Most of us college professors mentor junior faculty and make recommendations regarding their promotion and tenure. One of our main responsibilities is to inform them about the mores and taboos of the academy, particularly the latter. While the reasons for some taboos are both obvious and sensible, for example, not becoming romantically involved with undergraduates, the reasons for others are neither. One such taboo in some institutions and departments is against junior faculty writing textbooks.

It is easy to understand why junior faculty would be surprised that writing a textbook may be viewed negatively by their institution's promotion and tenure committee or even the senior faculty in their department After all, they were told by faculty in their department, their dean, and possibly even their academic vice president that they should strive for excellence in their teaching. Furthermore, they were told that they will have to document the quality of their teaching -- along with that for research and service -- when they are considered for promotion and tenure. It would seem an objective way to document teaching excellence would be to develop a proposal for a textbook and submit it to a publisher. The publisher then has it read by faculty at other institutions who teach the course. If the reviews indicate that the book is likely to be adopted at other institutions, they will be offered a contract. Once they draft the manuscript, it will be reviewed. These reviews will include information about the market for the book. If they indicate publisher concludes a market is likely, the book is published, which further documents the author knows how to convey material effectively. That is all peer review.

Once the book is published, reviews and adoptions provide further documentation for the quality of the person's teaching. It should not be surprising, then, that a junior faculty member may be both disturbed to learn there is a taboo on junior faculty writing textbooks. It conflicts with what he or she was hired to do) and wonder about the reasons for it.

Why, then, this taboo?

Let's begin with an obvious one: professional envy and jealousy. People who write books, particularly textbooks, become better-known in their field than those who do articles in refereed journals. Consequently, they tend to receive more invitations to lecture at other institutions and participate in professional meetings. This can all be very threatening to some senior faculty. To keep this from happening, some senior faculty encourage junior faculty to publish in professional journals. If they insist on writing books anyway, the seniors encourage them to write only "scholarly" ones that are published by university presses. Since the readership for monographs is usually no larger than that for journal articles, it is unlikely that the publication of one will cause a junior faculty member's academic star to rise too high too quickly.

Let's now consider a less obvious reason for this taboo: the vow of poverty. Books by junior faculty that do not earn them significant income, such as most those published by university presses, tend to be regarded as acceptable and those that are thought to generate significant income, such as textbooks, rightly or wrongly, tend to be regarded as unacceptable. The unwritten rule is that scholars are not supposed to benefit financially from their scholarship. According to one of my undergrad professors, Theodore Tass-Thienemann, this taboo dates back to the earliest universities. People who received baccalaureate degrees mostly intended to become monks and devote their life to scholarship. Becoming a monk required them to make vows of obedience, poverty and chastity. Even today. many members of the academy do appear to feel that it is somehow wrong to benefit financially from one's scholarship.

If you are tempted to discourage a junior faculty member from undertaking a textbook project or if you are tempted to make an unfavorable promotion and tenure recommendation, search your heart. You may by doing it for reason, if the truth be known, that would embarrass you.