You begin this editorial with a bite of sarcasm toward the students who are advocating for high-quality, low-cost textbooks. Perhaps this energy can be channeled more productively into opening dialogues with your professors on open education resources and open textbooks so they might adopt them over more expensive publisher created content. You could also call Sen. McCain and Sen. Kyl and ask them to add the textbook amendment to the HEA.

As for the issue of tuition, textbooks and tuition costs cannot be compared. Tuition is a matter of state taxes, state funding and politics. Textbooks are an issue of companies raping a captivated market place. Textbooks, housing and food costs are all important issues to look at separately from tuition.

It is foolish to suggest we will have all our textbooks for free over night. But this can almost be the case for several subjects. Please visit the ASNAU office and we will show you what a free textbook looks like. Today is indeed Thursday, and you can have free textbooks.