Assigning one's own books in the classroom, and keeping the royalties? Surely, with all the budget cuts our universities are facing, the outrageous pay raises and pension top-offs some senior university administrators are giving themselves and the large multimillion dollar bail-outs and unearned bonuses flying around in the private sector this is a non-issue. Clearly this is a minor not a major scandal. Nonetheless I want to make the case here that this one relatively small example of unethical behaviour on the part of professors themselves provides a valuable entry point into a larger discussion of how we can follow the principlined path

The issue of book royalties is important not because of the scale of the problem or the direct negative consequences that flow from this indiscretion, but because it is such an obvious unethical action. The issue itself hardly seems necessary to debate. I remember that when I was a Canadian attending Cleveland State University as an undergraduate student in the late 1970s, this was clearly seen as an unethical act by just about every student or professor I ever talked to about it. The required books assigned for a class are chosen by the professor and students have no realistic choice but to purchase the books or borrow them from someone who has done so. This is a very different type of purchase than when a student or member of the general public buys a book on the open market--place - students are a captive audience. There are, of course, good pedagogical reasons why a professor might want to assign a book they have written. The professor might genuinely believe it is the best textbook on the market, there is an advantage to going through the material that a professor knows well and has covered in a textbook she has written on the topic and there are few better educational experiences than reading a first-rate research monograph and having in-depth discussions of it with the author. But what possible justification could one give for keeping the royalties for oneself, as opposed to giving this portion of the proceeds to a student group or some such public good? One can make money from books assigned by other professors, at the same campus or elsewhere, of course. I am not against professors making money for the hard work that goes into writing books, especially since one of the great academic scandals of our time is all the work professors put into journal articles that make money for private journal publishers. But since the authority of professors and the highly unusual (and often resented) conditions of tenure are based on a foundation that assumes peer-review quality control and professional disinterestedness, how can professors claim they are making the text choice for a class based on purely academic judgements when they directly benefit financially from the decision to assign their own book? To raise the question is to answer it, in my view, and thus this issue does not involve some of the enormous complexities raised by other topics where professors on our universities might also be partly responsible for the crisis in higher education (as in the research-teaching trade-off or the tenure debate).

While the amount of money involved is relatively small, the message this unethical behaviour sends to students is unmistakable. I have overheard numerous conversations by undergraduates from both McMaster University and the University of Toronto that suggests students both notice when faculty assign their own books and resent it. There have not been movements of students who raise the issue precisely because the amount of money pales in relationship to the larger scandal of over-prized textbooks in our universities and because young people generally do not believe they could do anything to stop this kind of thing from happening. In practical terms, the students are right not to raise a major stink about the issue, but this does not change the fact that students surely increasingly see professors as largely self-interested individuals, hardly above pocketing part of the money students pay for the assigned course readings. This fundamentally undercuts a central element of the authority of professors in the classroom - the professional ethic we are committed to of putting the pursuit of knowledge and ideas above all else. It is precisely this kind of authority professors must preserve and build on, if we are to be successful in promoting the agenda outlined in Ivory Tower Blues. If the assignment of books for a class is simply a chance to make a little extra money, what moral basis do we have to criticize students for being excessively instrumental and grade oriented, critique parents for pushing vocationalism and stand against the priorities of university administrations and governments who emphasize (in practice, if not in rhetoric) "bums in seats" as the goal of higher education?

The issue is symbolically important, furthermore, because on this question we have no-one to blame but ourselves. Students and professors may conspire together on what