Two amendments I’d offer to Ms. Espinoza’s agenda:

(1) Faculty can sell unsolicited textbooks for personal gain, but not the ones they request for exam copies. Shelf space, especially for junior faculty, is worth a couple of bucks.

(2) “Virtual office hours” (being accessible to students via Instant Messaging) counts toward the 30-hour requirement.

If these are not acceptable, add my remote vote to the “No Confidence” column.

Sale of textbooks is probably legal, but may push the ethical boundaries. “But they’re unsolicited!!!!!” I hear you screaming, “I didn’t ASK for them and THEN sell them for personal gain!!!”

Whatever. If that makes you feel better. Several faculty where Chris and I got our PhD’s used to collect them and when enough built up, they would sell them and use the proceeds to buy a top shelf bottle of scotch for themselves.

Our solution has been to give them to the departmental Administrative Specialist who sells them and deposits the money into the university account we use to fund various “best paper” or “community involvement” awards that our department gives to undergrads.

I do think there’s a difference between selling the ones you get unsolicited and ones you request as desk/exam copies. Since I’d never be organized enough to track which are which, though, I just stick to a policy of not selling any of them. I don’t even think I sold back many of the books I bought in school.

The “virtual office hours” idea is a good one, and one I’ve not really implemented yet but plan to add in the fall. We’ll see how that goes; I’d really like to just use Google Talk so I can save the PITA of setting up another IM account, since I have a “faculty” Gmail address I use, but I get the feeling I’ll have to use AIM or Yahoo or MSN instead.

I have heard rumors from colleagues who taught elsewhere in Texas that there is a state requirement that professors at public universities have to be in the office X hours per week on the books. That is the scary thing to me – that such a law exists at all…

TAMU System policy sets a minimum of 3 hours/week, I believe.

Another Texas school I interviewed at required 10 hours/week although new faculty could weasel out of some of it for a required orientation their first year. That was not one of the highlights of the position… not that there were many (although some people might have seen two-preps/semester a “highlight,” I didn’t really see that as a fun way to potentially spend the next 30 years of my life).

So it would be more ethical to dispose of these textbooks in a wastebasket and let them make their way to a landfill, where they’ll sit for how many years, bleeding ink and other chemicals into the environment? Do you have any idea how many books profs who’ve been at a university for longer than one year receive unsolicited? Maybe it just depends on the university, I can’t say, but I’m a state university and within a year of being here the number of unsolicited books I received was ludicrously large. I used the money to pay bills.

Once a book is yours, it’s your property and I think legally you can do whatever you want with it; the only legal area that seems dicey is if you’re requesting free books with the intent of reselling them, and even then I think a court (a) would never bother with the case and (b) would probably buy the argument that if a publisher is dumb enough to send you something for free, that can’t expect to retain any real rights over what you do with it afterward. If paying your bills with textbook money doesn’t keep you up at night, by all means feel free to do so.

That said I know there are other worthy places excess textbooks can go; I’ve seen occasional drives to send them to developing countries. I’ve given away some (usually older editions or duplicates) to students in my classes and maybe a work-study or two in my department. When I’ve moved on from departments, I’ve left books behind for the department collection or freebie stack or whatever. A campus library might take some of them. I wouldn’t throw them away, but I’m not sure I’d use them to supplement my personal income or pay off my student loan debt either.

If a book has “Sample Copy Only: No Resale,” which is just something the publishers put on there and not legally binding, a library is not going to want it. And what developing country is going to want a book on US media politics that will be outdated within two years’ time? Or an American public policy models book, etc.? Wouldn’t the textbook company that puts out the sample company argue that you’re taking away monies from authors that could be earned from sales in said developing countries? (The copyright argument is the only reason publishers argue that there’s an ethical problem here, so… I said it’s still all right to sell textbooks to developing countries if you can sleep at night with that.)

Or, I “say” it’s still OK. In any case, look up why the textbook companies say it’s unethical—it’s primarily the copyright issue that bothers them. I don’t have much sympathy with them, given the crazy amount of free books they give away. Their marketing budgets must be off the charts.

I was one of those unfortunates at AWC under the reign of Bea Espinoza. The vote of no confidence wasn’t about textbooks or 30 hour weeks. It was about the persecution of faculty and administrators who reported to her. Discussion and disagreement were not allowed. Suggestions and ideas were supported only if they fell into line with her plans. She headed a reorg. of the learning services portion of AWC. All her “yes men” got promotions—some doubling their salary. These people were not qualified for the positions. She handled negative comments and questioning with letters to personnel files and charges of insubordination. The college lost a lot of good faculty because they didn’t want to live under gestapo rule. All trust was eroded. I am doubtful the college will ever heal.