Bought and Sold

Over at The Pope Center, a professor critiques the current higher education model that suggests students are customers of their college or university.

Although he says universities should remember to hold themselves accountable to the students, parents, alumni and taxpayers who send them money, they probaby err when they see the students as customers of their services. He lists a number of damaging effects that this mentality visits on the university and its primary purposes of educating people and promoting the life of the mind in individuals and society as a whole.

He overlooks one, though, as I see it. One of the major guiding principles of any business is that the customer is always right. Nobody who says this really means that every customer is correct in every detail of the business's interactions with them. What they mean is that their ultimate goal is to build and maintain relationships with customers, and that said goal is much more important than winning an argument with a customer about some issue. Should a sales clerk disagree with a customer, the manager knows that people will apply to be sales clerks, but he or she has to go out and hunt for customers. Therefore, the manager will side with the customer in the event that the sales clerk has not already gone ahead and done so.

You can see how this would be a problem for a university or college. Students are not always right. In fact, their presence at college assumes they are right at best occasionally and more likely rarely. If they weren't, they wouldn't need to be taught things. This goes across the board -- if I already know how to do something, then I wouldn't necessarily take the class.

For example, a quick assessment of my skills prior to 9th grade algebra would show that I did not know how to solve a quadratic equation. Had I tried, I would not have been right. Had I seen myself as a customer, then I would have expected to have been deemed right whether I was or not, which would have been swell for my self esteem and my grade point but of no value whatsoever to my ability to solve quadratic equations.

The student-teacher relationship doesn't fit well into the customer model. Yes, teachers provides a service for which the students (or their proxy, either Mom and Dad or you and me, via Uncle Sam), pay. But that service is unlike many in that it presumes students are wrong to start with and need to be set straight.

Maybe there's a course somewhere that teaches that.