Help. I don't know how, but help.

[ravenwings_7]

Dear Well-Intentioned Professor,

I appreciate your efforts to support small, local bookstores.  Admire them, even.  And, happily, the bookstore you've chosen to support is one I'm not allowed to enter without a chaperone, on account of how much money I can spend there.

But I pay a MANDATORY $395 Non-Allocable Segregated Fee every semester.  A

Comments

[nwhepcat]

Aaagh, that sucks. Can you approach him or email him and say without being antagonistic that you more than appreciate what he's trying to do, but you've already paid for these books and can't afford to do so again? I'd think he'd try to help in some fashion. Or at least know not to do that to someone else.

[ravenwings_7]

That's a really good idea, and I was going to do just that once I'd done some therapeutic housework (somehow, I'm an anxiety cleaner?) and maybe some bargain-hunting (nothing helps a problem like trying to solve it), but I ended up doing some fact checking and found this:

"Instructors may recommend to students that they purchase supplementary books from the University Bookstore. However, except for laboratory manuals and similar items, such purchases may not be required. If a faculty member requires the use of a book not provided through the Instructional Resource Rental Department, copies of the book must be available in the Library for general use.

These books aren't in the Library. Which, basically, means that instead of just being really unfair, like I thought was happening, he may be in violation of school policy. I'm checking the full state university library system, so I (or is it he?) may get lucky on that front, but otherwise? I have no clue what to do next...

[curiouswombat]

I think that you should, perhaps more gently, put this too him - perhaps it simply hasn't occurred to him that a number of students have already paid to hire the books.

[ravenwings_7]

I may try - I don't think it's occurred to many people where those fees go, not professors and especially not students. They just pay their tuition, don't question (or notice?) the segregated fees (which, admittedly, are also used to pay for things like our "free" city bus passes and the school's other student-related expenses), and then they go to the bookstore, where they fail to add two and two when the staff tells them that half of that giant pile of books they're carrying is composed of rentals which are paid for by your tuition. I worked rush weeks in the campus bookstore for four semesters, where I witnessed (and participated in) that conversation dozens of times per day, and watched people draw the conclusion of "Ooh! Free books!" almost every time. ::sigh:: Have college students always lacked a spirit of inquiry with regard to their own finances, or is this new