provoccrtive opinion Elephantiasis of the Textbook Robert C. Kerber SUNY at Stony Brook, Long Island, NY 11794
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Oreanic chemistrv textbooks are eettine" bieeer. And bieger. +he figure shows a plot of sizesidefined as the number of oaees) of full-vear oreanic chemistrv texts as a function of the year of puh"lication. The texts simpled include all of those available in my departmental library and on the bookshelves of my colleagues and include the most widely used texts of the last two decades. There appears to have been a takroff point in the mid1960's, with thesiee land number) of texts increasing rapidly thrrrafter; the regressiou line indicates a growth rate (11 16 pages per year for the average organic text. A linear extrapulation of the data since 1965 u,ould oredict that the o w r u p ~ ~ textbook length in the year 2000 bill be 1544 pages! he lareest mieht have 1800 naees or more. This will ohviouslv require hGh-tech binding methods, and perhaps a bodyhuildine orereauisite to the ornanic chemistrv course. Moreover, this anal& understate; the total burden on contemporary students in organic chemistry courses, who must also contend with study guides of up to 500 pages. Why do textbooks in organic chemistry grow so? An author writing a new hook or a new edition understandably wants to make the book timely and interesting by including exciting new developments. These will appeal to jaded faculty who are tired of teaching the same traditional stuff and to those (all of us, I hope) who want to keep their courses up to date. A textbook should present important new material in a dvnamic science. The problem seems to be that it is much harder to delete no-longer-so-important older material than to add exciting new material. Mass marketing of textbooks has become a big, financially risky business, and the lists of consultants and reviewers acknowledged in new texts have become longer, even as the books have. Before proceeding with new texts, to a large publishers often send multi-pag~question~aires prospective audience of hoped-for adopters in an attempt to elicit their everv, oreference and oreiudice. IA verv readable . . account of current texthuuk publishing and its consvquenwi on the texts annears in ' T h e Ninr Liws r,f Discredited Data (Old ~extbodk'sNever Die-They Just Get Paraphrased)" by Diane B. Paul in The Sciences, New York Acad. of Sciences, May/June 1987, pp 26-30.] Publishers appear to he fearful that omission of any traditional concept 6; reaction, however little used a t present, will provide an excuse for someone to reject their text. They fear the fabled professor with the yellowing old lecture notes who will not adopt a text that neglects, say, the Wurtz reaction. Do such nrofessors exist? Perhaos. but I don't know anv. Even if the; do exist, the needs of'stkdents should he paramount. and I take it as axiomatic that no one can (or should be asked to) absorb 1500 pages of textual material (plus 500 more pages in a study guide) in a one-year organic chemistry course. Of course, the professor can skip some of the chapters toward the end of the book (we did that even when the books had "only" a thousand pages). Much harder is to
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Number of pages (text index) in organic chemistry texts versus year of publication. Circled points represent consecutive editions of the same, widely used text.
tiptoe through a field containing a lot of fuzzy old dandelions among the tulips: "You may omit sections 7.2 and 7.5, except for the last two paragraphs of 7.5 and the top of page 236." Usually one gives up and has the students read entire sections, even when one has no intention of lecturing or testing on some of the material. The alternative is confusion and loss of textual continuity. In any case, the idea that a textbook should include euerything, so that the individual instructor can choose what he or she considers most important, constitutes a burden, both psychological and financial, to students. As stated by S. H. Cohen in an earlier "Provocative Opinion" on this subject [J. Chem. Educ. 1986,63,120], "Young students, who are not noted for their ability to distinguish the important from the trivial, are buried under an avalanche of information. This often results in a student's policy of trying to memorize everything and understanding nothing.'' Exaggerated attempts a t comprehensiveness also belie the traditional role of the author, who should earn his or her royalties precisely by organizing concepts and information and making some hard choices about what to omit. Having said all this, what would I propose to omit from oreanic chemistrv texts to make room for the nlories of syntl~ons,N M R , and orbital symmetry? \I!. own "hit hst" w ~ l include d much of the material dealing u,ith frrc-rddical halogrnation, elertrophilic an~rnnticsut)it~tution,and a lot of the triiditionnl 'nilme react~ons"from the 19th renturv (e.g., Meerwein-Ponndorf, Baeyer-Villiger, ~ o u v e a u l t Blanc, von Braun, Cannizzaro, Darzens, and many other reactions). I also feel that the small fraction of the total Volume 65
Number 8
August 1988
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clientele who will engage professionally in synthetic organic chemistry makes heavy emphasis on that most demanding discipline unwise in the first organic course. I cringe when I see diligent students carrying around decks of index cards bearing reactions to bememorized for use in working synthesis problems. What can those who wish to redress elephantiasis of the textbook do? As authors, they can more ruthlessly winnow their material, keeping the important general principles and
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Journal of Chemical Education
illustrating them well, but rejecting the minutiae, however customary. [Just because you were taught something doesn't mean it's still worth passing along.] As pre-publication reviewers, they can lobby for more reasonable manuscript sizes. As reviewers of published hooks, they can comment on excessive size (and cost) of texts. Most important, they can preferentially adopt textbooks of manageable size, which they can cover well within the allotted time and which will not intimidate the students.
