[MD] The Academy is Evil! Here's what I'd do instead...

[david buchanan]

Platt said:
Then there are those professors who base their course on a book they have written and require their students to buy it, otherwise known as a protection racket.

Arlo said:
So, hypothetically, if a University hired Pirsig to teach, he should not be allowed to teach courses based on his books? 


dmb says:
A "protection racket" has nothing to do with using a teaching position to promote book sales. The latter is certainly ethically questionable, but a protection racket is basically just robbery through intimidation. You pay for "protection" from the very same people who will wreck your place if you don't pay. It's the mafia's version of stealing your lunch money. It's just a regularly scheduled mugging. 

Speaking NOT hypothetically, I feel lucky to have teachers who have written textbooks on the topic. David Hildebrand has two books published now and he deliberately puts them on the "suggested" reading list rather than the "required" list for his classes. Why? Because it's not ethical. It's not cool. But even if he did, you still couldn't call it a protection racket. That just doesn't make any sense. 

If you want to know about unethical behavior to promote book sales, just look into what happens to books put out by right-wing politicians. Talk about unethical! Sarah Palin's book and books like that are purchased by the case to pump up sales figures and then they're "given" away to political donors. Now that's a racket. The books published by Regnery, for example, are essentially bombs in the culture war. They're written for activists and axe-grinders, for propaganda purposes. For these guys, intellectual merit is quite beside the point and merely seeming to be popular is every bit as good as the real thing. 

Next time you walk by the bargain bin at your local bookstore, take notice of how many discount stickers are stuck to the cover of books by FOX "news" hosts, etc. That bargain bin is the last stop before those books become recycled paper. That bargain bin is literally the last time those books will be worth more than the paper they're written on. After a few weeks there, Bill O'Reilly's works become a relatively affordable form of toilet paper. And rightly so.