Sitting in the living room of his Hollywood Hills home Wednesday
morning, English Professor Lawrence Grobel gushes about a course he
teaches on interviewing.
He pulls four books on the subject from a nearby shelf and piles
them onto a table. In his left hand, he holds “The Art of the
Interview,” 450 pages thick, with a list price of $14.95.
All five texts are required reading for his seminar, and the
author’s name should be familiar to the students: Lawrence
Grobel.
“I don’t think they’re hard,” Grobel
said, pointing to the books. “Most of these are magazine
articles ““ it’s kind of like bathroom
reading.”
The list of faculty authors posted on the UCLA store’s Web
site runs hundreds of names long, and Grobel is one of many at
UCLA, and across the nation, who assign their published works to
students.
Communications Professor Thomas Plate, who teaches media ethics,
among other topics, believes it makes sense for many of his
colleagues to assign their own books because they write the best
material in their fields.
But it’s vital that professors make their work as
accessible as possible to students, said Plate, who has a new book
in the works.
“If I were to give a course, I might provide excerpts from
it, but I wouldn’t require students to buy the whole book
because I know students don’t have a lot of money at
UCLA,” he said.
Because students in a class form a captive audience, assigning
self-written texts may appear to be a conflict of interest, Grobel
said.
“I wrestled with that because what can I do?” he
said. “What I know best are the pieces I’ve
done.”
“I wrote a book after I started teaching the class, so I
could have a book for the subject,” he added.
While Grobel has required students to read his books in the
past, “The Art of the Interview,” published recently,
made its debut in his course this quarter. It doesn’t
supplant old course material, which includes hands-on interviewing
both in and out of class, but works instead to supplement it, he
said.
“Interviewing has a little of everything. It’s
psychology, it’s theater, it’s drama, it’s
writing, it’s learning how to listen, it’s learning how
to move a conversation,” Grobel said, paging through his
book, reading excerpts pertaining to those issues.
Like Grobel, African American studies Professor Paul Von Blum
believes his new book on African American artists in Los Angeles
fills a niche in the textbook world.
After years of research, Von Blum said he found no books on the
subject. Black artists often slip under society’s radar and
receive less attention than their white counterparts, he said.
“I kept waiting for somebody to do this,” he said,
adding that after years of waiting, he concluded “the best
thing is always to do it yourself.”
Von Blum’s book will be on the reading list winter quarter
for a class he’s teaching, which covered similar material
before. Von Blum said each of 16 chapters focuses on the life and
works of one artist, drawing from extensive interviews he conducted
while visiting their studios and spending full days by their
sides.
He wrote during evenings and weekends, and worked rapidly in the
summer. Five years after he began the project, the book is finally
out, he said.
“I won’t even come close to a dime an hour, with the
thousands of hours I’ve put in,” Von Blum said.
Most professors who write books have students in mind ““
not royalties, he added.
His book uses only black-and-white photos inside and saves paper
by condensing two small pages worth of text onto one larger sheet.
These design elements reflect his concern for students, who
don’t have the money to pay for expensive art texts, Von Blum
said.
“University-published books are never best-sellers,”
he said. “I just want it to be out there. I want students to
read it because that’s my job.”
Grobel and Von Blum’s books sit together in a faculty
authors section of the UCLA bookstore. It’s a quiet corner,
with fewer than five patrons browsing over the course of an hour
one afternoon.
UCLA Bookzone floor manager George Rock said, other than
geography and physiology Professor Jared Diamond’s popular
“Guns, Germs and Steel,” he is unaware of how well
faculty-written books sell.
“I’ve never paid attention to it,” said Rock,
who has worked at the store for over two decades. “I
couldn’t say.”
While his books are available at the UCLA store, Grobel said he
encourages his students to search online to find the cheapest
price. After seeing his two daughters through college, he said, he
understands the art of penny-pinching.