A group of Kossacks are going to take up Robyn's mantle for "Teachers' Lounge" diaries. We will try to get the diary posted on Saturday mornings between 10 and noon Eastern time. This will come later in the morning than the Daily Kos University and will be essays with an education focus. So far, we have people who teach high school and college in a variety of fields, and one person who has offered to write about home schooling issues. If you are interested in being part of the diary-writing crew, either as a regularly-scheduled diarist, or as a fill-in when someone has to back out at relatively short notice, please email me at teacherslounge@live.com.
Now to today's topic. Textbooks -- can we live without them?
It is rough out there. In Inside Higher Ed on Friday there was an article about the cut of state appropriations for Higher Education. In public education, the states act as the equivalent of the endowment for a private university. While in Missouri we are being asked to consider how a cut of funding from the state of 15/20/25% will affect us, private universities are facing drops in their endowments of 40%, which will have an even greater effect. Beloit College, to which I applied for an endowed position a couple of years ago, will have to cut 40 jobs by the end of the year. At the same time as the higher education system is facing huge cuts, so are our current and prospective students. Their parents are losing their jobs; the students themselves are finding it harder to find part time jobs to help them with their own expenses.
So our student senate president on Thursday asked an all-faculty meeting to consider perhaps going to a textbook-less campus. The textbooks are very expensive. I use two, one lists at $124 for the one-semester half of the survey version, or $150 for the hardback, two-semester survey version. The other is a style manual which lists at $17. Other classes are higher, but some are less. But if you take $100-150 for a class average, and the 5 classes that an average student takes, you are easily above $500 a semester.
What are the advantages of textbooks? What would the students and professors lose by giving them up? What could the classroom gain? What are the implications for the university beyond the specific cost?
To begin with, some classes will be really difficult to get rid of textbooks. Literature is the first one that springs to mind. Unless you are reading material that is out of copyright (and is available on the web) there is going to be dramatic competition for library resources. Shakespeare is available on the web. Salman Rushdie is not. Language workbooks need to be available -- while a faculty member can put some exercises online, it is not going to be possible for a teacher to write every assignment him- or herself so that copyright is not going to be an issue. Perhaps one of the options could be for publishers to move more toward electronic resources, either CDs or completely on-line. However, there would still be a charge for access to the resources, and that is not completely saving the costs. I don't know math textbooks or math instruction as well as language instruction (I have been out of math classes much longer) but I would guess the textbook situation would be much the same.
I teach art history and interdisciplinary courses. I can cut down on textbooks I think. Several years ago I polled students in my classes as to whether they wanted to keep the textbooks -- I use them as supplementary to lectures and classroom experiences (student presentations, research projects), and largely their greatest value is as a bank of images. With the growth of web image banks (including people's vacation photos of architectural monuments) and article collections such as JSTOR I can change the required readings and make them more specific, more scholarly, and provide my students with a collection of images online. The advantage of a textbook bank of images is great, however, and again perhaps a compromise is a CD with images and short descriptions without the surrounding explanatory material. It will change the requirements for the teacher, as the frame will not be provided by the textbook, and the teacher will have to create context. Now, having taught these classes for over a decade, I know this material well enough to manage this. As a new instructor I relied heavily on the textbooks to learn the material myself. An upper level class will be easier, and I am going to try to commit myself to moving out of the textbook requirement next year, and to have them as at best recommended purchases, giving students an option. I will do this because I can.
What will the university lose? Well, among other things, our Student Union Building is supported in part by the rent paid by the bookstore company that runs the campus bookstore. The electricity, heating, etc., are at least in part covered by the sale of books. This means all the meeting rooms that are available free of charge to campus groups, the office spaces for student government, etc., are paid for at least in part by the profits from selling textbooks. How would this be replaced? Well, although it is an important income source, the number of books actually bought on campus through the campus bookstore I would think has been going down. A lot of our students are buying on line. Or from each other. If I were them, I would buy on line. The Amazon cost for my textbooks? At least 1/3 off. When the book is $150, that is a lot of money one can save, and there is no sales tax, or shipping when you have such an expensive purchase.
So what do you think? Could you go without textbooks? If you are a student, what classes would you need to have a textbook in? How much would you be willing to spend for textbooks in a semester? If you are a teacher, what do you get out of using a textbook for your students? What would be possible to do in a class if you were not using one? What difference will technology make if you decide to go "textbook-less"?
We start classes here on Monday. It is going to be a stressful semester because of the budget cuts. How are things looking in your neck of the woods?