Many students this semester were more than a little perplexed
at the release of the Fall Book List, detailing the required, non-refundable texts
that needed purchasing. This week professors finally came forward to admit that
these particular lists were something of an accident.
“I honestly don’t know how this came to be,” laments Professor
Benjamin Bogdon, who unfortunately teaches the class How Things Came to Be. “I thought the administration was asking me
about my favorite books, not which books I wanted to assign. It was very misleading.”
Misleading must be the best adjective, because it appears that
every professor at the university committed the same honest mistake.
Professor
Nancy Tenor, who teaches and specializes in literature, recalls with regret
what happened. “It seemed like the university finally wanted to know a little
bit more about me and my interests via my top reads,”
she sighs. “So I listed them. All of them.”
The
administration wishes that students and faculty could just laugh about this
hilarious misunderstanding. However, the reality is that Professor Tenor’s
list, like so many others, came out to be pretty lengthy and punched many students
right in the highly sensitive wallets.
“I’d heard about how expensive books get in college, but I was
still shocked by just how many non-refundable books [professors] were asking me
to buy,” says Gillian Swiss, Freshman. “Thirty, forty books. Is that really
necessary? I was forced to choose between buying my books and a computer. Guess
which one I picked?” Swiss asks as she gestures to her pile of books that is impressively stacked into the shape of a laptop. To be honest, I’m still torn
for an answer, the rendering is so good.
Tearful apologies may not be enough to undo the damage,
however that seems to be the policy faculty has adopted since this whole mess
came to light. In the meantime, students have a lot of reading ahead of them if
they want to avoid what experts call “a complete waste of money.”
Depending
on the tastes of the professor, some classes fared better than others. As Swiss
puts it, “I was pretty curious to find out how Eat Pray Love was going to
relate to Earthquakes, but I guess that’s up to me now.”
