College Textbooks "Obscenely Overpriced" and Inaccurate

If You Think You’re Overpaying for Textbooks, You’re Right

College history students today are required to buy “obscenely overpriced” textbooks that are “a vapid stew of half-truths and hilarious factual errors dumbed down to whatever reading level is desired,” the dean of a new history college says.

The texts are one of the factors college is so expensive, says Michael Chesson, dean of the new American College of History and Legal Studies(ACHLS), in Salem, N.H. Books in the hard sciences, computer science and math often cost three figures for a single title, he notes.

“‘New’ editions appear, with only a few problems, experiments, or equations changed. Even in the social sciences and humanities, textbooks now available as e-books for kindles and other devices, are prohibitively expensive (yet) students are required to buy them and are tested on their content,” Chesson says.

In a study he conducted some years ago of 17 of the most popular and widely adopted history textbooks, Chesson found the texts were “filled with factual errors, skewed or slanted interpretations, political agendas, and countless distortions, omissions, and failures to provide context.”

Checking the accuracy of writing about the Salem, (Mass.), witchcraft trials of 1692, Chesson said, “I was amazed to find that when it came to this complex and controversial subject most of the texts offered simplistic, dumbed down accounts of what happened and why. Many could not get even the basic facts right.” One Pulitzer Prize winner said in his text that 21 men and one woman were executed when, in fact, the actual number was 13 women and six men hanged and another man pressed to death.

Chesson said he was “awed” by the vague reasons the historians gave for the witch trials. These included “community hysteria,” “severe social tensions” and the efforts of Puritan clergy to start revivals.

“Entire forests,” he continued, “are cut down each year to feed the maw of the international publishing conglomerates that foist these so-called textbooks on unsuspecting students and their cash-strapped parents.”

“For many years I have refused to impose the expense of buying a fancy and expensive textbook on my undergraduates, preferring to use a free, online Wikitext, from the founders of Wikipedia,” Chesson writes on the ACHLS blog. “It is basic, with no frills, and written from a neutral point of view (and) in the years since I started using it I have found very few factual mistakes.”

As well as a history book each week, students at his own school are also required to read scholarly monographs. “We encourage them to buy used paperback copies of the monographs from online vendors at hugely discounted prices,” the historian says.

Chesson asserts, “No one in the profession cares if you get a lucrative contract for a textbook, or how much money you make from this sideline. The text can be churned out in your free time, often with three, four, or five co-authors. There is little if any fact checking by the prominent scholars whose names grace the title pages...The manuscripts go off to the publishing houses where they are all dumped into the editorial blender again, (with) no fact-checking.”

The ACHLS dean surmises that “Some professors continue to adopt an expensive textbook out of loyalty to the colleague who wrote it, perhaps a friend from graduate school who has made it, or the historian who directed their doctoral dissertation.”

“Why,” he concludes, “the vast majority of historians teaching at the college level continue to require their students to buy these costly texts is a mystery, since they are not collecting royalties from them, or deriving any benefit at all.”

ENDS

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