Virginia Lawmakers Approve Bill to Ban Textbook Kickbacks to Professors

[RUgreek]

http://chronicle.com/prm/daily/2005/02/2005022305n.htm

Virginia Lawmakers Approve Bill to Ban Textbook Kickbacks to Professors

By THOMAS BARTLETT


A bill that would prohibit professors at Virginia's public colleges from accepting incentives from publishers to adopt their textbooks for classroom use won final legislative approval on Tuesday with a unanimous vote in the State Senate. The bill, which the House of Delegates also approved unanimously this month, would also require all course reading lists to be available online, to make it easier for students to comparison shop.

A spokesman said Gov. Mark R. Warner was likely to sign the bill (HB 1726) into law.

The legislation was the result of a campaign by Virginia21, an organization led by the student-body presidents at 15 state colleges.

The anti-kickback portion of the bill was inspired by a 2003 article in The Chronicle that revealed how some professors accept under-the-table payments from publishers to adopt textbooks, according to David D. Solimini, a spokesman for Virginia21. The organization collected 6,000 signatures from students on a petition supporting the legislation.

"We wanted to send a message to publishers that this is a practice that isn't appreciated in Virginia," said Del. G. Glenn Oder, who sponsored the bill in the House of Delegates. "We have no interest in publishers' using inducements to get professors to assign a certain book or change editions."

The bill states that professors can receive no compensation for assigning a textbook, except for an instructor's copy of the book or royalties if the assigning professor wrote the book or a portion of it.

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RUgreek

[Optimist Prime]

thats going to clean up a lot of things quite nicely

[kddani]

I certainly don't object to this hope it catches on in other states as well.
Though in law school, about half of my books my professors wrote....

Though professor really don't get all that much money from the textbooks they write... I learned this when I was helping one of my professors put together a new edition of several of his books and statutory supplements

It's certainly not fair for them to essentially "take bribes" to make students buy books that might not even be the best for the subject or for the subject matter of the class