Occupy Textbooks: Drop Out and Try Something New | From the Bell Tower
The Occupy Wall Street movement has attracted mass attention from college students, many of whom are angry about huge debt and dim job prospects—and wondering what good it did to buy all those expensive textbooks Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA Dec 7, 2011
When cities around the country got fed up with Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protesters camping in the center of town, municipal officials took action to avoid these encampments gaining permanent status. Where is the next best place for the protesters to go? Why not local universities? They have lots of sympathetic students and green spaces for camping. They're known as locations for past protests. And they have libraries that offer information.
So move to campuses they did—or at least they tried. Many academic officials were less than supportive, and for good reason. As much as they might wish to support such protests, they could see that it cost the cities millions to deal with the protesters—for cleanup, security overtime, and so on. With their constrained budgets, many public institutions could ill afford to take on the additional burden of an OWS protest. Some feared that these not-so-welcome guests could stay put for a long time. In a New York Times article about the OWS shift from cities to campuses, a University of California, Berkeley, spokesperson said, "Our experience with these encampments is that they are never temporary. We've had a long-term encampment at People's Park for 43 years." But others supported the appearance of tents on campus, and suggested that peaceful protest was an integral component of the college learning experience.
Higher ed is "The Man"
Although the original source of the protesters' anger was Wall Street, the movement grew to include other institutions that would fall into the category of "The Man"—ones that rip you off, take advantage of you, and seem to always have the odds stacked in their favor, because they game the system so the average citizen can never win.
That hardly sounds like a description of the typical college or university, but higher education became a target of the protesters. The primary source of anger is a mix of three factors: skyrocketing tuition, skyrocketing student debt, and skyrocketing numbers of recent and unemployed college graduates. If you were led to believe that a college degree was the ticket to a decent job and a good career, and that the debt was worth it, you too might feel colleges and universities are The Man. "Student loan debt has been rising inexorably, and college students in the last couple of years are entering one of the worst job markets in a generation," Anya Kamenetz, the author of Generation Debt, told Inside Higher Ed. "There's a real feeling of betrayal that hits a lot of people when they find out that the debt they were told was good debt is not paying off."
Where costs are really rising
While there's no ignoring the seriousness of student loan debt and the significant negative impact it has on borrowers, a few new studies are reporting that college tuition, when accounting for a variety of factors, hasn't actually escalated over the past five years. When college costs did rise, it was usually owing to room, board, and books. Students are angry about rising textbook costs too, even if they're not angry enough to protest in the streets about it; if you had a $30,000 loan bill, you'd probably have other things on your mind, too.
Efforts to protest the cost of textbooks predate the OWS movement by a couple of years but remain in the shadow of protests about tuition costs and debt. There's certainly no dearth of companies working to come up with cheaper textbooks, either by renting print books, or selling digital or open access books. Faculty are becoming more aware of these options, and many are experimenting with them. They are concerned about textbook costs, too, but not enough of them to reach a tipping point. Meanwhile, academic librarians are still figuring out what to do about textbooks, especially with so many students expecting the library to have copies of them. No one seems to have an answer. Some academic librarians refuse to buy them, while others are trying different ways to do so. Let me tell you about an approach we explored on my campus.
Alternative textbook project
Not unlike your institution, we have faculty who are trying alternatives to textbooks. One has his students using e-textbooks on iPads, for example.
To facilitate such experimentation, the library decided to fund an initiative to encourage it. It seems like a better use of money than just buying a stockpile of textbooks to lend. While that might make a few students temporarily happy, in the long run it solves none of the core problems and just serves to enrich the textbook publishers. But with this alternative textbook project, faculty instead received modest stipends to ditch their textbooks, and build their own mix of digital learning materials. An initial group of 11 faculty were pointed toward open textbooks, library content, learning material repositories and other potential student learning resources. So far, they all appear to be getting very positive feedback from their students, who are thrilled to have no textbook costs for these courses.
We'll get fuller evaluations in the spring 2012 semester, but we're already planning to extend the project to a new group of faculty next fall. This could catch on. When a colleague at UMass Amherst heard about it, she sought support for a similar project and got full backing from the provost and library dean.
Occupy textbooks on your campus
The turmoil in the textbook industry is much the same as when I likened it last year to a "Wild West," with new options and innovations emerging regularly. In fact, I heard from someone just last week, who called to share an interesting entrepreneurial venture to provide faculty with alternatives to traditional textbooks. Opportunity abounds, so those of us in higher education can expect new possibilities. Academic librarians should consider what role they can play to "occupy textbooks" on their campuses. While the most obvious solution is to simply purchase textbooks, we should be able to find better ways to support our students and faculty.
Of the many essays and opinion pieces written about the OWS movement, I thought the best was journalist Matt Taibbi's explanation of how he came to appreciate the protests. He wrote: "[The protestors] want major changes. I think I understand now that this is what the Occupy movement is all about. It's about dropping out, if only for a moment, and trying something new...." Overpriced textbooks aren't one of the most serious issues confronting this nation, but there's no denying students and faculty want major changes. Trying something new—that's something we ought to get behind.
| Author Information |
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Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, is the current vice president/president-elect of ACRL. For more from Steven visit his blogs, Kept-Up Academic Librarian, ACRLog and Designing Better Libraries or visit his website. |
