UC To Allocate Cash for Book Costs

The Undergraduate Council (UC) passed legislation last night outlining the details of its plan to secure cheaper textbook prices for students and allocating $1,000 of UC money towards the effort.

The UC had already approved a more general version of the price-slashing proposal in February, voting to support the Harvard College Book Information System (HCBIS), a database that would compile the ISBN numbers of required textbooks on a central Web site, replacing a system that currently involves unwieldy coordination between professors, the libraries, and the Coop.

But yesterday’s legislation marked “the culmination” of the UC’s focus on lowering book prices and signaled a turn towards the “nitty-gritty” aspects of acting on that focus, according to Student Affairs Committee (SAC) chair Michael R. Ragalie ’09.

The relevant proposal spanned seven of the UC’s 10-page meeting agenda, boasted two appendices, and included two schematics detailing the present and future configurations for the sharing of textbook and coursepack information.

Currently, the Coop, Harvard College Libraries, and crimsonreading.org—the UC’s own website that compares textbook prices among different book retailers—fail to collaborate in the collection of crucial textbook information, according to yesterday’s legislation.

With the institution of the new system, however, the textbook information will go from professors and departments directly into the HCBIS system, where it will be processed and made accessible to the interested parties.

Streamlining the information as well as making coursepacks electronic should “save students a total of $1.5 million annually off the current prices of books and coursepacks at the Coop,” read the legislation.

Ragalie said the number was similar to figures derived by the Office of Financial Aid in their yearly study on costs.

Ragalie and other UC representatives have been meeting with administrators for the past few weeks to convince them to sign on to the project.

“The question [with the plan] is the amount of support we’re going to get from the College,” Ragalie said, adding that the UC will implement the plan regardless.

His certitude in that regard was corroborated by Vice-President Matthew L. Sundquist ’09.

“We’re going to keep talking about cheaper textbooks and coursepacks until somebody listens,” Sundquist said.

The textbook plan passed unanimously and with little discussion, but yesterday’s UC meeting was not bereft of contention.

Subject to debate was last week’s legislation in support of the “UC rides” program, which was passed to facilitate the arrangement of collective student transport to Logan airport.

The council’s support of the program sparked e-mails condemning the use of UC funding for such a venture. The discontent caused Mather UC representative Matthew R. Greenfield ’08—by means of an obscure constitutional rule of order—to ask for a retroactive amendment, which was not upheld, according to both Greenfield and Sundquist.

—Staff writer Christian Flow can be reached at cflow@fas.harvard.edu.