There is a social custom in this country that you should not pitch your product to a captive audience.
Those that have nowhere else to go, generally, should not be hit up for sales.
This concept was most obvious to me flying to Florida for winter break, when I watched the responses of my fellow airline passengers when the steward tried to sign us up for credit cards mid-flight.
So if it is considered rude to try to make sales to a captive audience, it would stand to reason that it is the height of impropriety to force a captive audience to buy things from you, yet this goes on every semester at IU.
This gross abuse became obvious to me this semester after attending the first week of classes and hearing from professors about how I must buy a specific textbook for the class.
The textbook in question was, conveniently, written by the professor of the class I was in and published by the University.
Arriving at TIS bookstore, I was greeted by a sticker informing me I would pay more than sixty dollars for a spiral-bound notebook.
Kelley School of Business accounting classes require students to purchase this workbook new, one that looks suspiciously similar in both layout and content to ones from previous semesters.
This is now the second semester that I have been forced to purchase books authored by the professor teaching the class.
In Kelley’s A201: Introduction to Financial Accounting course, your grade in the class is in part determined by exercises in the book.
So students are, in effect, a totally captive audience forced to engage in this forced sale.
Only the university and the professors stand to profit from these transactions.
IU needs to address this obvious conflict of interest.
While there are obvious reasons a professor would want to use their own book to teach a class, the conflict is too great for the university not to take action.
If professors insist on using their own books, the university should mandate that they be sold to students at cost.
Professors have plenty of opportunities to make income off their books at other campuses, particularly if the material is good enough to be used in their own classrooms.
This would be a powerful first step to take towards reigning in out of control textbook prices.
There is no reason students should be spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars a semester on textbooks.
We’re wasting money on supplies we don’t need and often will never even use.
Many students’ freshman Calculus textbooks were put into a drawer or on a shelf on the first day of classes never to be opened again.
In my experience, most textbook versions are the same as previous ones with a token amount of cosmetic changes.
Compare what these textbooks cost to even the newest books.
You will struggle to find bestsellers for over the thirty dollar mark at a normal book store.
Professors have been allowed to abuse students and their checkbooks for entirely too long.
Universities continue to allow it because they profit from publishing, but this era needs to come to an end.
If IU is to be a place where knowledge is efficiently filtered to the next generation, it must cease being one where previous generations line their pockets at student expense.
zaochamb@umail.iu.edu
