Help shave textbooks costs 
Online, downloadable textbooks are the next wave 

Could your students be using an online textbook alternative to books thaft cost them hundreds of dollars each semester? That's the question a student advocacy group is asking college faculty to consider when they design their courses.

The Student PIRGs (Public Interest Research Groups) are running a public education and legislative campaign called "Make Textbooks Affordable." The latest push is for "open textbooks"-textbooks by prominent authors that are available for free and can be downloaded in a printable format.

At its recent program and policy council meeting, AFT Higher Education leaders agreed to sign on to the PIRG campaign, just kicked off in January 2008.

Open textbooks are not an option for everyone, but they could be if more faculty used them, says Nicole Allen, who is the textbook campaign coordinator. "Our first step is to find faculty members who are willing to use an open textbook in place of a commercial one, and are willing to include it and other low-cost options in their search for appropriate course materials."

A list of open textbooks is on the PIRG Web site. It includes, for example, Introduction to Economic Analysis, by Caltech professor R. Preston McAfee. Students at Harvard, NYU and other colleges have downloaded and printed it out for a cost of $11.10. On the same Web site you'll find steps you can take to reduce the burden of textbook costs on your students.

How big is the burden? Over the past few years, the PIRG affiliates have conducted research showing that students enrolled at public universities pay, on average, $900 per year on their textbooks. That's nearly 20 percent of what they pay for tuition and fees. What's more, the cost of textbooks is increasing at four times the rate of inflation.

Feeling the power of the union 

The year was 1967. The place was Bryant College, an up-and-coming business school in Rhode Island. Among its growing pains was faculty frustration over increasingly authoritarian rule by the administration. Professor emeritus William B. Sweeney remembers well what happened after faculty leaders contacted the AFT.

Bryant's president, incredulous at the thought of a faculty union, called a meeting of full-time faculty. There and then, a faculty member called for an up-or-down vote on the issue of establishing a union. The vote of those present-39 of 60 full-time faculty on staff-was 39-0 for a union.

"At that moment, I experienced a huge shift in power. I knew now that my faculty status had been upgraded tremendously. I finally had gotten control over my professional destiny. Academic freedom and professorial responsibility along with professional growth and job security would become the stock and trade at Rhode Island's only business school," writes Sweeney in a letter to AFT president Edward J. McElroy.

The Faculty Federation at Bryant University, which says it is the first four-year independent college to unionize in the country, recently celebrated its 40th anniversary. Today, there are 575 organized faculty units on 1,125 campuses, according to the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions' January 2006 report. They represent 318,504 faculty and professionals. In addition, there are 26 units representing 57,045 graduate employees.