Professors cite a number of reasons for using their own texts in courses. Several say that they feel they have better control over their course's structure when they work from a text they have written themselves.
Nobel laureate Sheldon L. Glashow, Higgins professor of physics, says he is in the process of writing a textbook for Science A-20, "From Alchemy to Elementary Particle Physics," because he is dissatisfied with some of the books he has used in the past.
Glashow says that in the United States, there is a "dual role for professors to both do research and teach."
"It's a difficult thing to keep in tune," he says. "Kind of like a Maserati." Writing a textbook, he says, can help a professor reconcile the two tasks.
Aside from the course's nickname, "Sex," a pre-printed, hundred-page set of notes summarizing lecture material is one of the principle attractions for students of the spring Core offering. Science B-29, "Human Behavioral Biology." DeVore, who teaches the course with Associate Professor of Anthropology Terence W. Deacon. says he likes students to buy the notes "precisely because there are no books that structure the course in the way we like to do it."
And in upper-level courses, says Daiute, professors often feel that the area of study is so narrow that only one textbook will do--their own.
"When [administrators] look for faculty," Daiute says, "they look for people who are doing research in specialized fields to teach specialized courses, and there just aren't a lot of textbooks available."
Daiute herself, for example, teaches "Computers and Writing," using the basic text. "Writing and computer," which she wrote in 1985.
"The book just serves as background information," she says. "The course has expanded much beyond the book already."
DeVore, however, says that in most graduate courses, professors do not need to assign their own texts--or, for that matter, any single text.
Most fields of graduate study, DeVore says, are changing too quickly for book publishing to keep up with. "No textbook is really adequate," he says.
And some professors say they use their own books because they like to see first-hand the way students react to them.
"I'm interested in re-shaping my own thoughts," Nagy says, adding that eventually he plans to publish a book similar to The Best of the Achaeans, but with signifcant changes. "I've learned a lot from feedback from Core students.
And even when they go unread, pricey books often elicit halfhearted praise from students. Such is the case in this fall's most popular course, General Education 105, "The Literature of Social Reflection," taught by psychiatry professor Robert Coles. On the course's reading list, but not assigned in all sections, were two books from Coles' Pulitzer Prize-winning Children of Crisis series.
"I'm sure I'll get something out of it when I do get around to reading them," says John Ma '93, who says he spent over $50 on Coles' books, but rarely opened any of them. "None of the reading is absolutely required," Ma says.
Other students in the course says that only between 20 and 30 percent bothered to do a substantial amount of the reading. "I wish I had read more," says Erin O'Brien '90 of Currier House. "It's a wonderful reading list."
And a 1965 graduate looking back at his Harvard years took a philosophical attitude to the practice. "You have to look at the larger picture," he told a book-browsing student in the Coop this weekend. "What are these books going to look like in your living room?"