Yep, the bad thing here was going around established bureaucratic procedure.
If he bought them on his own, and gave them out to the kids at no charge, wouldn’t have been a problem.
It crossed a line to then turn around and charge the students for the books. Clearly he violated established policy to do so.
And, the way things are, if you violate established policy in a bureaucracy, you are in trouble.
I disagree:
My long-time friend routinely saw blatant violations of state and federal laws regarding political issues and union laws; as long as the violations were in accord with leftist propaganda, all was well. (It is a major reason she left public school teaching, despite being highly regarded as a teacher by her peers, and despite being many students’ all-time favorite teacher.)
The real thing that gets one in trouble with today’s bureaucracies is being Christian and/or conservative.
Case in point: Hillary Clinton has never been sentenced to jail, despite numerous massive violations; Dinesh D’Souza has been, for a singular, relatively minor, technicality.