How do college professors select books for their courses?

February 22, 2010 7:42 AM

How do college professors select books for their courses?

I'm beginning to think that instructors/professors mostly just adopt whatever reading lists they used in the previous semester but how do they decide what books to put on the reading list in the first place? Ask their peers? Copy the lists from other profs, god forbid!

posted by lapsang to Education (22 answers total)

Part of the job description of being an academic is staying current with the literature of your field. This will involve knowing who has put/is putting out textbooks and which ones are worth damn.

Being a professor is not, in fact, all or even mostly about teaching. It's about being an expert in your field. This means knowing what's going on, who's saying what, etc. Choosing books may take a bit of time, but discovering books ought to be a function of simply going about the business of being an academic.
posted by valkyryn at 7:47 AM on February 22, 2010

Not entirely snark, but most of the ones I had made sure it was something they wrote, so they could get extra money.
posted by furtive at 7:48 AM on February 22, 2010 [6 favorites]

For survey courses, usually the department will select a book. For upper-level courses, publishers usually send professors complimentary copies of their books for them to select. Asking peers, reading reviews, etc, works too. Depends on the prof and the university, I guess.
posted by Neekee at 7:49 AM on February 22, 2010

I taught a couple literature courses as a TA when I was in grad school, and my selection process went more or less as follows:

I had a general sense for what texts I wanted to teach for a particular course. (Texts here = works of literature, not textbooks.)

I tried to get one anthology that included most of them. ToCs for the major literary anthologies are on their publishers' websites.

I would fill that out with the occasional Penguin Classic, OUP text, or what-have-you.

I always tried to keep my total course cost under $100.

If there was a publisher who I knew would give exam copies if I ordered a certain number of books, I would prefer them to one that didn't, all else equal, and give the copies to students who had trouble buying all the books.

I think that was about it. I have no idea how non-humanities people do it. This is only for survey-style courses; for upper-level literature, the books sort of select themselves.
posted by Pickman's Next Top Model at 7:49 AM on February 22, 2010

From everyone's favourite manuscript marginalia blog: The Real Truth About Textbooks.
posted by zamboni at 7:51 AM on February 22, 2010

Despite appearances most faculty don't emerge from pods fully formed. They all, for example, probably took classes a lot like the ones they're teaching now, and they became faculty (hopefully) because they like thinking critically and creatively about designing a curriculum. So they do what anybody would do -- they start with what they know (what their professors used with them) and either adopt it wholesale, modify it, or totally discard it and start over if they think they have a better plan.

The usual advice for junior faculty is to not change anything about an existing course the first time you teach it, because the only way to really understand the structure of a curriculum is to live through it for a semester -- sometimes that book you hate at the beginning is there specifically to set up the awesome book at the end, for example.
posted by range at 7:52 AM on February 22, 2010

Not entirely snark, but most of the ones I had made sure it was something they wrote, so they could get extra money.
posted by furtive at 7:48 AM on February 22 [+] [!]

To be fair, you have no idea what their motives are. The profits from textbooks are pretty slim if your textbook is not assigned widely and many professors donate the proceeds from assigning their own books to the general scholarship fund of the university. Although there are certainly profit-seekers out there, many professors write textbooks because they feel that the existing ones do an inadequate job of covering the state of the field. So, if you have gone to the trouble of writing a textbook (and believe me, writing a comprehensive intro-level textbook is probably one of the more time-consuming processes imaginable in academia and these things don't count much for tenure) -- why wouldn't you assign it if you feel it's superior to existing alternatives? The fact of the matter is, many professors are deeply invested in the subject matter and understanding of it. While textbooks may seem interchangeable, in fact many present a theoretical, methodological, ideological, or even ontological viewpoint that may instill quite a bit of rancor in those who study these topics as their life's work. I'm not painting some lionized picture of professors here, but I do tire of the profit-seeking narrative. Many professors have no idea how much their books costs and have little to no say in the price point.
posted by proj at 7:57 AM on February 22, 2010 [3 favorites]

If the professor has authored a relevant textbook then obviously that's one source. Publishers often send professors review copies of textbooks in the hopes that they will select the book for a class and thus drive sales of the book.

Beyond that I suspect it varies a bit by discipline. In some cases there are only a few standard textbooks to choose from. In others the professor will look for a book that's ideologically aligned with his or her curriculum; this factor will matter more in subjective disciplines like law, economics, etc.

Sometimes it just depends on the purpose of the course. I took an undergraduate math course that was intended to teach students how to read, write, and critique proofs and how to derive an area of math from a few first principles (using the Moore Method). The actual subject matter was much less important than the process, and of course it would be counterproductive to have a book with a lot of worked out proofs. So the professor used a small, inexpensive book on topology that contained a lot of theorems and very few proofs.

Fun story: In a small triumph for students everywhere I bought that book from the campus book store for $12 and sold it back for $14.
posted by jedicus at 7:57 AM on February 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I've never had a department give me a list of books to choose from. I'm a tenure-track history professor and I decide based on these factors:
1) what my experience shows students will-- and can-- actually read (see 3)
2) price
3) accessibility. My students' reading skills are shockingly poor; many struggle with basic textbooks, and honest to god I mean no snark, seem never to have read a "chapter book."
4) For textbooks, I review a bunch of exam copies and choose what I consider to be the most accessible and relevant to the course. For my field, for any field really, there are only so many textbooks, so yeah, different classes get assigned the same textbook.
posted by vincele at 8:00 AM on February 22, 2010

How much leeway the instructor gets depends on how far from the "core" curriculum the subject matter is. There is some interest in making sure that everyone who passes, say, "ECE220 Fields and waves" can use Maxwell's equations to find the flux through a given circuit.

Which is to say the decision about course materials will sometimes be decided by the department to satisfy their requirements and guarantee that all instructors teach similarly. In other cases, the instructor has more choice in the selection of teaching materials, particularly as you get closer to their field of expertise. Some publishers will supply instructors with free textbooks for evaluation. Or the instructor will have written a text, or have a colleague who has written one and choose to use that.

Not entirely snark, but most of the ones I had made sure it was something they wrote, so they could get extra money.

All of the professors that I had in college who wrote/contributed to their textbooks asserted that they waived royalties to help bring the costs down. Several used a list of "recommended books" that the library would have 5-6 copies of, and provided PDF's of required readings. I guess that I can't prove it's true, but all of my professors went to (sometimes great) lengths to help reduce costs for the students.

Which brings me to my final point, there is nothing wrong with asking your professor why they chose the material they did. In fact, it's a good discussion to have! In several cases, I found the given textbook sucked and they would recommend alternative resources that helped make sense of the subject material.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 8:05 AM on February 22, 2010

I have tenure in an arts&humanities field (wow, fun to type that...) and I can say that textbook selection is a major time and energy sink. For the occasional seminar, I can sometimes assign something I've only party read, because I know right away that it's something that will be great to go through with grad students. But for the far more common undergrad critical study course, I find choosing texts feels more like writing than reading--I often have a huge table covered with stacks of books and anthologies, each covered with post-its noting things like the cost and various content tags. Then I obsess over a calendar, trying to get the balance right on the amount of reading. Then I obsess ridiculously over the total textbook cost and try to control it. Then I find out something I was going to use is out of print, etc. Probably sounds like hell, but it is also sort of a creative problem solving activity, especially for a class that is centered on reading--then it's really the heart of the syllabus.
There certainly are some subjects and some specific courses where an instructor could be callous or lazy (or, I suppose, greedy), but I think it's at least as common that your instructor has put a lot of time into the selection process.
posted by Mngo at 8:19 AM on February 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

We survey the available books, evaluate them, and pick what we think is the best one. It is pretty much that simple. Of course this leads to reading lists looking the same from semester to semester, and sometimes like other professors' reading lists, though of course there may be many differences of opinion. A lot of new faculty will naturally start with the opinion that the books their profs used in grad school or undergrad are the best, and people often think the same about their own text (after all, textbooks often get written by someone who isn't satisfied with the existing choices.). People will also differ in how often they reevaluate...it is a major major timesink to change what may be the core component of the course.
posted by advil at 8:29 AM on February 22, 2010

Relevant background: I am tenured (woo hoo!) at a big state university (I assume life is very different for non-tenured instructors and at smaller schools). From the time I started, I was free to choose which textbook to require of my students.

I usually teach an undergraduate statistics course. For this course, I first (back in 2001) used the latest edition of the same book I used when I took statistics as an undergraduate. It was a hardcover book, and, it turns out, a bestseller among psychology statistics courses. I liked it for my class primarily because I thought it was highly readable (for a stats book), worked through examples clearly, and had good supplementary material in the book (good exercises at the end of chapters, answers to odd-numbered problems in the book, good summaries at the end of chapters, etc.).

After teaching the course a couple of times, I took a look around and found another book that seemed even more readable. It was also a hardcover (I'd yet to become sensitized to the huge cost of these books; duh), but the students who gave me feedback on the book didn't like it (it was too simplistic!), and compared to the feedback I'd gotten on the previous (bestseller) book, it wasn't as well-liked or well-read.

Since then, I've gone back to the bestseller, but I've used a paperback version that is a few chapters shorter (I never get to those chapters anyway). I started using the paperback because it's less expensive but has virtually all the benefits of the hardcover. This textbook also has good web-based support (free from the publisher). And because it's a bestseller, there are lots of used copies available. To me, this feels like the best of all possible worlds: A well-written book that's as inexpensive as possible (not cheap, I realize) with good web-based support and is available used by the boatload.

I get new books sent to me by publishers every semester, and I look them over to see if there's anything about them that might convey statistics to students better than what I'm currently using. I would not change without good reason, especially because I can use the paperback version of my current book.

As for making money off of these books, I don't, but that's because I've not written a textbook. I have mixed feelings about the possibility of doing so. One of the reasons I've considered writing a textbook (down the road about 10 years) is to write a better one, and not so much to make money. I assume, perhaps naively, that this is the motivation for most textbook writing that is done. Certainly, though, the extra money would be nice. But at my university (the University of Arkansas), there is extra paperwork that has to be filled out if one assigns required materials for a class that would result in royalties; this is imposed by the state legislature.

Finally, most professors have not written textbooks, and most textbooks are not big sellers, so it's hard to imagine that someone could go through four years of college and have mostly texts that are written by the same professor who teaches the class, and that that same professor is sitting in his or her office surrounded by bags of money. I think that most of the profit from textbooks winds up in the publishers' pockets.

This is too long. I hope I've done more than echo the comments above. And, of course, I can only speak for myself.
posted by anaphoric at 8:47 AM on February 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

I teach survey courses; my department picks the books. I supplement them with texts I think are missing that I think are crucial to the course. Sometimes this is something I can't imagine understanding X without reading; sometimes it's something that was in an old textbook that's been removed from the new edition (or isn't in the new book) that I really liked teaching and had built a strong set of lessons around.

In my department, generally the department chair asks the faculty what we like and dislike about the current book, what we want and don't want, what are must-haves and what are mehs, and then he selects two or three books and circulates them to us for our thoughts. We had a pretty strong consensus pick on the most recent update.

(And constructive copying is the soul of scholarship! One of the things other faculty suggested I do when I started teaching as get syllabi from as many other faculty as had taught my course as possible, so I would have a starting point for constructing my own. It was very helpful.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:50 AM on February 22, 2010

I teach a variety of American politics and political methodology courses.

For a big Introductory American Politics class, I usually just assign a textbook and be done with it. There are approximately 84 billion to choose from, and all of them are bundles of compromises. By and large, I select one that meshes reasonably well with the way I teach the class and the recurrent topics I try to bash into students' skulls. For the next time, I will admit that I chose the text in part because I know the authors and would rather they get paid than watch Ted fucking Lowi buy another solid-gold rocket car, but I wouldn't have picked it if it wasn't ex ante good for my purposes. I wouldn't normally bother with another text or supplement; students won't read it anyway. Having pored over a zillion of them in years past, I don't spend much time or effort selecting a text for these courses any more, and I don't really give a damn whether the book costs students $20 or $50 or $100. More than that and I might.

For an upper-division undergraduate course, there's usually a more or less standard text, or a couple of standard texts to choose from. For Congress, Davidson & Oleszek, or Smith. That makes the choice pretty easy; which of one or a few texts do you want? Add to that maybe a supplement (again a few standard ones) that in one way or another simplifies relatively recent findings, possibly a more technical reader. You can try to roll your own out of a set of individual readings, but students resist and it's one of those things where even if I think they're wrong to prefer a predigested textbook, it's not worth my time and effort to fight that particular battle.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 9:52 AM on February 22, 2010

Copy the lists from other profs, god forbid!

Why not, if it works? There's probably a reason other professors use those books. Stand on the shoulders, yadda yadda yadda.
posted by SpringAquifer at 9:53 AM on February 22, 2010

I teach economics. In intro I use the same textbook I used in undergrad 10 years ago, it's a top text.

In my upper level class, I use three paper back books I had read and liked. I'm thinking of switching, so I'm reading some that I think my work well.

In a new class I plan to teach next semester I found a syllabus of another prof on the same topic. I asked her if it was OK to borrow heavily from it. I would say 80% of the reading material is what she proposed. Each year, I'll drop some and start new. So yeah we copy reading lists.

Most profs I know, also consider costs, because we want our students to buy the textbook.
posted by akabobo at 10:29 AM on February 22, 2010

Most profs I know, also consider costs, because we want our students to buy the textbook.

It depends on the cost range. I think the number of college students who won't buy a $60 or $80 book but who really would buy and read a $20 book is nearly zero.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 11:43 AM on February 22, 2010

I pick books I will enjoy teaching. Simple.
posted by A189Nut at 12:14 PM on February 22, 2010

The process of choosing is covered well by others above. One note about something you say in your question:

...[professors seem to] mostly just adopt whatever reading lists they used in the previous semester...

Well, yeah. This is actually good practice, good for students, most of the time. It takes a lot of work to develop a good course with thought-provoking and well-organized and accessible readings, and assignments that go along with those readings. When I carry over readings, it means that I can fine-tune my lectures, my assignments, etc that relate to those readings, I can rearrange them, or schedule an extra class period on the one that everyone was confused about, etc. Keeping mostly the same readings as last semester means that students will get a much better course experience (on average) because the teacher isn't reinventing the wheel every time, but is improving the course in smaller ways based on past semesters.

Plus, remember that in most courses there are a set of standard issues that a course of that title needs to cover -- and there will only be so many really good readings that cover each issue. For example, "introduction to ethics" needs to give students a certain general background so that when they get to the upper-level course "special topics in ethics: Kant's imperatives", the students are ready to handle the more specialized stuff. Any introduction to ethics course needs to have a bit about Kant. But Kant is hard to understand, and only a small sub-section of his writings are suitable for understanding in an intro course where students are inexperienced and you can only devote a couple of class periods to him. So the same sections of Kant will get assigned in every intro ethics course. And if you want to assign a secondary reading (someone other than Kant, who will explain Kant in a more accessible way, or raise some criticisms of Kant), there are only a few that are suitable for an intro course. So just about every intro ethics course will contain a snippet of Kant (choose from a menu of maybe four that are suitable) and then a secondary source talking about Kant (again, choose from a menu of six or ten that are suitable).

This will vary a lot depending on the field and the level of the course, but it's true for many courses. (I'm talking about humanities here, where we mostly don't use big textbooks, but instead have students buy six short books or have a course pack of articles or excerpts.)

You might also be interested to know that in job interviews for academic jobs, you often get asked what books you'll use for different courses. In many cases this question would be answered by giving a list of articles/books, often just by the author's name ("I like to start with Perry, then Frankfurt") -- this question makes sense because for basic courses anyway, everybody in the field knows what's in those articles/books just by reference to the title/author. Partly this is because professors are really very well read in their fields, so they have seen stuff that would seem very obscure even to someone who has majored in a subject as an undergrad or done a master's. And partly this is because there are a limited menu of standard choices for a lot of courses, for the practical reasons described above: only certain readings are going to work well for undergraduate audiences, certain issues/authors need to be covered, etc.
posted by LobsterMitten at 2:18 PM on February 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

I work in developing text books and publishing them. We tend to commission books with lots of contributing authors, hoping that the authors will then set the books for their courses. We also get all the books peer reviewed - usually several times during the initial development of the book, and occassionally when we're developing new editions of books also. These can also lead to adoptions of the books.

We also have a team of sales reps, who go out and meet with lecturers and discuss the requirements of their course. We send inspection copies of books, and sometimes we develop custom publications - made up of chapters of other books - if we can't get a sale any other way.

There are many reasons that a book is chosen or dropped for a course. If the course structure changes dramatically, then an old text might not be suitable anymore. We try to structure our books so that they match the general outline of the courses out there, but sometimes some editions get this wrong, and the adoption is dropped in favour of a different text.
posted by jonathanstrange at 12:59 AM on February 23, 2010

Short observation- when I was in university in the early 1980s, one of my Organic Chemistry professors mentioned that when he looks for textbooks for the freshman Introduction to Organic Chemistry course, the first thing he does is to look at the page count. Any book with fewer than 1000 pages isn't long enough to cover introductory Organic Chemistry adequately.
posted by Multicellular Exothermic at 9:31 AM on March 13, 2010