The Faculty Senate asked the administration to use about $1 million in profits obtained from the campus bookstore to help reduce the price of textbooks for students.
The University of Memphis' contract with Barnes & Noble, which operates the campus bookstore, requires the company to share its profits with The U of M. Currently, those payments from Barnes and Noble are spent any way the administration deems necessary or desirable.
The Senate passed a motion on Tuesday that proposed a set of 10 strategies for reducing the cost of textbooks on campus, in response to a request from the Tennessee Board of Regents (TBR).
The Tennessee Code Annotated requires the Tennessee Board of Regents to "develop policies for minimizing the cost of textbooks and ancillary course materials at its higher education institutions, while maintaining quality of education and academic freedom," according to documents distributed at the Tuesday Senate meeting.
Another strategy endorsed by the Senate is for the profit margin for used textbooks sold by the bookstore not to exceed that of new textbooks.
Peter Wright, chair of excellence in free enterprise management, was among the senators who opposed the profit margin limitation.
Although the strategy would be an advantage for him and other writers of textbooks, Wright said, ultimately students would not benefit from it.
The Senate voted to retain the strategy in its proposal.
Other strategies proposed by the Faculty Senate included textbooks being held in reserve at the library for students who could not afford to buy the texts and a University policy prohibiting faculty from receiving any financial or other incentives for textbook adoption.
Some of the strategies involve requiring the University Web site to carry links to Barnes & Noble's online price list, which sells textbooks cheaper than the campus store, and a link to the buy-back program for used textbooks featured "prominently on the home page of The University's Web site."
Jonathan Judaken, associate professor of history, suggested professors could help students by opting to stay with older editions of textbooks whenever possible, instead of new editions which have few changes from the older ones.
However, some senators warned that bookstores and publishers don't make that easy to do.
Jeffrey Berman, professor of psychology, suggested that in addition to printed textbooks, there should be strategies to reduce the cost of software programs required for some courses.
In other action, four proposed amendments to the Faculty and Faculty Senate Constitution were announced and will be debated and voted on at the December meeting. The amendments include limitations on who should be eligible to serve on the Senate, lengthening senators' terms from two years to three and giving large departments more representation than smaller ones.
