy from the government, universities must provide their courses online free and in either the public domain or under a copyleft license, so that all citizens paying taxes can benefit from what they payed for (both indirectly through the usual study by other citizens, as directly by self-study). If a professor refuses to put his course in the public domain, fire or replace him with a professor willing to put his textbook in the public domain. Courses only change slowly over the years in practice, why should professors be able to extort a hidden enrollment fee from their students? The only reason I can think of is to arrange gate-keeping of those professions set aside for the higher classes... since the lower classes will then choose the other disciplines even though the university wide enrollment fee is superficially "the same".
If the university refuses to put its courses in the public domain, the government should refuse to subsidize the university. To make sure the populace has unbridled access to all relevant course materials, reward students for telling on professors / universities for handing out materials without uploading them to the public domain or copyleft courses platform. All a professor has to do is upload the materials.
I refuse to use any of the drmed proprietary online platforms. As someone else asked, yes, the textbook publishers do frequently provide quiz banks and powerpoints but they typically are garbage. I use few of their quiz questions and have to edit and adjust their PowerPoint slides because they don't emphasize what I want to emphasize and often use shitty transitions or have too much text on each slide. If that is a bribe it is a shitty one.
The section on how pharmaceutical companies work with doctors was eye opening. It is relatively easy to manipulate even a very honest person's loyalty.
(I'm not saying you are even in a position to be influenced)
Well, if you're the type to never have noticed this happening, they surely wouldn't try to contact you.
This is very common all around the world, including the US. In fact, it has been written about since time immemorial, even Feynman mentions his experiences:
"One book in particular drew his attention. It was one out of a three book series. During a meeting he was asked by some of the other committee members what he thought of the book. He responded that he really couldn't say, that he hadn't received it. One of the members continued to press for an answer. After Feynman repeated himself a second time, a book depository employee piped up and explained that he had elected not to send the book on to the committee members. The publisher had missed the deadline and substituted a book with blank pages instead. They had included a note explaining that the book would be ready in time and hoped it could still be considered.
The amazing part of this story is that several of the committee members had nominated the book for inclusion on the approved list!
Feynman went on to talk about the unsolicited gifts he received from the publishers. He kept sending them back but one incident took him completely by surprise. He had arrived in San Francisco the evening before a committee meeting. He left his hotel room, intending to wander the streets to find a place to eat. As he walked into the lobby, two men popped up, greeted him by name and asked him if they could help him in any way. He explained that he was just going out and no thank you. They persisted. He said, "Look, I'm just going out to get into a bit of trouble." They responded, "Maybe we can help you with that too." He demurred and then later kicked himself for not seeing just how far they would go and documenting the evening."
https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/pajze9/people-are-finally...
https://www.lukethomas.com/the-textbook-industry-greed-its-g...
>Accepting one would be a crime for state university professors where I am, and probably almost everywhere else.
Isn't committing the crime and profiting from it the whole point?
> Professors are offered substantial bribes to select the most expensive texts
I've never heard of this happening, and certainly have never been offered a kickback myself to take a book. Accepting one would be a crime for state university professors where I am, and probably almost everywhere else.