BY JONATHAN REES
In the last week of classes of the spring 2025 semester, our administration announced a deal that would allow Barnes & Noble to take over our university bookstore. It included an arrangement that would guarantee students access to all their textbooks on the first day of classes, in exchange for students paying an additional $25 per credit hour in each course they took. After a week of stormy faculty senate debate, in which my colleagues pointed out many, many problems with this arrangement, the university announced that they were going ahead with it anyway and it started this semester.
Since this is an AAUP blog, I’ll focus on just two of our arguments. The first one is simple. Over the summer we learned that the university signed a contract with Barnes & Noble before they ever announced that this was a possibility. Shared governance at my university has never been great, but this was the worst violation of that principle in the twenty-five years that I’ve worked here, since textbook issues are fundamentally related to everything we do as teachers.
With regard to academic freedom, this isn’t a question of what we teach, but how we teach it. Just a couple of presidents ago, our university made a big push towards convincing faculty to assign open educational resources (OER). These books are available free to students by design. Many of my colleagues wrote their own OER textbooks to use in their classes. Now, the university, through Barnes & Noble, wants to collect $75 per student per class for a resource that should cost our students nothing. I began to assign an OER textbook in my US history survey course specifically because it is free. Now my administration has interfered in that decision-making process.
About a week ago, I learned that these bookstore takeovers are actually a national trend. This is a tiny bit of an article by Katya Schwenk, published in Jacobin:
Campus bookstore consolidation is only growing. This spring, Barnes and Noble Education announced a “surge in new campus store partnerships,” assuming control over bookstores at more than twenty schools, including Villanova University and Georgia Southern. At the latter school, student bookstore workers were laid off as a result of the takeover, losing their tuition benefits….
The fees charged by these programs vary; some levy a flat fee per course or per credit hour. Under some university contracts, Barnes and Noble Education and Follett charge $25 or $26 per credit hour for classes that use their materials, which could add up to $390 for a typical fifteen-credit-hour course load in a semester. Because course materials are either provided via digital access codes that expire or, less commonly, rental print textbooks, students can’t resell the materials, as they might with a brand-new textbook.
In 2020, as the companies’ automatic billing programs took off, students and independent booksellers around the country brought a slate of antitrust lawsuits over the practice. They charged Barnes and Noble Education and Follett, as well as the largest textbook publishers, with collusion to “restrict the supply of textbooks and monopolize the market.”
I don’t have a solution to this problem, but I wanted to lay down this post as a marker so that people worried about the imminent takeover of their college bookstore can find it and realize that they are not alone. Please tell us all about your experience in the comments, and maybe together we can come up with something.
