UPDATED
Philosopher Jonathan Cohen (UC San Diego) invited me to share a rather odd solicitation, which other Southern California philosophers may have received; Prof. Cohen's (apt) response follows the solicitation:
Dear Prof. Cohen,
My name is Dr. Darren Iammarino and I was formerly a lecturer at SDSU and currently I am working at Claremont School of Theology. I am writing to you today to present a unique win-win opportunity that will make you anywhere between 500 and 3,000 dollars per semester. My colleague Chad Tuthill and I, create educational audio podcasts (digital audio files available for download) that specifically discuss the Western and Eastern philosophical traditions in detail. Each podcast is between 45 minutes and one hour long, and they serve as a powerful tool to reinforce the learning week-by-week.
Student evaluations prove that the podcasts are not only well-liked, but also raise the overall GPA of each student. In addition, utilizing ed-tech materials helps to create job security and looks great on peer evaluations, as it will serve to separate you from other faculty members who are not on board with emerging technologies.
The proposition is this: we provide you with a full album of materia l covering all of the major philosophers/philosophical schools and *we will pay you 45 percent of the profit from your students*. In addition, we will give you a bank of test questions for all of the podcasts. The deal is you get 45 percent, we get 45 percent, and 10 percent goes to tech support for our website where the podcasts reside.
What this means is that you do not need to do anything other than assign the material on your syllabus and create an assignment like a quiz or online discussion question that requires the podcasts *on the first week of class*. If you structure it this way we have found that there is a 90-95 percent purchasing rate from the students. The podcasts only cost $24.99 for the whole 16 week album. You can use your current projected enrollments to calculate what that would come out to for your 45 percent. However, on average the pay is around $1,000 dollars per semester based on a class of 85 students, so with two sections it can really add up.
In the end, it truly is a win-win situation because it benefits the students to reinforce the material via a mixed media format, and it benefits you financially as well as pedagogically. We are more than happy to meet with you during your office hours/Skype or elsewhere to discuss the details, but truthfully, it is quite straightforward and a simple way to help boost the income of underpaid and under-appreciated faculty.
Thank you for your consideration. Please visit [link omitted] to hear sample clips of the podcasts.
Sincerely,
Darren Iammarino, PhD (Philosophy of Religion)
Chad Tuthill (Audio Engineer/Production)
-----------end solicitation
------- begin response from JC
Mr Iammarino:
So let me see if I've got this right. Your idea of a "win-win opportunity" is that I should use my position as a professor at my university to require that my students buy your product (which obviously is completely unrelated in intellectual terms to any course I teach) so you can profit, and in return I get a financial kickback?
I would call that not a win-win opportunity, but a cynical attempt to get me to exploit my position and my students so as to line your own pockets.
That you offer to share the profits with me makes things worse rather than better. While there can be situations in which professors appropriately assign materials that earn them (e.g., royalty) income, these situations are defensible only if (unlike the situation here) there is a plausible intellectual case for the particular materials chosen. And, if anything, the justificatory bar should be higher than usual in such cases. By offering a payoff to the instructor, you are positively inviting instructors to make choices for the wrong sorts of reasons (viz., non-intellectual ones), at the direct financial and intellectual expense of the very students placed in our care.
What you propose is avaricious, intellectually irresponsible, and a fundamental abuse of our role as instructors and scholars. No thanks.
I have unfortunately come to expect the level of cynicism and exploitation you exhibit from a commercial press, but am esp disappointed that a scholar/teacher would stoop to this level.
UPDATE: Prof. Peter Atterton, Chair of the Department of Philosophy at San Diego State University, e-mails to point out that Mr. Iammarino "used to teach in the Dept. of Religious Studies and also in Classics and Humanities at SDSU, not in the Dept. of Philosophy."
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