The Trouble with Textbooks: A View from the Profession

Abstract

I discovered sociology almost 30 years ago in a small introductory course at the University of Buffalo (now SUNY at Buffalo). We used the second edition of Broom and Selznick, which neither set nor extinguished intellectual fires. Its chief virtue was the use of adapted readings, mildly bowdlerized journal articles and book excerpts that could stimulate a taste for real social science. Fortunately for me, sociology was personified by a wise and patient teacher, Llewellyn Gross, who somehow encouraged me to think sociologically within the limited range of my own knowledge and experience. Had my impressions of the field been shaped by the textbook alone, I might now have some other vocation. During those 30 years, textbooks have become worse, not better. They have more colors but fewer ideas, they no longer presume that students are literate or interested in sociology (or in much else), and they say less and less of substance about sociology, not to mention the social world that our discipline presumably studies. Although I suspect that the declining quality of the introductory textbook has had little to do with the tides of undergraduate enrollment, which seem to ebb and flow in response to other influences, the genre makes little contribution to the education of undergraduates and even less to the success of sociology as a discipline. What has gone wrong, and what, if anything, can we do about it? I find it difficult either to describe the problems or to feel optimistic about the future. There have been many changes in higher education in my three decades of experience; the discipline of sociology has declined; and the presumption that there is some usable introductory textbook format, if only we could discover it, has itself become suspect. In the department where I majored in sociology, each of the seven or eight faculty members seldom taught more than 40 students in one classroom. Now, as Frank Graham points out in his excellent assessment of textbook publishing, the large lecture is more typical. Then, even in the liberal arts program of a relatively impoverished local university, intellectual demands could be made on students, including freshmen. Now the range of abilities seems to be wider, and those who teach demanding courses seem to be more the exception than the rule, particularly at the beginning level in large universities. In addition, we define many of our students as having intellectual appetites and digestive tracts tolerant of only the blandest diet, and therefore as incapable of any serious work.