The Pissed Off Professor

I overheard a story on the news this morning, and though I’ve tried to find details on KCRA’s Web site to include a link, I can’t. I have to talk about this anyway: a teacher has been stealing textbooks from her school, marking over the school’s name, and selling them on eBay. Now she’s been caught. Currently, she’s on paid administrative leave.

It’s nice to know the school district is following the innocent until proven guilty theory. After all, the 600+ books found in her home might be there for a legitimate reason, right? (I keep thinking after-hours tutoring, and that just gets me nowhere good very quickly.)

Let’s not let her mistake be for naught: let’s admit teacher’s salaries suck, or this woman would not have bothered supplementing her income in this manner.

Now, let me tell you about an oddly similar thing that goes on at the collegiate level which is perceived as perfectly lawful.

The textbook business is huge, and book representatives do everything they can to convince teachers to adopt their company’s texts for our courses. One of the ways this is done is via sample copies of textbooks. During a year, I receive approximately 15 textbooks—without asking. When I need to ask, I do, and if the book I need is from a new publisher, the request for a single text will generate my receiving a number of additional texts as well.

Keep in mind, I am a part-time employee: multiply the 15 books I receive by, say 4, and that’s likely the number of books a full-time faculty member receives annually.

Admittedly, many of the texts I receive are not going to be adopted for my courses, but most of them find a place on my bookshelf on the off-chance I might pull something of value from them at some point.

Two semesters ago, I realized how much space the extra textbooks were stealing from me, so I began to ask fellow instructors what they did with their unused desk copies. The unanimous answer was they sold them. That’s right, I was told to sell the books I’d received for free.

Am I missing something here?

As the semester draws to a close, used book sellers begin to scour the halls of college campuses looking for instructors who are in their offices. They offer to buy unneeded textbooks for on-the-spot cash.

I have overheard instructors getting as much as $325.00 after allowing the used book sellers to go through their shelves picking and choosing books.

I have three bags of unneeded textbooks in my study, and while the book publishers are now beginning to offer a service by which instructor’s can send the unneeded books back (free of charge), I simply don’t have the time or the inclination or the resources to wrap and send these books back.

When my W2 finally arrived, and I saw I’d (again) made less than $20,000 last year, I had a moment during which I considered selling those books to supplement my income.

I know myself well enough to realize I’ll neither sell those books, nor send them back to their respective publishers. I can’t give them to needy students: they’re instructor’s copies, and in many cases, they have the answers. I’ve toyed with simply tossing them into my recycling can, but they’re books, so throwing them away is contrary to everything in me.

My solace is knowing those bags of books will soon be relics of a bygone era. Given the current abuse being done to what is a really great system in which instructors actually get something vital for free, publishers will soon figure out a way to put a halt to the distribution of free exam copies. Instructors will have to start buying our own copies of the textbooks we use and consider the cost as yet another price paid for choosing to teach.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 9th, 2007 at 8:29 am and is filed under Books, Comparison/Contrast, Education, Teaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.