In your post on textbooks, you wrote:

We won’t make textbooks truly less expensive until we solve the third-party-payer problem: When the person making the buying decision (the professor) isn’t the person who forks over the cash (the student), costs spiral. See health care. Why not give each professor a budget for books, and let him keep some proportion of the unused money? The remainder could go either to the students in the class, or into the college’s general budget.

I have taught English for over 20 years now, and I have to say that this is simply not the problem. I teach intro to lit and literature survey courses, and I have to have a good number and variety of texts. I would LOVE to give my students less expensive books than the anthologies I require them to buy. However, I have no control over the cost of the books I use, and I have no control over the books that are available to choose from. If I were told I had $X for the books, that I couldn’t go over that amount for each class, it would make no difference whatsoever in the choices available to me, and the only probable outcome would be that I could not have the texts I need to teach them effectively. The problem lies not in professors’ choices but in publishers’ choices. I have to have texts; I can only use texts that actually exist; so what exactly am I supposed to do to keep the costs down?

While I disagree with this particular concept, I appreciate your work greatly, along with the other writers at Phi Beta Cons. God bless as you continue your excellent and much-needed work.

Beth Impson

Bryan College

Dayton, TN