Last semester, I wrote about the unfortunate downfalls of the Red Stack Direct textbook program that Fairfield had newly implemented. In that article, I lampooned the cost of the program, argued against the textbooks’ loose structure and generally complained about the entire process from start to finish.
This semester, I have the pleasure of informing you, dear readers, that much of what made Red Stack Direct a pain last semester has been resolved.
“How could this be?” you may ask. After all, Fairfield, for all the wonderful things there are to say about it, has an unfortunate tendency to be slow to respond to criticism. Just look at the years-long debate between the town of Fairfield and Fairfield University with parties on the beach, which has been reported on by both The Mirror and The Rearview.
This time, however, Fairfield seems to have spent the previous semester learning from their mistakes and has come back with a program that, while still expensive, is far more efficient than before.
While Stags attempting to pick up their books last semester had to wait in long lines just to get to the counter, that wait seems to have disappeared almost entirely this semester. Personally, my wait was all of thirty seconds. Other Stags had to wait a few minutes at most. Anyone who can remember the process of picking up textbooks last semester will know that this decrease is monumental.
The structure of the textbooks, too, seems to have changed. Last semester, students complained about stacks of loose paper and needed to purchase binders separately to somehow put their textbooks into one piece. While this is still the case for some texts, for the most part, textbooks are now bound as any normal book would be, eliminating the hassle and extra costs that Stags were previously burdened with.
Indeed, the issues inherent to such a complex process seem to have also been eliminated on the side of the people running the distribution. When given my name, they were quick to find my textbooks and send me on my way. Even more significant, none of the textbooks were missing, which seemed to be the case for some Stags last semester.
Unfortunately, the program isn’t perfect yet. One Stag, Aidan Maione ‘28, informed me that their entire class was missing the textbooks required for their course. Evidently, the issues in delivering textbooks, which were previously difficult to track and largely on an individual basis, are now more elementary. Some classes just didn’t get a specific text at all, which is a pretty simple issue to solve, all things considered.
Does this mean that I recommend Red Stack Direct?
Again, I would caution readers about the cost. This semester, with one of my courses requiring 10 textbooks, I got the better end of the deal by utilizing Red Stack Direct. Other students, however, are finding that locating their texts for decreased prices is far easier than paying the flat cost of Red Stack. Indeed, many methods of finding texts for free seem to be gaining in popularity around campus, and, honestly, it is hard to blame students who try. Textbooks have been too expensive for too long, and while last semester, Fairfield seemed to be taking advantage of that, this semester the program seems to be exactly what it is advertised as. It really may be a way to alleviate some of that cost.
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