This blog has chronicled the ways some professors exploit the sitting ducks, the trapped rats, they encounter each week.
There’s the professor (now in jail) who on the first day of class had everyone write down their social security number and pass it forward to him. The professor who used her graduate students as slaves. The professors who forced their students to sell tickets to sports events for them. A professor who simply stood in front of his graduate students and told them to hand over $10,000 or else.
But the most venerable method of making hay out of your students is the buying-my-book-is-a-requirement thing. A perennial favorite, b-m-b-i-a-r takes many forms, the most recent on view in Australia, at RMIT University, where a bunch of guys in the business school made buying their extremely expensive e-book an inescapable expense for all:
College of Business students were told they had to purchase textbooks written by their lecturers to access the mandatory tests.
These textbooks were sold on a website which Fairfax Media has found is owned by an RMIT lecturer.
The site sells textbooks written by a number of RMIT Business lecturers.
… “Your grades are behind a paywall and your money went into the course coordinator’s pocket,” [one student] said.
Another student, Renata Majdandzic, said she only bought a textbook from the site so that she could sit her tests.
“I just wasted $60 on a book for nothing,” she said.
“I never even looked at these books but we have to pay for them just to do a test that should be included in the [university] fees”.
September 14th, 2017 at 11:49AM
During my time in Melbourne, 1958-1971, RMIT was just the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. It had no aspirations to the status of a university. In those days there were just two universities in the entire State of Victoria: The University of Melbourne and Monash University. Much has changed.