please tell him to sell merch. I'm a Michael R. Clarkson super fan and desperately want to show my support in real life.
Because of him I learned ocaml and for this I'm forever grateful.
Naive European here. Are you saying that in America academics sell merchandise for their modules? And students, despite having paid exorbitant sums to sit them, go and buy them?
FWIW I've never heard this happen before. But some courses are very popular with students.
I think Harvard's CS50 hands out yellow rubber ducks to students for free.[1] I see now that you can buy them online, too.[2]
Besides what the sibling post is saying about tuition being earmarked separately from merch, your peers wearing/hauling around course-related merch could also strengthen your impression that the course is good. Therefore you give better course evaluations, which helps your lecturers.
(Lecturers are adjunct faculty which is generally a bad gig.)
No, the merchandise is sold at cost. The class is so popular with students, that students want a token to remember it and so they buy clothing embroidered with the class name.
It's easy to distance yourself from the cost of tuition when it's paid for through a loan (with predatory interest rates, and no escape through bankruptcy).
Meanwhile, the swag is bought with 'your' money, to support the artist (and good teachers are artists, in the most positive sense of the word).
