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Universities should
ease textbook burden
Re: “Is higher education worth the money?” (Page B1, May 12).
While long-term benefits are helpful when looking at colleges, the cost is what has been the decision factor in my experience. I am transferring to UC Berkeley from a community college. Berkeley gave me the most financial aid to attend. While this is good, there are other costs that I hadn’t had to deal with, like textbook costs.
At my college, I have been able to take 75% of my courses using Open Educational Resource (OER) textbooks. Not having to use my Pell Grant to pay for my textbooks meant I could use that money toward food and housing.
OER textbooks can help low-income students attend college, and this is where many UCs are lacking. UC Berkeley should incentivize OER adoption to support their low-income students. Students would have a weight off their shoulders if they didn’t have to deal with the burden of paying for textbooks.
Abbigail Schwartz
Berkeley
Stop march of fascism
with November vote
On Sunday my husband and I watched a PBS special “The Rise of Fascism.” For those who don’t know what fascism is, it’s a “far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy and forcible suppression of opposition.” It started in Italy during World War I and spread from there. Mussolini embraced it, then Hitler adopted it and the rest is horrifying history.
Watching that program was just like watching Donald Trump, and his close allies and supporters. My husband and I are “baby boomers” born after World War II and we know individuals who experienced European fascism, and it was dreadful.
Look at the frightening recent European election results with far-right winners. Unless Americans take less interest in “social media” and more interest in history and what’s happening here and worldwide, we’ll be living under fascism if Trump is reelected. Then what will Americans do?
Ramona Krausnick
Dublin
GOP would rather act
up than praise system
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Well, I see the GOP has nothing to say about the Hunter Biden case since the president made the statement “that he accepts the judicial system’s decision.” That is true democracy at work, not blaming someone else for what happened.
Maybe someone else should take notice and eat some crow, but we all know that will never happen. So sad. See Trumpsters, the system really works if you will just trust it, but I guess that will never happen either.
It could be so easy to work together, but there are some who would rather see just how much trouble they can make. It can be so easy to work on problems together but again there are so many troublemakers that it will not happen either.
Robert Klingenberg
Antioch
