THE CHRONICLE
of Higher Education®
http://chronicle.com
September 11, 2009 • $3.75
Volume LVI, Number 3
This Could
Be the Year
Cheap Loans
of e-Textbooks
to Lure Stars
Many titles are available,
but students are wary
BY JEFFREY R. YOUNG

THE TRICKIEST PART of teaching with electronic textbooks is getting everyone on the same page—or to the same part of the digital text. That’s what a professor in the honors college at Arizona State University found last month at the start of an experimental class with Amazon Kindle e-book readers.

There are no page numbers for books on the Kindle; instead, every passage has a “location number,” which lets users jump to that section. Those numbers can be long, and it can be awkward to type them on the small keyboard. So when Ted Humphrey, the professor, asked students to turn to a certain passage in the Iliad, there were “some glitch-es,” he says, as a few students mistyped the location number.

“You have to hold down an ‘alt’ button to type in the numbers,” which can be cumbersome, says Carson Cook, a student in the required course in Western civilization, who also worries that it will be difficult to take notes in the digital margins using the Kindle’s keyboard.

Arizona State is one of six universities participating in a closely

BY MARC BEJA

Colleges Use

to Faculty

Critics question

whether the practice is a wise use of money

SANDY HUFFAKeR FoR THe CHRoNICLe

Sign of the times: At the San Diego State U. bookstore, a poster exhorts students to “Buy This Textbook as an e Textbook.”

watched e-textbook experiment supported by Amazon. It is gaining attention in part because this academic year marks the first time that major textbook publishers have offered a critical mass of their titles in electronic form. CourseSmart, a spinoff company started by major textbook publishers in 2007 to sell their electronic versions, now offers 7,150 titles. That’s over half of the most popular textbook titles from the participating publishers. Students can read them on laptops and desktops, and the com-

pany recently unveiled a free application that lets students read textbooks on their iPhones. Several textbook publishers are making titles available on Amazon’s new Kindle DX. And last month, Sony released a new Sony Reader e-book device that can download textbooks wirelessly.

The increased awareness and availability of e-textbooks could make this a watershed year for the format—which has held only 2 to 3 percent of the market until now, according to the National Associa-

tion of College Stores—as publish-
ers learn whether or not enough stu-
dents like the new titles and features
to make them worth selling.

“My mission is to make sure every college student knows they have a choice to buy their assigned book as an e-book,” says Frank Lyman, executive vice president for marketing at CourseSmart. As part of a new campaign this fall, the company is working with several college stores to tout the digital option—

Continued on Page A12

U. of Cincinnati Builds a System
What to Do About the Cost of College?
to Track Its Place in the World

BY KARIN FISCHER

WHEN MITCH LEVENTHAL was being considered for the position of vice provost for international affairs at the University of Cincinnati, he asked nearly as many questions of his interviewers as he answered: Which foreign universities send the largest number of international graduate students there? How many faculty members were abroad, and where? What partnerships did the university have in China? In India? In Kenya?

He got few satisfactory responses. And so, in his final interview, he made a bold proposal: Hire me, and I will put in place a comprehensive and dynamic data-management system that will allow the university to track the breadth of its international activities and agreements.

Mr. Leventhal got the job, and in the four years since, he has worked to develop UCosmic, the University of Cincinnati online System for Managing International Collaboration.

Multinational corporations have no trouble describing their international activities, he says. They know the source of their raw materials, can detail their activities in key markets, and have global strategies.

But while many American colleges, and research universities in particular, boast an increasingly complex web of international work, few have effective mechanisms in place to tally and monitor those efforts. That leaves the universities with an incomplete picture of their own international engagement.

“Because we cannot answer fundamental questions about the scope of our activity,” Mr. Leventhal says, “we can’t make the most of our relationships abroad.”

UCosmic is helping Cincinnati be more deliberate in its international work. The data system aids its international recruiters in focusing their efforts, and it allows top administrators to identify areas of the

Continued on Page A25

The Chronicle concludes its series of reports on the high price of higher education with a set of commentaries by academic leaders and other experts. The writers offer their thoughts on the problem— including whether or not it’s truly a problem—and pose solutions for colleges that want to contain costs while preserving their academic missions.

O Charles Miller: Institutions
without program accountability
undergo mission creep. A14
O Sandy Baum: Low tuition
benefits the wealthiest students
as well as the poorest. A15
O Mark B. DeFusco: The academy
must find a different way to
measure productivity. A17
O Warren Bennis and C. L. Max
Nikias: America’s colleges are
not revenue centers. A16
O Ronald R. Thomas: We can’t
surrender the soul of American
higher education. A18
J. Douglas Toma: O Is it even
realistic for a college not to
engage in positioning for
prestige? A16
THE HUNT for top professors is a high-stakes game. Like major-league baseball teams
courting free agents, colleges engage
in cutthroat competition to woo and
retain highly sought talent.

And when standard compensation and perks are not enough, some colleges—especially those in high-priced urban areas—quietly offer low-interest mortgages to lure star professors.

Boston University, for example,
issued eight such loans in 2007-8,

ranging from $25,000 to $500,000.
According to the most recent avail-
able federal tax forms, the uni-
versity was holding $3.56-million
in loans to 13 professors—two of
whom had recently been appointed
deans when the loans were made.
While the practice of offering loans
to university employees is not new, es-
pecially for relocation, it has typically
been reserved for senior administra-
tors. But a Chronicle review of college
and university tax forms shows that
institutions have extended large per-
sonal loans to scores of professors in
recent years. Tax experts say the Inter-
nal Revenue Service and state laws al-
low the loans, in most cases.
But many of those same experts
question whether the practice is ap-
propriate, arguing that nonprofit in-
stitutions such as colleges should not
act like banks, nor draw on money
that could be used for more explicitly
educational purposes. “It’s not at all
a best practice,” says Dean A. Zer-
be, a lawyer with Alliantgroup and a
former senior counsel to the Senate
Finance Committee. “It’s a backdoor
way to hide compensation.”
Congress held hearings on similar
loans by nonprofit groups a few years
ago, with the Senate Finance Commit-
tee investigating a dozen low-interest
mortgage loans made by the Nature
Conservancy to some of its officers.
The loans were repaid, and the Nature
Conservancy apologized for the prac-
tice. But the scrutiny did not stop the
lending activity by colleges.