terrapinsanity.com

Thus spake the General Assembly, and lo, it was so.

In a frenzy of hand-wringing over the cost of textbooks, and pandering to constituents who demand that gosh, we’ve got to do something, Maryland’s legislature passed a law to require all university instructors affirm they are cognizant of consequences to students when course materials are selected. We have already predicted how this will actually increase costs to students.

We didn’t realize how quickly this would become true.

The first practical edicts to implement this law are rolling out to faculty now. A new web site has been set up at faculty affairs where instructors must sign in, select a semester for which they give their statement, and then click to confirm. [We'll append the text here for those of you who don't have login capability at that site.]

Unfortunately, as you’ll note, the form contains plenty of jargon and undefined terms, so anyone who makes the mistake of trying to give a thoughtful and informed response must make contact with campus legal for explanations. It is also ambiguous as to whether you are supposed to affirm first and then select books, or vice versa. But no matter, most instructors will just click and move on without the soul searching that the legislature presumably wanted to trigger. At the end of it all, we get to make the same selections of materials as before – we just need to have clicked this page somewhere along the way.

So far all that cost doesn’t yet add up to an amount for which the legislature has any regard. Cost? Presuming each of a couple thousand instructors only loses 15 minutes of time for reading memos and reminders, juggling a browser and processing the site, this only adds up to a couple faculty-weeks lost capacity per semester. That pales in comparison to the capacity we all just lost due to furloughs, and legislators obviously don’t give a rip about that.

But does anything else increase costs? Sure. The above figure must be multiplied by a ‘confusion factor’ too. Officially book selection is now something that must only be done by instructors (no more having a secretary do data entry and hence the time hit for a lot of faculty, allowing them opportunity for productive things.) When faculty get to the site where we do entry – a commercial site with which the campus contracts – they’ll find that all the course information for Spring 2010 has been misloaded. Sorry, everyone gets to spend time head-scratching and then come back later since the textbook bureaucrats put in Fall 2009 listings instead.

[Cool feature though: that misload need not necessarily stop all the full professors from performing their new secretarial duties. The bookstore interface lets you add your own course information and there is no check done at all. An enterprising instructor could fill in book selections for all sorts of courses around campus. Surely nobody would think to editorialize by putting Dilbert collections as the textbook of choice for all courses. Stephen Colbert collections perhaps...]

But the truly big costs are still to come. That will be the cost to students when there is no lawful way to get one of the books needed for a course. Looking at the faculty affairs web site on textboooks you find regulations worthy of a bureaucrat from the old Soviet Union. These are the rules that apply not to the faculty, but to the publishers.

Many college materials are not books specifically crafted to be textbooks, they are just books. Scholarly works. Materials published by companies who, until this law, didn’t know they would suddenly have new obligations in order to sell their products in Maryland. But according to the new rules, specific obligations they will have, for listing costs and explaining differences from previous editions. Few from out of state (that would be all of them…) will want to go to federal court for an injunction (there’s that pesky interstate commerce clause in the Constitution, that limits Maryland’s ability to impose its own laws on other states’ companies.) They’ll either ignore the law (showing it the contempt it is due) or simply not do business here. [Comply? Do you think Amazon wants to maintain separate special lists of books based on which are Maryland-legal and which can be sent anyplace else?]

Maryland’s increased costs are a self-inflicted wound, squandering resources that could have gone into promoting excellence on an international scale.

Textbook Affordability Acknowledgement Form

In considering the appropriateness of a textbook and other supplemental materials for my course (content, pedagogy, teaching in my discipline), I acknowledge:

1. I have been informed about the impact that the high cost of college textbooks and supplemental materials has on students.
2. I have been informed of the following obligations of the publisher: that a publisher that sells college textbooks or supplemental material and provides information regarding a college textbook or supplemental material to a faculty member, other adopting entity in charge of selecting course materials, or the administration of an institution of higher education shall disclose the following information, in writing, by paper or electronic means:
1. The price of the college textbook or supplemental material;
2. The title, author, publisher, edition, current and three previous copyright dates, publication date when available, and ISBN of the college textbook and supplemental material, both as bundled and unbundled items;
3. Substantial content revisions made between the current edition of the college textbook or supplemental material and the previous edition of the college textbook or supplemental material;
4. Other available formats for the college textbook or supplemental material such as paperback or unbound; and
5. A list of textbooks that are classified as integrated* textbooks.
3. Before selecting a college textbook or supplemental material and before transmitting the selection to a campus bookstore, providing the selection to any other bookstore or posting the selection on the website of the public institution of higher education, I acknowledge the following:
1. If selecting a different college textbook from a different publisher, the cost of the new selection versus the cost of the previous selection; or If selecting a current edition of a college textbook; I have considered the following:
1. The differences in substantial content between the current edition of the textbook and the previous edition of the textbook as reported by the publisher;
2. That the use of the current edition is appropriate due to a material change in substantial content between the current edition and the previous edition;
3. The difference in price between the current edition of the textbook and the previous edition of the textbook; and
4. That the previous edition of the textbook may be available to students at a lower price via the used book market
2. That an integrated* textbook is not subject to the requirement for a publisher that sells a college textbook and any supplemental material accompanying the college textbook in a bundle shall also make available the college textbook and the supplemental material as separate and unbundled items, each separately priced.
3. That supplemental material included in a bundle is intended for use in the course.