Selling Books

One of the perks of being a college teacher is that publishers send out lots of books in the hope that us college teachers will adopt them for our classes. I dont' have to tell you that you get a lot of free books this way. The problem is that it is unusual for these books to be any good. Luckily, there is a small army of people who are willing to buy these books from us, and all we have to do is keep them in a stack until they come around. (I guess that, strictly speaking, we're supposed to return them to the publisher if we don't want them. Failure to do this unnecessarily increases the price of textbooks the students buy. Nevertheless, I have never considered doing this. Does anybody do this?)

The school I teach at has a policy against this sort of thing. It regards these book buyers as trespassers. In the event of a book buyer, the policy says I'm supposed to tell the person to leave campus. And then I'm supposed to call the police. So this morning, when this book buyer came to my office and offered me forty free dollars in exchange for books I didn't want or ask for, I had a choice. I could take the forty bucks, or I could call the cops.

Is this a common policy?

--Mr. Zero