This month Texas
A&M University at Kingsville posted a new job ad for a faculty member in
early-modern/Renaissance literature. The first line of the "job
summary" reads, in all capital letters: "PROVIDE EXCELLENT CUSTOMER
SERVICE." A bit lower, the job description mentions that the selected
candidate will have to teach four courses a semester while remaining "active
in research, professional development, and service to the university and
profession."
The ad represents
a culmination of dangerous trends in higher education that threaten to erode
the single most important relationship we form in our profession: the complex,
multifaceted one between teacher and student.
For years now,
corporate language and thinking has invaded academe, correlating with many
other trends—the decline of public funding from states, the rising price of
tuition, the amenities arms-race in student housing, the administrative bloat,
the demands of assessment culture, and, most of all, the general saturation of
corporate-speak into academic life. Institutions, especially branch campuses of
public university systems and small private colleges, feel perpetually strapped
for cash and desperate for tuition revenue.
In that context,
the attempt to shift the world of higher education into the business paradigm
seems rational to administrators: Without customers—i.e., students—faculty jobs
will be cut, programs shuttered, and staff members "downsized."
Meanwhile,
students (and their families) are taking on ever-increasing amounts of debt,
paying higher tuition, and fearing that they will never earn enough to make
those costs worthwhile (although a recent study from the Pew Research Center
found that "for millennials, a bachelor’s degree continues to pay
off"). It’s no wonder that American students in particular bring the cult
of "the customer is always right" to the college campus. They’ve paid
their money—or they will over the next 30 years or so—now they want service.
But public
discourse has consequences for how we think and act. Tell faculty members that
they are obligated to treat students like customers, and the instructors will
either eschew rigor in favor of making satisfaction guaranteed or work
defensively lest they be harangued by the irate customer. Tell students that
they are consumers, and they will act like consumers but ultimately learn less
and perhaps not even receive the credential that they think they are buying.
Students who
believe that they are mere customers are selling themselves short, as are the
faculty members and administrators who apply business-speak to the classroom.
Students are not customers to be served. They are far more important than that.
Customer service
implies participating in a system of transaction or exchange in which one side
provides a service to another. While plenty of money changes hands,
universities don’t really sell a product, not in the sense that "customer
service" implies, anyway. At most, I think we might argue that students
are purchasing a well-structured opportunity to learn or obtain (we hope)
meaningful credentials. The "well-structured" point is critical. When
I hear students explicitly define themselves as customers, it’s often in the
context of perceived bad teaching, a sense that the structure surrounding the
learning opportunity is somehow deficient.
It’s not just
that students want simply to buy a degree. Students place reasonable
desires—faster grading, fewer lectures, more lectures, more preparation,
clearer grading standards, etc.—into the framework of commerce. It’s a way of
reversing the power dynamics. A customer holds a special place in our society.
They have the right to complain, pressure, and go over the head of the worker
to the management.
I sympathize with
students who employ the language of commerce in order to get redress for real
problems, even as I resist the ones who demand customer satisfaction in the
form of easy As for little-to-no work. But I can’t blame those students for
unrealistic expectations when it’s the institution itself that has introduced
business-speak to the education process. As Melonie Fullick noted in a 2012
essay, "Can Education Be Sold?," once a student has been
indoctrinated into the discourse of education as commerce, it’s difficult to
then say, "’You’ve paid $6,000; now you have to do the work,’ because that
arrangement simply doesn’t fit with consumerist logic."
Education is
created, not consumed, but we cannot expect students to believe that when every
message from academe itself tells them that they can just buy it.
In addition, any
short-term power that students gain over their professors by introducing a
controlling commercial metaphor into the classroom dynamic is more than
mitigated by the losses. Faculty members respond to the student-as-consumer by
teaching defensively, fearing the management that we formerly referred to as
administration. But administrators administrate on behalf of the faculty.
Employees delivering customer service get managed.
The syllabus is
one place where the defensive crouch of the customer-service professor hurts
student learning. Many faculty members and some teaching centers talk about the
syllabus as a contract, an explicit use of the corporate-speech in the
classroom. The contractual model has some positive aspects. It’s a way of
increasing the stakes in order to push students to actually read the syllabus
and try to create a sense of reciprocal obligation. In a contract, both sides
are obligated to hold to its terms.
I’m not at all
sure that works because, in my experience, students actually treat the syllabus
more as an End User License Agreement—something for which one glances at
briefly, clicks "agree to terms," and moves on to the product without
reading any of the document.
In any case, I
don’t think encouraging notions of reciprocity lie at the heart of the
emergence of the lengthy, faux-legalistic syllabus-as-contract. Instead, such a
document functions as a form of pre-emptive defense from lawsuits or
disciplinary complaints lodged by students upset about their grades, wanting
special exemptions, or otherwise responding to challenges in the classroom—much
like a customer angry at a business for providing lousy or incorrect service.
So we wonder:
Maybe the syllabus as end-user agreement is the right model? After all, we know
many students don’t read the syllabus, and in a dispute we can wield it like
lawyer underlining the fine print. And in hearings and lawsuits, the defensive
syllabus works pretty well. It just doesn’t help with learning.
A
learning-centered syllabus, like a learning-centered class, offers a
well-organized (one hopes) plan and an opportunity to learn. It’s not a
defensively legalistic document or a way to trick students into agreeing to
your terms.
Some of my
absolute best classes have resulted from enabling the students to shift the
trajectory of the course over time, an approach that’s difficult with the
language of contract hemming us in. As a teacher, my goal isn’t to sell a
product or to "PROVIDE EXCELLENT CUSTOMER SERVICE." At my best, I
push my students, encourage them, beg, plead, cajole, debate, critique, and
praise. Perhaps I’m a romantic, but I believe in teaching as a vocation and a
craft, not a sale. I believe that it’s possible to turn a class into a
microcommunity of learners and teachers. Such an approach yields some of the
power back to the students and makes us collaborators, all governed by
expectations, feedback, evaluations, and conversations.
So let’s move
past this language of customer and service. For all that we need revenue,
students are not mere customers to be wrung out for tuition in the short term
and donations in the future. Faculty members are not cashiers, ringing up the
bill when students check out with knowledge—and not because that would be
demeaning to the professor, but because the responsibility of a teacher to his
or her students is far greater than the employee to the customer.
