On School Policy II

I thank you for your recent letter detailing your concerns regarding our current campus policies. While many of these policies are set at the university level, I am privileged with the logic behind a number of them, and will gladly lay your concerns to rest.

In regards to the pricing of the textbooks in the campus bookstore, we are aware that prices there can exceed two hundred percent of the retail price. There are significant extra costs associated with the campus bookstore, costs which are incurred in our duty to provide the highest quality of learning environment. As you are no doubt aware, new editions of textbooks are issued with alarming frequency. This is especially true of the School of Engineering (in which I believe you are a student). To ensure that our students receive the most up-to-date information, our professors select their texts one week prior to the semester's commencement. Naturally, this requires several hundred text books to be shipped overnight (as the bookstore must be stocked in time for the freshmen who arrive the same week).

In the past we have had significant disasters when an dated text was used. Not less than twelve years previously, at the start of the fall semester we stocked the book store with an old edition of the Calculus text (the 19th edition if memory serves) the same as was in use that spring. To our great dismay, we discovered the book listed pi as 3.14159265358979323846 with the newer 21st edition carried it the constant to its proper conclusion. In payment for this oversight, an entire semester's worth of engineering and science students had to relearn a fundamental constant.

More recently, we mistakenly ordered an older version of Global Climate (Green and Summers) when a newer edition had been released that August. As a result those students who had acquired the book though alternative means had more current information than the professor teaching the course! Thankfully, one of the students consented to loan the professor his book averting serious consequences. However, the first three weeks of class had to be written off.

I fear that I must leave your remaining queries for a later date as there is pressing school business at the moment. In sincerely apologize and will return to your letter at the earliest convenience.

Dr. Callid-Stult