Advocate Online

The Dialogue Question:
Does the use of departmentally chosen textbooks limit the academic freedom of individual faculty members?

YES, under some circumstances denying faculty the right to choose texts limits academic freedom.

According to the 1940 AAUP Statement on Academic Freedom, an institution “cannot fulfill its purposes of transmitting, evaluating, and extending knowledge if it requires conformity with any orthodoxy of content and method.” Academic responsibility requires faculty to teach the course that is advertised; but selection of a text over the teacher’s objection seems an example of undesirable orthodoxy.

In prerequisite courses with multiple sections, teachers may agree to use the same text to assure students receive a consistent foundation and for other pragmatic reasons—shared supplementary materials, financial advantages. On occasion, texts must be ordered before the instructor is known. And for many courses, particularly at lower levels, the available textbooks may be quite similar in coverage and perspective.

But in other courses, particularly those in developing areas of curriculum or fields with major controversies, alternative textbooks may include, omit, or treat inadequately topics of importance to the teacher. My selections have sometimes been influenced by significant differences in the treatment of topics such as gender bias. Some faculty design courses with limited assigned readings because major learning outcomes result from students’ own identification and guided analysis of relevant material.

Finally, a major concern stems from contemporary political pressures for uniformity in documentation of learning outcomes. It seems only a few steps on the slippery slope from uniform learning outcomes to uniform techniques and textbooks: “orthodoxy of content and method” that may obstruct “the extension of knowledge” in academe.

* Rosemary Hays-Thomas, president of the University of West Florida chapter of United Faculty of Florida, is an industrial/organizational psychologist. Her expertise includes pay equity, fairness in organizations, and applied master's education in psychology.

Jay L. Gordon *

Most faculty members feel that we’re entitled to design our courses in whatever way we wish, including choosing the materials and textbooks we see fit. The collegiality of academia’s “marketplace of ideas” reinforces this feeling. But this idea is grounded in the faulty assumption that each of us is a kind of sovereign entity within the university. It is grounded, that is, on a misunderstanding of what “academic freedom” is.

Academic freedom, in a legal sense, is a vague principle; the history of cases revolving around questions of academic freedom certainly hasn’t led us to the conclusion that we can teach anything we want any way we want. Were that the case, then we should see no problem with a colleague teaching French literature in English classes.

The phrase “departmentally chosen textbook,” in fact, suggests that the department has deliberated and made a collective decision on the selection of a book for a given course. Making that collective decision is itself an expression of academic freedom, as are so many other decisions we make about courses and curricula.

Most of us teach the courses we want to teach, with the books we want our students to read. We can all be thankful that the collegiality of higher education does permit us a good deal of latitude in course design and textbook choices. Certainly there are cases in which our choices may seem to be made for us through perhaps questionable departmental decision-making processes. But if my department—of which I am a member, and in which I have a voice and vote—decided to use a text other than what I've used before for a particular class, I'd be obligated to use it.

* Jay L. Gordon teaches in Youngstown State University’s English department, primarily in the professional writing and editing program. He co-directs YSU’s first-year composition program and has taught writing for 15 years. His interests include the history and philosophy of rhetoric.