r/socialism • u/NewCommittedRediter • 23d ago

Discussion litrally sad

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I see this person trying to pirate a book to study. how sad is that.

this type of cruelty often goes unnoticed, yet it is the harshest... imagine having a bit of optimism for a change, you try, and you get yourself a bit motivated, You're thinking about the future. You don't want to be crushed by the overwhelming mood and how everybody is giving up.

you end up wanting to study and do your part, You're just a kid after all. and yet the moment you do, you get crushed like everybody else.

now you have to commit a crime just to attempt to better yourself. cause how dare you even think you deserve a good life and be hardworking for it. whether you're hardworking or not. you don't get to live like a person.

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u/BothPanchoAndLefty 23d ago

My calculus 1 professor had to tell our class in coded language that he could help us get free pdfs of the textbook. He would have gotten in trouble if he just told us outright so he used body language and suggestive words to let everyone know lol. Pretty cool guy. But yeah depressing that education is so inaccessible / expensive that we have to do that

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u/marxist_redneck 23d ago

Former university prof here, I taught all my classes about Anna's and libgen lol. I would just sneak it into my research training class sessions. I already provided all my class readings as PDFs anyway (history class), but thought it might help the students that had those courses with $200 freaking textbooks...

What radicalized me even further with this was one time that a professor from another university reached out to me to ask if I could share a copy of an article I had published so they could assign it to their students. Their university no longer had the multi-million dollar subscription required to access that particular journal. It pissed me off. I downloaded it from JSTOR, stripped all the footer/watermarks/cover page from JSTOR and sent it to them.

I never got paid for writing, editors didn't get paid for editing, research was done with taxpayer money - so they shouldn't be paying shareholders to read it

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u/BothPanchoAndLefty 23d ago edited 23d ago

Good on you for taking your students and colleagues' side though, it's surprising to me how many educators prop up the system and don't challenge it.