Ivory Tank

I'm not sure if Matt's moniker for our shared institution -- a term for "a public policy school that feels like a Brookings franchise" -- is accurate, but it sure sounds cool.

Urinetown

I saw it last weekend with Y. at the University of Maryland, and while it was delightfully acerbic, as advertised, I would have enjoyed it more, perhaps, if it weren't also an apparent harbinger of things to come.

Textbooks for Rent, cont.

So I finally decided to rent my textbooks for the semester, giving in to temptations I had harbored a while back. The expensive ones, anyway: it didn't seem worth it to try to save money on comparatively cheap paperbacks that are also more likely to be worth keeping, to boot. One textbook (Paul Krugman's international economics textbook) is out of stock, unfortunately; maybe Half.com has it.

Textbooks for Rent

In my inbox, I just got a promotion for TextBookFlix, which allows you to rent textbooks for a semester, and, according to the website, save 55% to 65% on your textbook bills. As a grad student, this is quite tempting; however, is this a sustainable business model? In my experience, at least, the turnover for textbooks (and indeed, any books used for a class) tends to be rather high -- new professors come in, some classes cycle through different professors each semester, some classes are only offered occasionally, if at all, etc. Add to this the fact that professors are usually idiosyncratic about their textbook choices, and it's hard to see how this could work, at least from the point of view of the bookseller. (For the book buyer, the ultimate fate of books rented is arguably not important.) I guess that for introductory courses that everyone has to take, there is plenty of money to be made in renting textbooks; but for advanced courses, its profitability has to taper off.

Things I Didn't Know

Having gone to a small college with a small student government, I appear to have missed out on the phenomenon of political parties for student government elections. This is possibly a more instructive way of introducing students to the political process, rather than the popularity contest mindset of individual candidates running for office. After all, most independent runs for the presidency tend to be vanity campaigns, rather than expressions of a larger movement (e.g., Mike Bloomberg, if he runs).

Also worth checking out is the recent protest at the University of Maryland over the lack of housing. It's a real issue, I can tell you that.