Here's a good one: since we lease the space why can't we negotiate a bookstore contract that would have textbooks in our students' hands at the beginning of the semester, rather than by individual special order a week later?

We waste too much academic time (class time, professor time, and student time) already with our disaster of a registration system, and changing schedules and waiting lists and yellow cards....

Shall we just put the semester on hold for a week, while we adjust schedules and let students get their books? Of course it hardly saves our frugal institution money when we need to make questionably legal copies of textbooks so that our students can begin the semester.

-- Anonymous, January 10, 1999