Here’s a lesson from a university in how not to support your employees. For those of you in the academic world, nothing here will surprise you (you may accuse me of toning down the story, even). But for anyone in business, I hope at the very least this typical story will cure you of any grass-is-greener (or grass-is-more-sensible, or grass-is smarter) feelings you might have.
Photo: Bibi
I’m on the docket to teach an advanced problem solving course this coming fall, and the best book for this particular course happens to be published by a consultancy in England called IFR. The campus bookstore is a for-profit store with a contract with the university, and the bookstore routinely tries to minimize its costs by under-ordering textbooks.
Over time, the bookstore managers have found that some significant percentage of students orders textbooks from places like Amazon, where they can frequently be had for much less than the bookstore is able to sell them. So, rather than have to return books to the distributor, the bookstore just orders fewer books than will be needed for the course. For a course with an expected enrollment of 25, the bookstore may order 15 books.
What happens when there are too few books in the bookstore?
Now what generally happens is that this causes students to go through the first several classes of the semester without a textbook. In this particular case, with the book not available through Amazon and coming from across the pond, I’d say it’s more likely to be several weeks without a textbook.
Yay England!
So I contacted the author in England, who very generously offered to ship me a stack of the books (at a 15% academic discount, even) and to take back any books I didn’t sell to the students. Even with costly shipping from the U.K., the amount per book came out to about $62.
The sources I had found in the U.S. for the book (though only an older edition is available in the U.S.) ran about $100 plus shipping. I can imagine that the campus bookstore, if it even were willing to get the books, would probably have to charge at least $100.
But then the department chair asked the administration if it would be OK for our department to front the money for the purchase of the books, and the administration said no, it would not be OK.
The reason given was that the university has a policy of not “going around” the bookstore.
Now I understand the business interests of the bookstore in wanting an exclusivity agreement, but I don’t know why such a policy is really in the interests of the university.
Or, to put it another way: shouldn’t there be a policy that the university will help students get the best resources available? Or reward faculty who figure out ways to teach more effectively while reducing costs? You can imagine how disincentivized I will be in the future to try to work out a deal like this at this university.
What to do, what to do?
I think there’s a valuable lesson here: use your policies to help you help your employees and customers. Policies should be useful tools that can be–and should be–modified when necessary for you to achieve your goals. If your policies are running you, instead of being sensibly used by you, chances are they’re doing lasting harm to your business relationships.
Ahhh I hear you so clearly. At the very same bookstore, two of the last three semesters, the books for my class arrived at the bookstore several weeks into the semester. On both occasions it happened to be the week they normally return the unused books, so what do they do? Ship them right back to the publisher before my students even have a chance to discover they’re available. Classic!
There are so many ways the campus ‘contracting’ system is harmful to the students and employees, and to the university. They negotiate exclusive contracts with outside vendors for nearly every product and service. Even the ATM in the student union is an exclusive contract–and it has outrageously high fees. How does that serve the campus community? Wouldn’t some competition between banks and machines be a good thing? Vending machines are done the same way, but the rules in the contract are so cumbersome to follow that no vending business can manage to make it work… the result? They took out all the snack machines. And don’t get me started on disposal of assets… instead of being able to sell or trade in unwanted gear to those who need it and will pay good money for it, we have to use the university’s contracted auctioneer who, you guessed it, has an exclusive deal for the disposition of any and all assets… the result here is that your stuff, including multi-thousand-dollar scientific instruments, sits on pallets outdoors in the dust wind and rain for months on end waiting for the auction, in the middle of nowhere, attended by a mere dozen or two locals–and they won’t let buyers test anything, thus guaranteeing that it all sells for scrap metal prices.
Somehow all of this came out of an original intent that was ostensibly meant to serve the campus. But policies got put in place to prevent poor quality service, abuse, fraud, nepotism, and whatever other evils frighten administrators more than throwing away money–and it all ends up reinforcing one of the universal truths of civilized life… you can’t legislate quality. It’s unavoidably counterproductive. Trying to define quality at the lawmaking level is what inevitably leads to the deterioration of exactly that which it was meant to protect. I have yet to witness an exception.
Andy: Thanks for your post. When I read (and recognize) your remarks, it reminds me of the “don’t get mad; get even” advice I hear sometimes.
Because it’s advice, it’s impossible to follow. Usually, we do get mad, and we only fantasize about getting even.
Maybe these needn’t be the only two options. If we were able to reliably, consistently take these maddening stimuli and transform them, we’d save ourselves a lot of nasty chemicals released into our bloodstreams. Of course, we’d be saints (or at least martyrs), too.
My brother has good advice on this topic. After 15+ years at Los Alamos, he has learned to redirect that negative energy into finding creative work-arounds to the bureaucratic frustrations. He takes it on as a challenge. I have tried that at times on campus, and it works sometimes, but it’s not nearly as satisfying as doing things sensibly in the first place, especially when you end up back at square one after working hard on a solution and getting roadblocked again. It doesn’t take too many of those failures to decide to just keep standing on square one and quit trying to improve things. But I swore to myself early on that, if I ever found myself doing that, I would get out.