College bookstores are reporting early successes in complying with new federal rules designed to reduce textbook costs, but some faculty members say the new procedures have burdened them with busywork.
Congress passed the rules as part of the 2008 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. Although the textbook provisions won’t take effect until July 1, many colleges told faculty members to provide reading lists and other information for electronic course catalogs in advance of summer- and fall-term preregistrations. So far the early reviews have been mixed.
At the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the provost’s office e-mailed Daphne Patai and other faculty members in March, only a week ahead of fall registration, asking them to provide a list of required and recommended texts for their courses, including supplemental materials like course packs, along with ISBN’s and prices. (The provost, James V. Staros, told The Chronicle that the notice went out late because the software to upload the textbook information into the online course-registration system wasn’t ready.) The provost’s message contained a hyperlink to the textbook provision of the new law, and Ms. Patai, a professor of languages, literatures, and cultures, was vocal in criticizing it as government micromanagement of faculty jobs.
“The whole effect of this is that it’s going to lock people into their book lists,” she said. “It’s not going to encourage change. It’s not going to encourage innovation.”
Elsewhere, colleges have offered several months of PowerPoint presentations, online tutorials, and educational workshops to help faculty members and officials comply with the new law.
Margaret Horner oversees the campus bookstore as director of auxiliary services at Anne Arundel Community College. She said her team began training top administrators about the new rules in January 2009, just five months after the reauthorization bill was passed, and proceeded down through the ranks. Faculty members have had no trouble complying, she said. The college’s effort was eased because Maryland imposed its own, far stricter, textbook rules last summer.
“The faculty are feeling more empowered” by the rules, which require publishers to give them information like ISBN’s and descriptions of what has changed in new editions of textbooks, she said.
A number of other states also have their own textbook-affordability laws, often a result of lobbying by the Student Public Interest Research Groups, which also played a key role in the push for change at the national level. Nicole Allen, director of the student public-interest group’s textbook campaign, said the economic underpinnings of the college textbook market have long been flawed. In a typical market, the buyer chooses which product to buy based on considerations of cost and quality. But in the textbook market, the person who chooses the product, the faculty member, is not motivated by the incentive of cost. Or so the argument goes.
Resale Value = Price of Pulp
The Student PIRG’s also contend that publishers’ practice of “bundling” textbooks with workbooks, CD’s, DVD’s, and other media—materials that might not even be used in a course—has driven costs higher. (However, the Association of American Publishers reported in 2008 that as tuition increased, textbooks remained at a steady 4 percent of total college costs.) Additionally, the PIRG’s say, each time a publisher releases a new edition of a textbook and a faculty member assigns it, the earlier edition’s resale value drops roughly to the price of pulp.
Rich Hershman, director of government relations at the National Association of College Stores, said the new federal rules have three goals: to provide students more time to shop around for deals on books; to ensure that campus bookstores know by buyback time which books will be used again; and to allow students to consider the costs of books and other required materials when deciding whether to register for a course.
To meet those ends, the new rules require publishers to tell bookstores how much they’ll charge them for the textbooks; provide general descriptions of changes that have been made in new editions (so that faculty members can decide whether to assign the new version); and unbundle textbook packages before selling them, unless doing so would make the book unusable.
The law calls on colleges and their stores to provide, at preregistration time, ISBN’s and textbook prices on the electronic course schedule “to the maximum extent practicable.”
“The vast majority of colleges and universities were already posting ISBN’s and book information,” Mr. Hershman said. “The new wrinkle here is that now they’re trying to get it out at the time of preregistration.”
He also pointed out that the “maximum extent practicable” wording was added to provide wiggle room for cases in which, for example, colleges don’t know at the time of registration who will teach the course, and thus what books will be required.
Bookstores have long struggled to get faculty members to submit their textbook lists in a timely fashion, for the sake of both the stores and the students. If a professor hasn’t settled on a syllabus in time for book buybacks, departing students might have trouble reselling their texts, which then results in a dearth of used books for the next semester’s students.
Don Newton, general manager of the bookstore at the City College of San Francisco, said that although he has had to stay on top of faculty members to ensure that they submit their book orders on time, most have complied with the new rules. The multicampus college serves about 100,000 students, many of whom are working adults trying to get by in one of America’s priciest cities. That makes faculty members more sympathetic to students’ expenses and to what his bookstore is trying to do, Mr. Newton said.
Ms. Patai, at UMass, said she was also in favor of keeping textbook costs down but suggested that Congress could have dealt with the biggest part of the problem by applying the new rules to classes of 75 or more students, the types of courses that use big, expensive textbooks.
Because she tends to assign relatively inexpensive novels and change them from year to year, she said, complying with the law will be difficult, if not impossible.
No Penalty
The law actually places the burden of providing the information on the colleges and their bookstores (though not on vendors who merely lease space). Furthermore, although Mr. Hershman insisted that the law has teeth, it contains no provision for penalizing colleges that flout the rules. The Department of Education, which has no authority to enforce the law, will issue “Dear colleague” guidelines in the next month advising colleges on how best to comply.
The law requires the U.S. Government Accountability Office to issue a report by July 1, 2013, gauging institutions’ compliance, but it specifies that nothing in the law “shall be construed to supersede the institutional autonomy or academic freedom of instructors involved in the selection of college textbooks, supplemental materials, and other classroom materials.”
Mr. Hershman said that the “academic freedom” language was added at the urging of some faculty groups, but that those groups were not heavily involved in the shaping of the textbook provision. Representatives of the American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers said in interviews that they supported efforts to keep textbooks affordable.
But John W. Curtis, director of research and public policy at the AAUP, said his group was wary of what individual colleges are asking faculty members to do to comply with the textbook rule.
“It could be implemented in such a way that it could limit faculty members’ abilities to choose their textbooks or be a hassle to them,” said Mr. Curtis. He added that professors’ concerns about the textbook provision have begun trickling into his office.
Ms. Patai said she did not even try to submit her orders for fall preregistration. She is wagering that she isn’t the only faculty member who feels as she does.
“I just made a bet with a colleague that in a year, no one will be paying attention to this anymore,” she said. “It’s just one more bad idea that will go away.”
