The Ethics of Textbooks

Back when I was in college there was one class that began with our instructor apologizing for assigning us the textbook he had written. He seemed genuinely embarrassed by this, but he explained that his really was the standard text for this subject; it was then (back in 1984) already in its ninth edition, and you would have read the same textbook if you had taken the same class at UCLA – or Harvard, for that matter. But assigning your students a book you wrote is considered unethical in some circumstances (you’re making money off of a captive audience, you see) and our teacher – who was a good teacher – made a point of assuring us that if there was a better text available he’d use it…

Today, with the rise of self-publishing, e-publishing and a variety of specialty press businesses that would have been called “vanity publishing” just a decade or so ago, anyone who teaches at college level could conceivably author a textbook for his or her class, and many colleges and universities would allow an instructor to assign his or her book to the class without any further review. But while the industry and the technology have changed, the basic question has not: is it ethically acceptable to assign one’s own students a text book one has written and from which one is (at least in theory) receiving royalties? I thought we should take a closer look…

On the one hand, there is no doubt that not all textbooks are created equal. In most fields there appears to be a one book, or at most a small group, that find wide acceptance and become the standard texts for that subject. However, just because a book has become the standard in the field that does not mean that it is necessarily the best explanation of that subject, or that a given instructor somewhere might not have a better understanding of the subject (and a better grasp of how to present it) than the authors do. If an instructor can provide better information to his or her students than they can get from the standard text it could be argued that he or she has a duty to his or her students to write up that information and publish it for them…

On the other hand, publishing textbooks is often seen as a lucrative sideline. Unlike popular fiction, where margins are often small enough to preclude any large royalties to anyone, the markup on textbooks is so outrageous that even a relatively small run can add up for the publisher (500 books at $200 each is $100,000, and 500 students isn’t a particularly large class in some universities). There’s no real question that this system is prone to abuses, and even if the authors are receiving a relatively small percentage of the profits there would be a very strong appeal to writing and assigning your own text. Certainly there are some texts that will be published and assigned despite being absolute twaddle…

So that leads me to the question: Does a publishing company have an ethical responsibility not to publish textbooks that contain no useful information and could actually be harmful to a student due to the mass of misinformation they contain? Does the company have a responsibility to its stockholders, employees, and other stakeholders to sell whatever products will result in the highest profits, regardless of the effect on the student, the discipline, or Education in general? No one is suggesting that a textbook on medicine or chemistry that contains faulty information, and could result in a danger to the general public, should ever be countenanced. But do we, as businesspeople, have the right to decide that a given text should not be produced based solely on the fact that the instructor who is going to assign it is also the author?

It’s worth thinking about…