The Coop Controversy
Posted on September 26th, 2007 in Uncategorized | 11 Comments »
The Globe covers the simmering battle between CrimsonReading.org and the Harvard Coop.
For the students, this is a fight about the cheapest access to information.
“We’re not out to be at war with the Coop,” said Jon Staff, director of crimsonreading.org, who passed out fliers advertising the site outside the Coop yesterday. “It’s sad that students have to choose which classes they take based on the overall cost of the textbooks.”
And for the Coop, it’s about the value of information that it works to compile.
Coop president Jeremiah Murphy said the store’s reading list is proprietary information. The staff spends considerable time compiling the list, collecting the names of books required by professors and sorting books by course, he said.
“The issue is, why should we give it out to anybody, particularly the competitors?” Murphy said.
It’s really a classic fight of the Internet era, in which information wants to be cheap and old monopolies dig in their heels to try to maintain profit levels. Sorry, Coopâright or wrong, you know how this is going to go. Cut your prices or die…..
11 Responses
9/26/2007 9:12 am
I find the whole controversy somewhat bizarre, since the information is hardly secret. ISBNs are available online. I understand why the Coop is annoyed that it has to pay staff to collect the info about what books are required by which courses and then others profit from their labor. (Understand, but do not condone any bogus conclusion about creating intellectual property, much less bringing the police into it.)
But the Coop shouldn’t be in the business of collecting the information in the first place. In the flat world, the university ought to do that, so the purchasing choice can be distributed to the consumers. The playing field would then be level, the Coop would have the info it needs to order the books, it would have nothing to complain about regarding the fruits of its labor, and students could make their own choices. With books as expensive as they are, the university ought to have an interest in what professors are ordering, since they are acting as agents of the university when they say “To take my course, everyone has to buy these books.” So Harvard would gain some information and maybe even the opportunity to have some influence over professors’ behavior (in which it surely has an interest here, at a minimum because a lot of the money being used to buy those books is Harvard financial aid money). Am I missing something here?
9/26/2007 9:36 am
Harry,
I’m not saying that’s a bad idea, but I do think it’s an awfully quick slip in your paragraph from “the University should help professors” to “the University should put pressure on professors to keep costs down and solve logistical headaches.” I would have thought administrators were meant to work to accommodate fixed curricular elements, not the other way around.
Yes, in a way, the school has an administrative interest in what books are assigned — but those are EXACTLY the sort of interests that should be trumped by matters of intellectual substance. Administration should always be secondary to academic value, when there’s a good-faith claim that the two are in conflict.
(On some level I imagine it was student success at getting shopping period depicted as ‘intellectually substantive’ [hah] that led to the death of the administrative reform, preregistration.)
If logistical matters could be truly taken over by some computer people, so that students could get course packets as .pdfs at some very minimal cost, professors could benefit in significant ways. But talk about attaching strings! if the University thereby begins to put intellectual pressure on professors to minimize costs, regardless of the intellectual case that might be made for including certain texts.
The intellectual-property claim the Coop might have, weak as it is, is only an avatar of the strong claim professors have to creating something intellectually real when they create their book lists. “To learn about this subject matter you need these books” — creating that correlation is real, specialized labor, with real fruits. So I do think the reading lists have value — which doesn’t however mean that the school shouldn’t mandate their being freely available.
Syllabi should all be online, in my opinion, not because anyone is ENTITLED to them but because universities shouldn’t be grabby.
Standing Eagle
9/26/2007 9:41 am
Yes, ISBNs are available online. Harvard students can go to HOLLIS, click on “digital resources,” and type in “Books in Print.” This is how to find the ISBN number of a book on a course syllabus. As long as the professor indicatesn which edition is requred, this should work beautifully, and much more simply (and comfortably) than trying to copy ISBNs in the Coop.
Crimsonreading.org compiles comparative prices of used books based on ISBN numbers that professors submit, and this is an excellent resource for students.
I do believe that professors should include ISBN numbers on their syllabi, and regret that I didn’t do so this year-though I have done so in previous years and am about to hand out a revised version of my syllabus that does contain ISBNs. I did submit ISBN numbers to Crimsonreading this semester, however.
9/26/2007 9:44 am
P.S. The Coop may go to the trouble of finding ISBNs for books in some courses, but they so ask professors to include them on the order forms-which I have always done. When a professor submits ISBNs to the Coop, it cannot be said that the Coop has “compiled” any information at all. I wonder how many professors send order forms to the Coop without including ISBNs?
9/26/2007 9:53 am
Prof. Ryan,
Can’t agree with you, although it’s possible that ‘compiling’ is not labor that has legal status.
compile, n.: to collect information from a variety of places and arrange it in a book, report or list
SE
9/26/2007 9:56 am
Can’t agree with you, SE. The Coop makes it sound as if it goes to significant independent effort to “compile” this info. Most people think of compiling as proactively gathering information, rather than being the passive recipient of it. While technically you may be correct, I think common sense suggests that it’s the professors who really do the work. For the Coop to say that it compiles this information is a bit like Tom Sawyer saying he painted the fence.
9/26/2007 10:40 am
Tom Sawyer was the CEO of the fence-painting enterprise. And you know how CEOs are paid in our society!
I hope no one thinks that I think the Coop has a leg to stand on here. I speculated that they might have something in writing from the school, perhaps even a license, but it’s pretty clear now that they don’t.
Go free market!
SE
9/26/2007 10:57 am
A word first of continued defense for a small part of the claims against the Coop. It really is work for the Coop to collect the information. Those of you who are good citizens and actually fill out your forms properly and submit them on time may not realize that a lot of professors aren’t so cooperative, if you’ll pardon the expression. And the Coop will, I think, still order anything, even if it’s something that’s hard to make a profit on. To repeat, even given all that, it doesn’t justify the Coop’s recent behavior.
As for SE’s worry that I am advocating yet another administrative attack on faculty autonomy, I’d say that you are right to worry about the general assault, but there are far better ramparts to defend than this one. At these prices, faculty rights have their limits. Many faculty fill out those forms without knowing or caring what they add up to. It simply isn’t reasonable that individual professors can blow a student’s financial aid budget without even having to think about it or know they are doing it. Sometimes they even have conflicts of interest. (I have felt a lot better placing the book order for one of my courses in recent years, after a better textbook than my own became available.)
Harvard some years ago eliminated glassware fees in lab courses and equipment fees in film and photography courses for just this reason; the high prices of required books in certain courses and fields are an equally problematic form of anti-educational economic discrimination.
Of course there is a right way and a wrong way for the university to do this, if it were to take over the job from the Coop. I just think it would be silly to think that the university could collect the information as a service but pledge never to look at it, so I am suggesting that the information would be useful to the administration (which would ultimately be providing a useful service to students) as a matter of transparency, if nothing else. It would be better than having a student organization or company collect the same info and then publish an analysis in a guidebook about how students can choose their concentrations and their courses to live within their budgets.
9/26/2007 10:41 pm
Let the university include all text materials in tuition, just as Harry Lewis reports that glasswares and film supplies are included. Let professors choose whatever readings they wish and have the Coop distribute them to students who present evidence of course registration. Tuition should rise, of course, to include this additional expense, but so should financial aid increase for those students who need it.
9/27/2007 9:47 am
Great idea, Ben! The university could then exercise its mass-purchasing power to drive down prices for everyone, including supplying used books sometimes. The disadvantage, I suppose, is a magnification of whatever inclination the university might have toward the kind of intervention SE fears, some kind of mindless standardization. You can easily imagine some efficiency expert who doesn’t understand education declaring that no books costing more than $100 would be allowed. Ideas like yours and mine can work only if there is faculty involvement and buy-in, and at the moment the faculty and administration are relearning what it means to trust each other.
9/27/2007 3:16 pm
Benjamin Levy makes an excellent suggestion. I understand that MIT already does (or did) include textbooks as part of the student services fee. I can see cons with this approach (e.g. right now students don’t buy all the books so for the University to buy every book for every student would be somewhat inefficient; what would happen to the used book market?; etc.), but perhaps we could learn how our neighbors down Mass. Ave. have dealt with them.