[rahimnathwani]

"Providing teaching resources to make the book and users of the book more effective at the job of teaching and learning isn't a bribe"

What if the publisher were to reimburse you $30k/year so you could hire some additional help in grading papers? Would that count as a bribe?

What if you were to spend the time freed up not on additional teaching, but with your loved-ones? Would the money count as a bribe now?

What if, instead of providing $30k/year to hire some help, they provided you with an online tool to do the job. You still spend the time now saved with your loved ones, not on better/more teaching. Is the provision of that tool a bribe?

What if access to the tool costs each student $100 per year (access for one year, via a voucher that comes only with the purchase of a brand new $100 textbook). Would the tool that makes you more efficient, thus allowing you more time with your loved ones, be considered a bribe now?

What if the benefit to you (in saved time) was $20k per year, the additional cost to your students was $40k/year, and there was no change in the quality of education. Would you consider provision of the tool a bribe in this case?

[paultopia]

By that logic all textbooks are bribes. After all, anyone who assigns a textbook could just write their own materials. So by assigning a textbook and spending the time now saved with their loved ones instead of on better/more teaching, almost every professor on earth is taking a bribe.

That kind of reasoning is perfectly logically consistent, but it wouldn't track our ordinary understanding of the world very well. It would also condemn almost every situation in which someone uses a third-party tool that they don't personally pay for to make their job more efficient. If you're a developer, and you convince your employer to pay for a license for an IDE so that you can get your work done quicker and spend more time playing with your cat, that's not bribe-taking...

[rahimnathwani]

Your response is logically consistent, but doesn’t track our ordinary understanding of the world very well.

At the time students sign up for college and commit to paying tuition fees, they expect to have to fork out money for textbooks. They don’t expect professors to give them free materials that mean they don’t need to buy their own books. But they also expect that professors will provide some tuition (including grading homework), as that’s what tuition fees are for.

On your last point, if I convince my employer to pay for an expensive IDE that happens to come bundled with $30k of credits for Upwork, and I outsource part of the job I’m being paid to do, then that’s bribe-taking. And it's more similar to the scenarios I outlined than would be the purchase of an IDE without such a bundle.

EDIT: looked at your personal site, and see that you create awesome materials for your students and the world to use for free!

[paultopia]

Ok, I think we're making progress here! I think that your appeal to student expectations helps clarify the issues. With it, we have at least two plausible criteria for what constitutes bribe-taking (or, I'd say more broadly, corruption):

- The professor receives some direct purely personal benefit from a publisher, like cash or a trip to Florida; or

- The professor receives some benefit that allows them to shirk their responsibilities to students, as defined by the common reasonable expectations of the academic process.

Maybe that second one should also have a proviso that the result of this shirking is that the students get less-good instruction, or maybe (being more strict with the professor) that the instruction the students receive doesn't improve, or doesn't improve sufficiently to justify the extra cost passed onto the student.

I think this does some work to track the difference between corrupt and non-corrupt textbook-assigning practices. But it also, unsurprisingly, leaves plenty of grey area. For example, I'm not sure if publisher-provided homework and grading falls into this category, since textbooks in many fields have included assignments and have teachers' manuals with the answers since basically forever. (I know that I had homework assignments out of the book in math-y classes as far back as the 80's and 90's, for example.) So I'd think that this would be part of the ordinary expectation of students.

On the other hand, it does seem fair to suggest that if the professor offloads all, or substantially all, of the course to some textbook publisher, then they're violating the expectation of the students that their own professional judgment will be used to guide their education.

(And yeah, I try my best to provide free materials to my students. I can't do it in every single course, because it takes an immense amount of time to create them, and, often, it's hard to figure out what materials work best for a course until you've taught it a couple of times. But I do it as much as possible.)

[rahimnathwani]

Yes, we're getting closer.

I think what bothers me is that the professor is forcing the student to buy a tool with their own money, when buying that tool is neither expected nor optional. And not cheap.

If access the tool were purchased standalone, rather than being bundled with a book, they might not get away with it. Because the students would (rightly) say that they're already paying tuition, so any systems that are mandatory for them to use should be provided by the university.