“He is best served who has no occasion to put the hand of others at the end of his arms.”~ Cervantes
If you want something done right – or, in some cases, done at all – you just might have to do it yourself. This is the lesson the university seems to be learning from the debacle in Annapolis over the three failed bills that would have worked to relieve the stress students suffer from textbook prices.
That the bills failed is certainly regrettable. They were all casualties of the political process in state government. By the end, even if the bills had been put forth for a vote, they would have been diluted and qualified into having a much smaller impact than was originally intended. In the end, there was not even time for a vote.
In the meantime, the university has taken the initiative and more aggressively pursued its goal to have course instructors submit their fall book choices by May 1. This year, compliance with the guideline was about 70 percent, unfortunately not much different from a typical year. The May 1 deadline is in no way onerous; there is no field being taught at the undergraduate level that changes so dynamically that a set of books cannot be determined a matter of months before a course begins. Additionally, the university has committed to the publishing of the books’ ISBNs, which will make shopping around for them much easier.
Neither of these provisions is strong enough to lead to dramatic savings on a large scale. But when the problems associated with legislative action are considered, measures by the university begin to look attractive. It is unlikely the problem of political gridlock is going to be solved anytime soon, so it does not make sense to rely on Annapolis for change on this issue. Furthermore, as textbook publishers are national, there is not much the state government can do in the way of pressuring them on matters such as the bundling of supplementary materials. There is a bill under consideration in the federal government that seeks to do this, but gridlock is just as much a feature of operations in Washington.
Ultimately, achieving a goal such as having textbook lists in by the beginning of summer relies on the foresight and initiative of faculty members. This will not change, regardless of legislative action at the state or federal levels. As far as the university has the jurisdiction to act to relieve the pressure of textbook costs, it should do so. For better or for worse, there are no political roadblocks that it must face, only administrative inertia.
