Massachusetts Daily Collegian

A free and responsible press serving the UMass community since 1890

A free and responsible press serving the UMass community since 1890

Massachusetts Daily Collegian

A free and responsible press serving the UMass community since 1890

Massachusetts Daily Collegian

Trust the professors, and trust the system

(Katherine Mayo/ Daily Collegian)

About a week into the semester, rumors circled amongst students of possible ethical violations faculty could be involved in. Word was that professors who had authored textbooks were including them as required materials for their classes. The books, which could run over $60 apiece, were difficult to find and the high price tag led many students to question where their money was going, and if it was ending up back in their educators’ pockets.

This seemed to me to be a serious ethical concern that the university was overlooking, so I began researching the topic and looking into whether the allegations were true.

Fortunately, I could not have been more wrong.

Not only are there university policies in place to prevent professors from profiting off of students, but the motives are generally positive for professors who write their own textbooks.

Take Gerald Friedman, for instance, professor of economics who gained national attention last year for his analysis of then-presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ economic policy. My initial research told me that, with several hundred students a semester each buying one of his $60 textbooks, Friedman could be pulling in tens of thousands of dollars a year.

However, as I gathered while talking with Friedman, he had written the textbook after years of relying on more orthodox, but less understandable, readings. “For years I criticized the books,” Friedman remembers. “So I decided: I’ll take my notes and write my own.”

Friedman also described other professors he knew to be in similar situations, notably Robert Feldman, professor of psychology, who served as Senior Advisor to the Chancellor until his retirement last year. According to Friedman, Feldman “had a very widely-used textbook in psychology, but he donated the profits to [a] scholarship fund.”

The sense Friedman had was that most professors who write their own texts operate in a similar manner, although he did note one educator he knew of at Harvard University who is said to be pulling in a profit on his books.

This situation has also come to the forefront at other large research universities. San Diego State University professor Charles Tatum was criticized just last week in the school newspaper’s editorial section. Not long after that story was published, the University of Pittsburgh’s Pitt News ran a piece investigating several humanities professors at the school.

At the University of Massachusetts, where there is a significant structure and culture in place to prevent ethics violations, the lesson seems to be that we should trust the professors and trust the system that guides them in their teaching. Of the royalty that Dollars and Sense Publishing gives to Friedman for his textbooks, much of the money goes back into creating the next edition of the book. Research assistants need to be paid, editing must happen and the long process of putting ideas into a teachable form needs to take place.

In a nutshell, professors don’t tend to write textbooks out of personal enjoyment. For Friedman, other texts lacked the information and style that he needed to be able to teach out of them reliably. For others, writing a textbook is simply a way of organizing a career’s worth of research and discoveries.

As Friedman put it, “I can write what I believe, and I can tailor the book to my course,” – a much more noble undertaking than the one I originally envisioned.

The true lesson, though, is that while a scoop on educators funneling student’s money into their own bank accounts may have been a juicy story to print, it wouldn’t have been true. Not often enough is the story told of people in government or high-level positions simply doing the right thing. Often the stories we see are sensationalist or designed to draw clicks and retweets. We are too used to focusing our energy on stories that are depressingly revealing. As a journalist, it’s not only my job to write about the negatives, but to also include the positives. We all need a little bit of a pick-me-up, now more than ever, and knowing that our faith in our professors to do the right thing can now be restored might be just what we need.

Will Katcher is a Collegian columnist and can be reached at [email protected].

View Comments (2)
More to Discover

Comments (2)

All Massachusetts Daily Collegian Picks Reader Picks Sort: Newest

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

  • Y

    YoyoMaSep 22, 2017 at 3:17 pm

    Did a quick google search after reading this article. Numerous articles on this very topic indicate textbook profit is healthy for both publishers and authors. Even though these people preach communism at this school, they are free marketeers in their private lives.

    Reply
  • M

    maseSep 21, 2017 at 6:14 am

    Wow, very hard hitting journalism. Do you accept everything that people tell you? Did you ever consider after the expenses that are listed, research assistants,etc; that a profit is still made. In what you wrote, it’s never implicitly denied.

    The idea that a professor sells a book and it requires it and doesn’t make a profit does not sound plausible unless the professor states the book is being sold at cost or is non-profit. A strenuous ethics structure by the university which you do not elaborate on in this article, would require professors to show the accounting for their books to ensure that the professors are not using their textbooks and also the university for self enrichment.

    Hard hitting journalism would also investigate how this may tie into ethic laws in the state of Massachusetts; there are state laws against employees using state resources, their position, their office for enrichment. Professors are state employees, umass is a public university;tax dollars are provided,etc.

    Reply