Royalties aren't the real incentive

Missouri, the University of Minnesota, and many large Midwestern universities, for example, prohibit professors from using textbooks that they've written. There are a few instances of professors working their way around this rule--and then, only under the condition that the publishers set aside the royalties from these books and donate the money to scholarship funds.

A rare example of a Harvard professor following this lead is E.O. Wilson, who contributes the 60 cents in royalties he makes on each copy of "Life on Earth" from students in Bio 1 (amounting to about $100) to the Harvard scholarship fund. "Of course, I don't regard this as something I would expect others to do," Wilson says.

Textbook publishers don't encourage college professors to teach from the books they've written--they just expect that they will, the Houghton Mifflin man says. "Almost 95 per cent of the books we publish are written by professors and various other academics, and as a tool in their profession, we just assume they'll use it. To use someone else's would seem odd." But Harvard professors are not known for their homogeneity nor their conventionality: there are some who characteristically veer from the norm to write a textbook they adamantly refuse to teach from. Stanley Cavell, chairman of the Philosophy Department and Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, thinks this refusal is fortunate. "If somebody uses their textbook exclusively, you hope they'll have something to say and it will be useful. With lots of good books, I'd love to hear their writers talk at great length. But sometimes people have nothing to say about a book beyond what they've written."

Most writers who choose not to teach their books, however, do so for other reasons. John Kenneth Galbraith, now Warburg Professor of Economics Emeritus, used to lecture his classes from notes he compiled in the course of writing a book. As soon as he completed the manuscript, he would move on to teach another course in another branch of economics in the interest of preventing boredom. For the same reason, Craig, Fairbank and Reischauer consistently lecture in Soc Sci 11 on the parts of the East Asian tome they didn't write. Loomis decided to leave his Math I teaching post as soon as the department voted to switch to his text several years ago. "I get embarrassed about using my own," Loomis confided. "Anyway, it's easier to use someone else's book. When you use your own, you're inclined to repeat yourself. Besides that, students gain more from learning two points of view," he said.

Some of the large majority of professors who do decide to use their own texts concede that there is a great tendency to overlap material in lecture. Some, like E.O. Wilson, like it that way, and seize upon the opportunity to go into greater depth. He uses examples that are closely related to, but not included in the text. Most, like James Duesenberry, have their students use them so they don't have to wade through the drudgery of teaching the basics and can devote lectures to elaborating on material which is their own.

Regardless of the manner in which they use them, professors naturally enough take their own works seriously, and therefore tend to use them. Bernard Kummel, professor of Geology, who lists his "History of the Earth," the country's leading textbook on physical geology as the primary source for his students in Geology 18, says, "I'm a missionary--I had a goal. I'm trying to convert the world to my religion through the book. So if they read it, God bless 'em. If they don't, what the hell?"

Perhaps the problem of whether professors should or shouldn't teach from works they've written has no "right" answer. Some mathematicians use no text--they just go to a board and invent a textbook on the spot. In some uncommon cases, professors feel it is immoral to ask their own students to buy their books. "Then what happens to the textbook that becomes a classic?" Cavell asks rhetorically. "Kant and Hegel would have used their own. Of course, they didn't have any competitors..."