COLUMN: It's better to be dead than read

From Eric Goldstein's, "Upon Further Review," Fall '97 From Eric Goldstein's, "Upon Further Review," Fall '97Forgive me if I seem a little disillusioned. But my naive optimism has just been shattered by a university that I thought was genuinely interested in its students' well-being. Last Wednesday evening, a group of "representative" members of the Penn community decided professors should not be forced to make their courses' reading lists available to area bookstores. Instead, University Council decided that professors should be able to select which stores will have the privilege (a.k.a. monopoly) to sell their books. Imagine the horrors of the rejected open-market system. Barnes & Noble, Penn Book Center, House of Our Own and Campus Text would all be able to decide exactly what they wanted to sell. And students would be able to decide for themselves who they will give their business too. Imagine a system that would actually encourage the bookstores to lower prices and provide better service and engage in what the real world likes to call "competition." Imagine a student with maxed-out student loans, a part-time job and zero spending money actually having a little extra cash to go to the movies on a Saturday night or to splurge on a real meal instead of warming up some leftover spaghetti. But, alas, Council has decided that students' financial concerns are not important. After all, as long as you're going to mortgage the next 20 years of your life to pay back $100,000 worth of tuition, what's another $500 per semester? Of course, this decision was not made to spite students; that was merely the outcome. Many people on campus are fearful that Barnes & Noble will force the independent bookstores out of business. Barnes & Noble does, after all, have the ability to undercut smaller stores like House of Our Own and Penn Book Center by virtue of its national network and economies of scale. But House of Our Own and Penn Book Center should theoretically have some advantage over Barnes & Noble or people wouldn't be so intent on ensuring their protection. That advantage may be better service, a more diverse selection of alternative reading, an intellectual environment or the mere atmosphere of a local bookstore. However, students should be allowed to make their own decisions on whether a higher price tag is worth the other benefits. If students value the service and intellectual environments that many claim the independent stores provide and if students decided to support local businesses over national chains, then House of Our Own and Penn Book Center will continue to survive. But professors shouldn't be able to dictate that to students. If students unanimously decide the lower price that Barnes & Noble can offer is the most important trait, then so be it. And if students decide that they will only give their business to stores that have buy-back program for used books, then House of Our Own and Penn Book Center will have to adapt or perish. That is the reality of business, and it isn't the University's place to artificially subsidize those that can no longer compete. Some faculty members at Council argued that a policy of publicly disclosing reading lists would be an infringement on their academic freedom. This is a ludicrous statement. Professors have two roles at Penn -- to conduct research and publish scholarly works and to pass their knowledge along to students. Nowhere in a professor's job description does it say that he has the authority to determine which stores students shop at. What if professors decided that Bic had an unfair cost advantage over smaller pen manufacturers? Could they then require students to use only the more expensive non-Bic pens for classwork? That is exactly what is being done now with textbooks. The recommendation presented to Council also suggested that "[s]ome teachers favor friends or ideological comrades with their book orders." If true, this is perhaps the worst offense. This would mean that professors are making conscious decisions to force students to pay more in order to help their "friends" or "ideological comrades" stay afloat. Professors should feel free to encourage students to use one bookstore over another, but mandating students to pay more goes over the line. In fact, numerous students and parents asked that all books be offered at Barnes & Noble, according to Adam Sherr, who sat the Council's bookstore committee that proposed the full disclosure policy. In rejecting the proposal, Council made a clear decision that professors' political agendas are more important than students' financial health.