West Texas A&M's Faculty Senate voted no confidence in its president last spring, partly for his talk of a “textbook-free” campus. Now he's doubling down. “If a course requires a textbook, the college’s dean will utilize college resources to pay for the textbook—not the student or student fees,” Walter V. Wendler wrote in an email Thursday to students, staff and faculty members. (His message did note that there are a “multitude of examples … which will surface” of “reference books and digital materials,” such as the International Building Code, that won’t be considered “textbooks.”) “I wrote an op-ed published on October 26, 2018, entitled Text-Book Free, Not Free Textbooks,” Wendler wrote. “I waited and prodded for campus responses for five years.
