Platt said:
Then there are those professors who base their course on a book they have
written and require their students to buy it, otherwise known as a protection
racket.
Arlo said:
So, hypothetically, if a University hired Pirsig to teach, he should not be
allowed to teach courses based on his books?
dmb says:
A "protection racket" has nothing to do with using a teaching position to
promote book sales. The latter is certainly ethically questionable, but a
protection racket is basically just robbery through intimidation. You pay for
"protection" from the very same people who will wreck your place if you don't
pay. It's the mafia's version of stealing your lunch money. It's just a
regularly scheduled mugging.
Speaking NOT hypothetically, I feel lucky to have teachers who have written
textbooks on the topic. David Hildebrand has two books published now and he
deliberately puts them on the "suggested" reading list rather than the
"required" list for his classes. Why? Because it's not ethical. It's not cool.
But even if he did, you still couldn't call it a protection racket. That just
doesn't make any sense.
If you want to know about unethical behavior to promote book sales, just look
into what happens to books put out by right-wing politicians. Talk about
unethical! Sarah Palin's book and books like that are purchased by the case to
pump up sales figures and then they're "given" away to political donors. Now
that's a racket. The books published by Regnery, for example, are essentially
bombs in the culture war. They're written for activists and axe-grinders, for
propaganda purposes. For these guys, intellectual merit is quite beside the
point and merely seeming to be popular is every bit as good as the real thing.
Next time you walk by the bargain bin at your local bookstore, take notice of
how many discount stickers are stuck to the cover of books by FOX "news" hosts,
etc. That bargain bin is the last stop before those books become recycled
paper. That bargain bin is literally the last time those books will be worth
more than the paper they're written on. After a few weeks there, Bill
O'Reilly's works become a relatively affordable form of toilet paper. And
rightly so.
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