February 7, 2008
Peer Portfolio
BOOK RENTALS: To battle ever-increasing textbook costs, the book store at the University of California, Davis, is planning a book rental program for students, according to the institution’s newspaper, Dateline.
“We’re looking at it as a way to offer choices: new, used, digital or rental,” the store’s book department told the paper. The store is looking to get the participation of faculty who teach lower division courses that are offered every quarter, and who agree to use the same textbook for six quarters. It’s a little more expensive than buying a book and then selling it back, but does not involve the often high up-front cost of the purchase. The pilot project is beginning this winter.
NO NAME, PLEASE: A group of 13 alumni at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have donated $85 million to the university’s school of business on the condition that it not be named for any donor for at least 20 years.
An early November Associated Press story told how Michael Knetter, when he became dean of the school in 2002, started looking for a big donor who would give $50 million to the school in exchange for having it named for him or her. No one took him up on the offer.
The donation was the largest in the university’s history. “It’s an unprecedented act of selfless philanthropy,” Terry Hartle, senior vice president for the American Council on Education, told the Associated Press. “It’s the most interesting development in philanthropy I’ve seen in the last year.”
DRY SPELL: The drought of 2002 was the worst ever for North Carolina, but the drought under way in the east this year already has it beat, according to the University Gazette, the newspaper of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“The University responded to this year’s water shortage in the same way it did five years ago. It has urged employees, both at home and at work, to limit their water use. It has constructed new buildings designed to capture and reuse rainwater; it has limited the irrigation of athletic fields to a level necessary for the players’ safety; and it has installed new ‘waterless toilets.'”
In a report to the UNC president, Chancellor James Moser said the campus has achieved water savings of about 25 percent.
Peer Portfolio is a compilation of news from our peer institutions.
