Why your professors assign their own textbooks

If you watch the mad scramble to the white pile in the front of the lecture hall during the opening week of classes, you might guess that the professor was offering his prospective students letters of admission to the Law School. Course reading lists, obviously, are a few steps behind these letters in guaranteeing a seat in a glamorous law firm, but they usually dictate where and how a healthy part of each student's time and money will be spent for a year. It's no surprise that these white mimeographed sheets are some of the hottest items floating around campus during the first week of classes.

The practice of Harvard professors to include their own books in course reading is widespread and can have important ramifications. In many natural science and language courses where lectures are devoted to special presentations and discussions peripheral to the course matter, a single text may be the sole source of information on a subject. In the less exacting social science and humanities courses, a book selling a certain point of view may color and distort a student's perspective in a field to which he plans to devote his entire life. Despite all the sneers, chuckles and snide remarks from students who discover their professor's books on the list, the books penned by course teachers--whether required or supplemental--always leave empty shelves on the Coop third floor annex before the close of the first week of classes.

"Students always like to know how professors feel about subjects they teach," James Q. Wilson, Shattuck Professor of Government, who will use his new book "Thinking About Crime" to teach his Government 262 seminar on crime this fall, said last week. "Nobody is actually required to buy my book, but I feel there is no sense pretending you haven't written anything on the subject you're teaching if you have." And in this age when most Harvard professors must publish to get tenure, it's not startling that about one-eighth of the courses offered here include works by the instructor in their curriculum.

"It's just the best there is" is the most simple and direct explanation author-professors have offered when asked why they use their own texts. If numbers sold are any mark of quality when it comes to textbooks, the assumption may not be as presumptuous as it sounds. The Soc Sci 11 textbook "East Asian Civilization," for example, co-authored by Edwin O. Reischauer, University Professor, Albert Craig, professor of Japanese History, and John K. Fairbank '29, Higginson Professor of History, was written for the course about 20 years ago when, as Reischauer says, "We were killing ourselves to teach two whole civilizations without a printed page to work from." Since that time, the two volume set has become the definitive and best-selling text in East Asian Studies, with nearly 6,000 copies sold annually.

Professor of Zoology Edward O. Wilson's Biology I and Nat Sci 5 textbook, "Life on Earth," never quite made it to the top of the charts, but was at one time the second most popular basic biology textbook, used by most of the Ivy League. The most popular one, Wilson says, is too elementary and weak in its treatment of evolutionary theory.

A slew of the leading textbooks written and used by Harvard professors to teach their courses met few hurdles on the rise to the best-seller list. Many are now used in courses here because there are no competitors in their field. Such is the case with Y.C. Ho's "Applied Optimal Control," which the co-author used to teach Engineering 202, "Optimization and Control of Deterministic and Dynamic Systems." Ho and Arthur Bryson, who first taught the course here and then moved to teach at Stanford, compiled their voluminous lecture notes, making their ground-breaking work accessible to thousands--and facilitating their own teaching.

The texts that are not written out of desperation because nothing has been published in the field, like the Ho-Bryson work, are usually written out of dissatisfaction with what has been rolling off publishing house presses. The way Lynn Loomis, whose new book "Calculus" replaced George Thomas's leading work in the field as the Math I text-book, explains the procedure. "You set out to write the definitive textbook. I taught the course [Math I] for a number of years, and never liked any of the books we used. So I tried to write the best," Loomis said recently.

There are certainly bonuses to be reaped from publishing and then using your own text besides the convenience of having a text which you find satisfactory for your students to use. Ironically, the monetary rewards are probably the smallest of these pluses. The average royalties on college textbooks bring the author a meager 14 per cent of net receipts, although each book has a different rate. This income is not based on list price, but rather on discount over-the-counter prices--many on second hand, paperback, and drastically reduced editions. Ezra Vogel, professor of Sociology, who lectures in Sociology 114, "Japanese Society" from two books he has written on social class structure in Japan, says that the ten cents the University of California Press sends him for every copy of his $2.95 book sold, amounts to one or two days salary--the royalties he makes from books sold to his Harvard classes alone amount to almost nothing. Even in the exceedingly rare case of Reischauer's royalty income, which for one East Asian textbook reaches the $4000-mark annually, the author says the return is a "complete drop in the bucket" in terms of his annual salary. "If people want to write for money, they steer away from textbooks and concentrate on magazine articles. Royalties from academic books are inconsequential," Reischauer says.

A number of universities and various departments are "super-sensitive" about having authors require their captive students to dig into their pockets to pay for instructor's texts, a representative at Houghton Mifflin, who asked to remain anonymous, claims, even though the royalties reaped from any single class amount to "little more than cents." All public educational institutions in the state of