I have a few trick questions for you. What’s worse than a boot from Parking Services? What’s worse than a former university president who was a four-star general? What’s worse than a 4-8 football season? What’s worse than a Starkville pothole? What’s worse than the manic Drill Field preachers? What’s worse than Aramark Tex-Mex food from Zoca? Well if you answered buying books at the beginning of the semester, then you share my pain.
I’m not an economist, but if I had to guess, I’d say the local bookstores, along with liquor stores and Taco Bell, are Starkville’s most lucrative businesses. Or should I say rackets?
One could argue that being in school, not the job market, during an economic downturn is the best place to be in, and that students are in an insulated cocoon from the recession. And perhaps that is true, but if we students were ever in doubt of inflation, our credit bubble quickly bursts when we reach the checkout counter at the bookstore and are forced to call Daddy on the spot in order to coax out his Discover card number; and if we aren’t so lucky, we’re forced to bank on the teacher using “his old professor’s lecture notes” and not the book.
Another facet of the racket that pains me is some of the textbooks themselves. For example, this semester I had to buy a book called “Thinking About Women” for a sociology class.
Now I will withhold judgment on the class and book, seeing as how I haven’t read or taken them yet and am sure they will be informative.
But seriously, does your average, heterosexual MSU male need an entire textbook devoted to thinking about women, as if we don’t already think about women 90 percent of the time? (Don’t worry, I Wikied that statistic; it’s legit.)
To be honest, $100 books wouldn’t be so bad if every teacher actually used them, but let’s have a reality check. Every semester there is always that one teacher who swears on the Honor Code, “We will be using the ‘Norton Anthology of Everything’ this semester, folks,” but of course they only crack the book once, and then, at the end of the semester, when you’ve forgotten exactly how much you had to shell out for the book in the first place, you return the book for a measly $15 and are happy you can eat out for the last week of exams.
What a vicious cycle. But I have a proposition: All you drug dealers out there, stand up and hear me out. Drop your gats and your plastic dime bags, pick up that “Intro to Music Appreciation: Second Edition,” stand on your favorite drug-selling corner (sorry if I’m stereotyping you guys) and entice us poor students with your black market textbooks.
Matt Morgan is a sophomore majoring in sociology. He can be contacted at [email protected].