Adjunct hustles students for $60k

[mleok]

I've never taught a class with this many students, but I do have colleagues on campus who have as many as 400+ students in one section of an undergraduate required general education course.

I always ruminated on the idea that those professors could require use of their own self-published textbooks at $100 each. (And they are allowed to do that.) Nice perks, if you can get away with it.

Typically, one was supposed to put aside the profits arising from assigning a book you wrote, either by donating it to a scholarship fund, or just throwing a pizza party for the students which is more relevant for the vast majority of us who only get pennies on the dollar in royalities.

[MarathonRunner]

How many schools have explicit rules about professors requiring students to pay for textbooks, access to online platforms, or other class materials? I've never seeny any explicit rules.

I've seen plenty of professors require students to buy their textbooks. I don't really see a difference in kind with what this adjunct professor required her students to do. Just a difference in how much money they made from it.

I tend to think that a good deal of higher ed is a hustle, so while this particular professor seems to be particularly hypocritical and blantant in their approach, I find the outrage about this to be misplaced.

At both public universities where I've worked, professors can't make a profit from their own students. They can require their own textbook but either sell it at cost through the bookstore or donate their income afterwards. Not sure how carefully it's monitored though.

Yes, I've seen this plenty of times. Professors requiring their own textbook for a class, whether students get it through the bookstore or some other mechanism. At least there's always been at least one text on reserve at the library.

I think this is a common policy. In a couple grad classes we used the professor's own textbook because they really were the best and matched how they taught the class, but they always just gave us PDF versions for free. In on case we got to pilot test the new edition before it was published.

Never got them for free, but there was always at least one, if not two, copies on reserve at the library if you genuinely couldn't afford the textbook. On the other hand, in third/fourth year undergrad I had some profs only assign readings, as they understood the financial burden of textbooks. But for many foundational first or second year courses, textbooks are important. Trying to reduce their cost (paperbacks, texts on reserve) helps many students. Canada you can't put financial aid explicitly towards textbooks like in the USA.

[dismalist]

[In] Canada you can't put financial aid explicitly towards textbooks like in the USA.

Thank goodness! Keeps the price of textbooks down.

The "new" edition is intended to kill the used textbook market, so that publishers can raise price. Laziness makes this possible.

I used to examine new editions with a fine toothed comb -- free to me for the publishers want me to adopt -- and discovered that in the main the new edition had end of chapter problem sets renumbered! I made a document with the problem sets I wanted and handed it out. I told the students they could purchase any recent edition.

Once or twice I discovered a page or two or three that was new. Photocopy, distribute [later electronically]. End of story.

But the Ms. MSU case is not about charging students for stuff they need. It's about charging stuff for stuff the students don't need, and actually reject!

A "charging for textbook analogy" is completely wrong.

[ciao_yall]

[In] Canada you can't put financial aid explicitly towards textbooks like in the USA.

Thank goodness! Keeps the price of textbooks down.

The "new" edition is intended to kill the used textbook market, so that publishers can raise price. Laziness makes this possible.

I used to examine new editions with a fine toothed comb -- free to me for the publishers want me to adopt -- and discovered that in the main the new edition had end of chapter problem sets renumbered! I made a document with the problem sets I wanted and handed it out. I told the students they could purchase any recent edition.

Once or twice I discovered a page or two or three that was new. Photocopy, distribute [later electronically]. End of story.

But the Ms. MSU case is not about charging students for stuff they need. It's about charging stuff for stuff the students don't need, and actually reject!

A "charging for textbook analogy" is completely wrong.

I always let students buy the previous edition. Other than occasionally reshuffling the chapters and updating the graphics, even the examples didn't change.

[Caracal]

Actually, I read somewhere that the lawsuit is not just against the hustler but also against two employees of MSU who are claimed to have signed off on the hustling.

Well, then, did the two employees who signed off also benefit?  I've seen some really creative monetizations of classes but never a personal add-on.  I wonder if they also had to raise money, buy additional unrelated products or provide free labor?

My guess would be that it's just the chair and director of undergraduate studies? I doubt this is really their fault. If the instructor just said something about needing to log in to some website on the syllabus and left out the part about the cost, I doubt that would really raise any red flags. Besides, nobody really looks at syllabi unless there's an issue.

[downer]

Complaints about the professor go back over a year on Ratemyprofessor, though the $99 charge seems new this semester. The positive reviews sound like they were written by the professor.

It looks like those in charge were asleep at the wheel.

[mleok]

[In] Canada you can't put financial aid explicitly towards textbooks like in the USA.

Thank goodness! Keeps the price of textbooks down.

The "new" edition is intended to kill the used textbook market, so that publishers can raise price. Laziness makes this possible.

I used to examine new editions with a fine toothed comb -- free to me for the publishers want me to adopt -- and discovered that in the main the new edition had end of chapter problem sets renumbered! I made a document with the problem sets I wanted and handed it out. I told the students they could purchase any recent edition.

Once or twice I discovered a page or two or three that was new. Photocopy, distribute [later electronically]. End of story.

But the Ms. MSU case is not about charging students for stuff they need. It's about charging stuff for stuff the students don't need, and actually reject!

A "charging for textbook analogy" is completely wrong.

I always let students buy the previous edition. Other than occasionally reshuffling the chapters and updating the graphics, even the examples didn't change.

I always just type out the problem in full on the problem set, so that students can use any edition, and I never have to keep up with the problem shuffle game that publishers play. Thankfully, this happens less regularly with the upper-division and graduate classes that I teach, but the editions game is strong in calculus textbooks.

[Caracal]

Complaints about the professor go back over a year on Ratemyprofessor, though the $99 charge seems new this semester. The positive reviews sound like they were written by the professor.

It looks like those in charge were asleep at the wheel.

You can't really use rate my professor as a proxy for course evals or actual complaints. My experience is that disgruntled students will make up all kinds of things on there.   It is hard to believe that this person was a perfectly fine instructor and woke up one semester and decided to pull this con Some of the things mentioned in RMP do fit pretty well with someone who doesn't have any sense of professional responsibility-having the TAs largely teach the class, not having any real assessments, giving everyone As. They also, however, are the kind of things that might not generate many complaints.

It's hard for chairs to really effectively monitor adjuncts. If someone gets paid a crummy wage, and they are employed on a contingent basis, it's pretty difficult to have regular evaluations where performance can be assessed and someone can be told if they need to improve on something to retain the job. That leaves chairs relying on evals and anecdotal complaints from students, but lots of problems might not show up in any clear way with those things.

[downer]

Complaints about the professor go back over a year on Ratemyprofessor, though the $99 charge seems new this semester. The positive reviews sound like they were written by the professor.

It looks like those in charge were asleep at the wheel.

You can't really use rate my professor as a proxy for course evals or actual complaints. My experience is that disgruntled students will make up all kinds of things on there.   It is hard to believe that this person was a perfectly fine instructor and woke up one semester and decided to pull this con Some of the things mentioned in RMP do fit pretty well with someone who doesn't have any sense of professional responsibility-having the TAs largely teach the class, not having any real assessments, giving everyone As. They also, however, are the kind of things that might not generate many complaints.

It's hard for chairs to really effectively monitor adjuncts. If someone gets paid a crummy wage, and they are employed on a contingent basis, it's pretty difficult to have regular evaluations where performance can be assessed and someone can be told if they need to improve on something to retain the job. That leaves chairs relying on evals and anecdotal complaints from students, but lots of problems might not show up in any clear way with those things.

Yes, I agree it's not good for chairs to rely on RMP. But there's a good correlation between RMP and student evals, and the student complaints on RMP are above and beyond the regular complaints. Indeed, some of the comments were not complaints, but raised red flags -- students get to decide their own grades?? If that's on the syllabus, or there is not a clear mechanism for assigning a grade on the syllabus, then there's a major problem.

I also agree that chairs are in a difficult position to evaluate adjunct faculty, especially when there are many of them. I'm pretty sure at my school the chair does not read the student evals (maybe glanding the overall satisfaction number), but just waits for complaints. This case of the adjunct hustle is noticeable for being egregious, but it makes sense that when there is little quality control, most people cut a lot of corners.

[apl68]

I've never taught a class with this many students, but I do have colleagues on campus who have as many as 400+ students in one section of an undergraduate required general education course.

I always ruminated on the idea that those professors could require use of their own self-published textbooks at $100 each. (And they are allowed to do that.) Nice perks, if you can get away with it.

Typically, one was supposed to put aside the profits arising from assigning a book you wrote, either by donating it to a scholarship fund, or just throwing a pizza party for the students which is more relevant for the vast majority of us who only get pennies on the dollar in royalities.

That would have been some pizza party in this case.

[RatGuy]

It's hard for chairs to really effectively monitor adjuncts. If someone gets paid a crummy wage, and they are employed on a contingent basis, it's pretty difficult to have regular evaluations where performance can be assessed and someone can be told if they need to improve on something to retain the job. That leaves chairs relying on evals and anecdotal complaints from students, but lots of problems might not show up in any clear way with those things.

At my place, evaluating adjuncts is part of the Associate Chair's purview. Indeed, part time instructors and visiting professors are observed by the AC at least once a semester, and syllabi/materials are submitted through the AC's office. I don't know what it looks like in, say, business, but that's true for many other departments. This goes double for adjuncts who have special skills or experience but perhaps not acquainted with the conventions of academia. (theater has a class taught by a Star Trek screenwriter, history has a class taught by a curator of local haunted objects, English has classes taught by a rotating number of high-profile authors). Indeed if we were to hire a part-timer whose bread-and-butter was a "smash the patriarchy" website to teach a class on the psychological methods of smashing the patriarchy, there'd be much more oversight than the average class/prof.

[kaysixteen]

I know what level of oversight I received at the three schools I adjuncted at in the teens, which was minimal, and I know that student grade complaints to department chairs were common.   What is SOP adjunct oversight nowadays, and what allowances are made for the reality that the nature of teachng as an adjunct just ain't the same, even though students largely do not know this, and perhaps those who do, do not much care?