Like, I knew of the us higher education industrial complex and how shitty it was. I assumed it was normal shitty, like everything else in this country.
Chat, I just had to pay 60 American dollars to rent a PDF and even once I resigned myself to pay I had to:
- create an account in Macmillan's shit website, which involved rejecting cookies like five times
- Enter my address, which was required but also the address field was not working so I had to start over several times and on different browsers. For a PDF. That I paid $60 so they would email me the "access" link
- Wait for them to email me the link, which took hours. For an automated email to a link to a PDF file
- Find that the link is actually to create a new account on a third party application.
- Get a message that the link expired (it was just sent??) and request a new link.
- Create the stupid account to finally be able to click on a link to open a PDF file on my browser.
- But what if I need to read this literally anywhere else? Well I'll just click the link to "read offline"
- Which has me scan a QR code to download an app on my phone, which also requires an account
- I don't see a way to actually read this on my e-reader?? Offline?? In what world is "read offline" the same as "read on your phone with Internet access"
I fucking hope my professor is getting Macmillan kickbacks because there's literally no other explanation for this
No the professor probably hates this nearly as much. A sort of cartel of book publishers and database owners hold universities hostage: they just kind of dictate what the schools will do and how they will pay. If they don't pay, they lose access to where all the useful research is (and that research is kept within the databases because the same people own the business ends of journals for the most part). If a university wants to try to open things up they have to be, like, MIT. Everyone else is stuck
What I know most intimately is LMS, learning management systems. The oldest and most ubiquitous will outright blame on-campus personnel for their mistakes, in front of those personnel. I've seen it happen; hell, I'm why it happened. I'm the one who asked why the system didn't do what it says it does.
And what are you doing to do? Not have a platform for online classes? Switch? You or got the Identical Service that Didn't Form an Agreement with the Competition Your Honor, We Just Stagnated at Exactly the Same Time. You've got Startup Scraping Student Grades for Smart Management Systems. You've got The One You Already Have but New(tm).
The capitalist takeover of the university system isn't because professors ignore book prices or get kick backs from digital reader companies. It's because the management class is all MBA jackasses who've never taught a class in their lives creating deal after deal to lock their landlord scams into certain financial vectors to siphon money out of the government and the students.
Ah, I should have known it was the MBAs
Just... I thought the reason people put up with capitalism was because of comfort but like... the shit people put up with here is ridiculous



