In the USA Today, Peter Funt addresses the painful reality of high textbook prices. Mr. Funt notes that professors don’t have to adopt a new version of a book if that updated version puts forth only cosmetic changes. He also notes the growing availability of e-textbooks as cheaper alternatives to high-priced physical books.

While he proposes some basic steps to ease the cost burden on students, this is a more complex issue. Namely — why do certain courses need textbooks?

In business schools, management, organizational behavior, business ethics, and leadership are often separate courses with their own $150 textbooks.  These books are appealing to professors because they are all-inclusive; professors receive test banks, PowerPoints, and instructor guides that allow for less time on course prep and more time pursuing pubs. 

It’s a shame that many of the professors who adopt these texts shun an idea that’s stated right in those expensive books — efficient does not always mean effective.

The majority of the modern management texts are written by theorists who render the content into endless seas of meaningless terminology. A better idea is to forgo textbooks altogether.

I can teach three to four courses effectively and efficiently at the total cost of $150 by adopting original source readings and articles that are available through my school library’s electronic resources, combined with “Great Books of Management” (e.g. Frederick Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management). 

I’d venture to say that this suggestion is not exclusive to my area. I urge those professors who have the ability and desire to ditch the textbook to do so. You and your students will be glad that you did. 

By labor unions . . .

Protesters at Friday’s “Occupy CPAC” event, organized by AFL-CIO and the Occupy DC movement, told The Daily Caller that they were paid “sixty bucks a head” to protest outside the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C.

One protester told TheDC that all the “Occupy” activists were being paid to protest, and that his union, Sheet Metal Workers Local 100, approached him about the money-making opportunity.

“I have nothing nice to say about Local 100. . . . They just told me ‘you wanna make sixty bucks? So c’mon,’” the protester said.

I thought these people were against the influence of money in politics?

Read more here.

After a week of backlash from defenders of religious liberty and freedom of conscience, the White House has announced a compromise on its earlier plan to force religious non-profits with objections to birth control to cover it anyway. But is this really a compromise, or is this just spin and damage control?

Under the new compromise, insurance companies sponsored by religious universities would still be required to cover birth control. Only now, insurance companies would be required to provide the birth control coverage for free. The institutions themselves would not be required to pay for that part of the health plan.

But won’t insurance companies simply raise their overall rates to compensate for these “free” services?

It’s like when you buy a set of steak knives off a TV infomercial for $19.95, and they throw in a cheap “free” gadget, like a lemon peeler or a pizza cutter, on the side. In effect, you’re paying for everything. Saying that part of the purchase is “free” is nothing more than a sales gimmick. We all know that.

I don’t share the Catholics’ position on birth control, at least not to that extreme, but I defend their right to abide by their beliefs — without interference from Obama and his roundtable of radical pro-choice advisers. He’s been dancing on the end of a marionette for the Planned Parenthood, NOW, and NARAL crowd for years, going back to the days when he was a state legislator fighting against the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act in Illinois.

First he wanted to force Catholic universities to pay for birth control. Now he wants to force insurance companies to offer it for free. (Since when can the government force private businesses to give away their products or services for nothing?) There seems to be no limit to the power Obama claims for himself. He imposes his agenda without any thought for our liberty.

We need to foster a culture that values life and respects religious liberty. But our current president is an enemy to those ideals. There is nothing he wouldn’t do to appease his puppet masters in the radical-feminist Left.

For a while, Texas was the hotbed of academic reform. A few regents, at least, were serious about improving faculty productivity, and the Texas Public Policy Foundation pushed for better data. But the bold move of publishing faculty salaries and workloads elicited angry feedback.

Now the University of Texas system (Texas has several public higher-ed systems, but this is the leading one) seems to be settling back into the normal torpor.

On Thursday, the UT Board of Regents passed a requirement for annual post-tenure review. Previously, a review was required only every six years (and according to the Austin American-Statesman not much happened as a result).

But I don’t see any teeth in the document that the regents adopted. Evaluations will be the following: “exceeds expectations, meets expectations, does not meet expectations, and unsatisfactory.” The criteria for dismissal are “incompetence, neglect of duty, or other good cause,” but that is not anything new — and dismissal must follow “remediation,” anyway.

The document goes on to say: “Individuals whose performance is unsatisfactory for two consecutive annual reviews may be subject to a comprehensive review.” On the other hand, as far as I can see, they may not be.

Hasn’t the federal government been evaluating staff this way for years? Hardly anyone fails to meet expectations there, and I don’t see any reason why this will be different. Oh, one more reason not to think much of this: The Faculty Advisory Council approved the measure.

In today’s Pope Center piece, Professor Jeff Anderson of Illinois Valley Community College discusses the shameful neglect by most professors of students’ writing. We hear all the time about how colleges and universities supposedly do so much to give people the “higher” skills that the economy is said to demand. A good reason to be skeptical about that is the fact that many college graduates still write very poorly.

“Higher skills?” How about making sure they have grade-school skills?

Tuition increases at public universities are a big issue, at least in the populist state of North Carolina. A front-page story in the state’s largest paper today describes University of North Carolina students’ plans to march on the UNC Board of Governors meeting as it considers a 9 percent tuition hike.

In terms of policy, I tend to agree with the kids. The increase, while smaller than the trial balloons that have been launched since November, still outstrips (for the second time in three years) the 6.5 percent annual limit that the university set in place a few years ago. Raising tuition allows the administration to delay facing the university’s structural problems, and it’s not fair to students who have planned their payments with more modest increases in mind.

But heck! There’s another side to the story. North Carolina taxpayers, not the students, are paying most of these students’ tuition — on average, nearly $13,000 per student. Yes, a lot of it is misspent (due to those aforementioned structural problems) but still students are getting a bonanza. And, as we know, all too many of them are blowing it on “beer and circus.”

George Bernard Shaw said that youth is wasted on the young. Sometimes education is, too.

I just saw an adoring documentary on the life of Howard Zinn that was made in 2004, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, narrated by his adoring acolyte, Matt Damon. It is a one-sided presentation of Howard Zinn’s negative and one-sided view of America, as purveyed in his wildly popular A People’s History of the United States. Zinn is a man who cannot give a shred of credit to any opposing viewpoints about the nature of the United States, and neither does the documentary, even when evidence glares and flickers on the screen.

For example, after he came home from the war, Zinn went to graduate school at night and worked in a warehouse during the day; his wife had a job in publishing. She worked so that he could complete his degree, a typical academic arrangement of those days. They lived with their two children in low-income housing on the Lower East Side. Of this period of his life, Zinn speaks torturously of the struggle for economic survival in the so-called working class. But the fact that they had jobs, that they lived at below market rates in what was no doubt a large airy apartment with fully equipped kitchen and bath (leaving aside later problems with housing projects, they were meant to be a great improvement over the tenements in which Zinn grew up and of which he loudly complains), the fact that photos of his pretty wife and nicely dressed children speak of something beyond pure struggle and survival, this he cannot bring himself to mention. He also cannot bring himself to mention the G.I. Bill that enabled him to study and become a college professor. The documentary was partially funded by the NEH and the NEA. Zinn says in the documentary that traditional historians have left things out, but he is a far worse offender on that score. 

Then I looked at Good Will Hunting, written by and starring Matt Damon and his friend Ben Affleck, which also makes favorable mention of Zinn’s People’s History. This is pure self-indulgent adolescent resentment and fantasy. Damon portrays a mathematical genius who, because of abuse as a child, is hostile, belligerent, and physically violent, confining himself to a cramped existence in a dingy room and doing janitorial work for a living. It is very unlikely that a mathematical genius would be physically violent; it is very unlikely that his Einstein-level of genius (he brings a Field’s Medal winner to his knees), as well as assorted other sterling abilities, would not have been noticed before his twenties; and it is very unlikely that such a genius would resist opportunities to use his powers. But the whole thing is to play out the Zinn-like idea that society neglects the finest and rewards the undeserving. Of course in the end he gets everything, including splendid advancement and a rich English girlfriend, but once again, the society that offers him so much opportunity gets no credit.