
Great Courses, Great Profits – A Curriculum in Human Thought - ycombinete
https://www.city-journal.org/html/great-courses-great-profits-13393.html
======
syspec
> The average royalty is about $25,000 a year for a course > A Great Courses
> lecturer earns a royalty that varies according to how highly viewers rate
> his performance; the base royalty is 4 percent of the course’s gross
> revenue, but that rate can rise to 6 percent if a course receives high
> enough evaluations.

25k being 6%, would mean the average course has gross revenue of about 416K
per year. Impressive

------
cepth
Breaking up my comment because it was "too long" to submit as one (that's a
first).

\----

There are so many factually incorrect claims and contradictions in this piece
that I don't even know where to begin. I write this as someone who owns nearly
100 Great Courses (between DVDs and digital copies). I'm also someone who has
had the pleasure of taking an in-person college class with a professor whose
course I first watched through The Great Courses (abbreviated as TGC from here
on down).

\-------------------------------------------

> Company recruiters sit in on classes of professors who have won awards or
> been recognized for their teaching; the most promising are invited to the
> Great Courses headquarters to record an audition lecture. That recording
> then goes to the company’s most valued customers. If enough of them like it,
> the company asks the professor to create a lecture course.

> The very fact that the Great Courses has found professors who teach without
> self-indulgence may suggest that academia is in better shape than is
> sometimes supposed. But the firm’s 200-plus faculty make up a minute
> percentage of the country’s college teaching corps. And some Great Courses
> lecturers feel so marginalized on their own campuses, claims Guelzo, that
> “if the company granted tenure, they would scramble to abandon their current
> ships and sleep on couches to work for the firm.” Further, it isn’t clear
> that the Great Courses professors teach the same way back on their home
> campuses.

I've spoken with multiple professors who have had their college courses
adapted into TGC. For the professor whose class I took in person, their TGC
lectures were literally structured identically to their syllabus. Some of the
same jokes in TGC lectures made their way into the classroom (lol).

The in-person filming process for TGC may require multiple trips down to their
Virginia studios, especially if we're talking about longer 48+ part courses
that reach 24+ hours of screentime. Then there are the occasional re-shoots
and restructurings necessary if the their customer focus groups (similar to an
Amazon Vine/early reviewer program) finds the content not great.

The idea that professors are creating courses from scratch for TGC is in the
overwhelming majority of cases not true. A professor who has normal teaching,
research, and service requirements is generally not going to have time to
create a whole course from scratch for what the author herself notes is
typically a $25,000 royalty per year. A religious scholar who I spoke with
(eventually decided not to go forward with submitting an audition tape) said
that in his mind the biggest value prop of TGC is that you can minimally adapt
existing materials to earn a healthy royalty.

\-------------------------------------------

> True, the Great Courses emphasizes breadth over depth and offers largely
> introductory material. In literature and intellectual history, the survey
> format predominates, with relatively few courses on individual writers or
> philosophical schools.

This article was written in 2011, but even then there were already courses
available about Voltaire, "The Great Ideas of Philosophy", "The Modern
Political Tradition: Hobbes to Habermas", "Religious Debate in the Western
Intellectual Tradition", Alexis De Tocqueville, "Great Minds of the Western
Intellectual Tradition", "The Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to
Derrida", "Legacies of Great Economists", "The Conservative Tradition",
"American Ideals", etc. And yes, I double checked my order receipts to make
sure these were actually available at the time. In fact many of these courses
were on their 2nd or 3rd edition.

Since then, they've added quite a few STEM courses in multivariable calculus,
differential equations, linear algebra, statistical computing, complexity
theory, college chemistry, organic chemistry, etc.. Several of these are
taught at a 2nd year undergrad or beyond level.

> The most striking thing about the Great Courses’ humanities curriculum,
> however, is how often the same thinkers appear across a large range of
> courses. The canon has been “problematized” in the academy, but it is alive
> and well in these recordings. Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Paul, Erasmus,
> Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Dante, Chaucer, Spenser,
> Shakespeare, Cervantes, Milton, Molière, Pope, Swift, Goethe, and others are
> foregrounded again and again as touchstones of our civilization.

Again, TGC content is largely carbon copied from college courses' syllabi. If
these subjects are "problematized", where is TGC finding these lecturers? Keep
in mind that TGC is not plucking unknown professors from lonely heterodox
institutions. A majority of their professors teach at "liberal" (in the
American sense) campuses.

Just a cursory look at my digital courses shows (in terms of course title and
institutional representation):

* Great Ideas of Philosophy, 2nd Edition (Oxford / Georgetown)

* Voltaire / Birth of the Modern Mind: The Intellectual History of the 17th and 18th Centuries (UPenn)

* History's Great Military Blunders and the Lessons They Teach (University of Wisconsin)

* Fall and Rise of China (Cal Berkeley)

* Skeptics and Believers: Religious Debate in the Western Intellectual Tradition (Grinnell)

* Turning Points in Middle Eastern History (Johns Hopkins)

and so on, and so on...

~~~
cepth
> This past academic year, for example, a Bowdoin College student interested
> in American history courses could have taken “Black Women in Atlantic New
> Orleans,” “Women in American History, 1600–1900,” or “Lawn Boy Meets Valley
> Girl: Gender and the Suburbs,” but if he wanted a course in American
> political history, the colonial and revolutionary periods, or the Civil War,
> he would have been out of luck.

Take a look at the Bowdoin course catalog for the 2010-2011 academic year
([https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...](https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1291&context=course-
catalogues)).

We see courses in:

* The Civil War Era (Fall 2011)

* History of the American West (Fall 2011)

* American Society in the New Nation, 1763-1840 (Fall 2010)

* Borderlands and Empires in Early North America (Fall 2010)

* The History of African Americans, 1619-1865 (Fall 2012) (announced in the 2011-2011 catalog)

* American Political Development (Spring 2011)

* American Political Thought (Spring 2011)

* Political Parties in the United States (Fall 2010)

* Introduction to American Government (Fall 2010)

...and many many more that I got tired of copying over to this post.

This is incredibly lazy research by the writer. At the time this article went
to press ("Summer 2011"), these courses already existed, and there are
countless others already pre-announced in the 2011-2012 course catalog
([https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...](https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1292&context=course-
catalogues)).

\-------------------------------------------

> The company produces only what its market research shows that customers
> want.

> This repetition occurs not because the company is on a mission to
> resuscitate the canon but because customers want it. The insatiability of
> the demand for such courses surprises even the producers themselves.

> But the incursions of identity studies and other post-sixties academic
> developments remain minimal—and are inevitably denounced by some customers
> on the company’s website.

> The biggest question raised by the Great Courses’ success is: Does the
> curriculum on campuses look so different because undergraduates, unlike
> adults, actually demand postcolonial studies rather than the Lincoln-Douglas
> debates? Every indication suggests that the answer is no. “If you say to
> kids, ‘We’re doing the regendering of medieval Europe,’ they’ll say, ‘No,
> let’s do medieval kings and queens,’” asserts Allitt. “Most kids want
> classes on the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, World War I, and
> the American Civil War.” Creative writing is such a popular concentration
> within the English major, Lerer argues, because it is the one place where
> students encounter attention to character and plot and can non-ironically
> celebrate literature’s power.

The author spends a good chunk of the article talking about TGC's customer-
centric focus as a key reason for the company's success. TGC largely films
courses that its customers want!

Yet, the singular piece of evidence she offers that undergrads are having
unpopular curriculums pushed upon them is what she herself deems as an
"assertion" from a singular professor. It's difficult to square the "excesses"
of student protests against what they see as Western-centric canon (a pet
topic that the author has written extensively about) with the idea that
students _actually_ really do want to learn about a suppressed canon.

Could it possibly be that today's generation might want a greater variety of
course offerings beyond the classical Western canon? Could it be that TGC's
median customer, who skews older, has different intellectual preferences and
tastes from someone who is 30-40 years younger? What happened to respecting
the customers' preferences above all else?

> A few professors suggest that the company has pegged the audience as leaning
> conservative[...] Lerer got an angry e-mail from a customer asking how he
> could include that “leftist son of a bitch” Noam Chomsky in the course. John
> McWhorter was told to omit from his linguistics lectures his usual argument
> that the idea of grammatical “correctness” is an “arbitrary imposition.”
> Such caveats on the company’s part, however, could simply reflect the desire
> to avoid alienating any customers.

Where is the outrage from the author that TGC's customers are so close-minded?
;)

\------------------------------------------

> Predictably, the Great Courses has come under pressure for not having enough
> “diversity” in its teaching ranks. Rollins has received angry letters from
> women complaining about the paucity of female lecturers; his nonstop efforts
> to recruit them have yielded few results, in part because women lecture less
> than men. As for the truly big-name female professors, they command speaking
> fees so high that the Great Courses’ pay scale looks insignificant. The same
> applies to the black superstars, one of whom told Rollins: “Tom, honestly, I
> make several thousand dollars a night from Martin Luther King Day through
> Black History Month; you’re not even on my radar screen.”

As someone who has spent almost $5000 with TGC, indulge me for a second to
offer some advice to the company. I would've likely spent even more if they
had more courses on the non-Western canon. This is something that has improved
in recent years, but until ~5 years ago, there was practically nothing in the
catalog on eastern philosophy, histories of India or the Middle East, non-
European music, etc.

To this day, there is nothing in the catalog about African-American literature
or history, Latin American history, or African history. Given that Latin
America and Africa are collectively home to over 1/4 of the planet's
population, how about some content development in that area? I'd be among the
first customers.

Given that TGC's bestselling western philosophy course is taught by an Oxford
professor, how about some more recruitment of professors from international
universities who would be experts on these subject areas (when we finally
emerge from COVID of course).

> But the incursions of identity studies and other post-sixties academic
> developments remain minimal—and are inevitably denounced by some customers
> on the company’s website.

Quoted in the previous section as well, but I will say that one of the more
amusing things about TGC is that the pre-2008 economics content aged extremely
poorly in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. They had a very popular
course (Legacies of Great Economists) that was released in the early 2000's,
and has more than a hint of triumphalism around deregulation and the
financialization of so many aspects of our modern economy.

Perhaps including some more skeptical voices would've been a good thing.

\------------------------------------------

To close, TGC offers great products that I encourage fellow HN readers to try
out. They offer a streaming service (The Great Courses Plus) that is likely a
better value than purchasing courses outright.

With regards to the author of this piece though, with all due respect she has
no idea what she's talking about.

~~~
ycombinete
Thank you for this review of the article that I posted. I really appreciate
the effort and the information that you've put in here.

I love the Great Courses, and have spent a lot of money on them. I wish I'd
shared a more accurate article on them now, as an addled account can't help
them all that much.

~~~
cepth
I was happy to write this, since The Great Courses have had such a big impact
on my learning. I was just frustrated that what could've been a nice profile
(given how much access the author had to the company and its leadership)
turned into an ideological screed. IMO, Heather MacDonald sees herself and/or
functions as more of a commentator/activist than journalist.

The _NY Times_ has done some fun looks at The Great Courses over the years:

* [https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/business/born-in-the-vcr-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/business/born-in-the-vcr-era-great-courses-seeks-to-evolve.html) * [https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/05/arts/television/the-great...](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/05/arts/television/the-great-courses-require-great-production.html)

 _The Washington Post_ did a profile a few years back:

* [https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/before-you...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/before-youtube-and-online-classes-there-were-the-great-courses/2015/08/31/30947f08-353d-11e5-8e66-07b4603ec92a_story.html)

It's truly a remarkable company. It has reinvented itself multiple times:
physical DVDs, online downloads, Netflix style streaming, and now audio
partnerships with Audible. The recent lifestyle additions (partnerships with
NatGeo and Culinary Institute of America) have been great too.

It's been equally remarkable that the Big History was so well regarded that
Bill Gates and Khan Academy then went ahead and spun it out into its own
standalone project
([https://www.bighistoryproject.com/](https://www.bighistoryproject.com/)).

