Let Me Clear My Throat

If I may, and, well, I may, because it's my damn blog...

I started out typing this in the comment section of the previous post, and I realized that it was quickly becoming WAY too long for a comment. There is quite a bit of debate within academia about the "business model" of the university, with administrators being "pro" and professors usually being "anti", generally speaking of course. Here is my own two cents on the matter.

I think the push to turn universities into businesses is a terrible idea. Students are already so overly consumer minded that they believe they pay for grades, when what they really pay for is my time. The trade off is their cash for my expertise. They almost to the man think that their cash is a trade off for an A. A business model, especially one based on the American capitalist system, assumes that businesses (universities) will have to compete for customers (students), and that free competition will somehow create better businesses.

Here's the problem with that. Student customers are, well, uneducated. Otherwise they wouldn't be coming to school, obviously, they'd already know everything. Or, they'd go to a trade school and learn only those things which they had to know to perform the job. A college education assumes you're getting a "well-rounded" education, and students aren't always the best judge of what makes good civic and intelligent citizens. They often don't know what they want to learn until they try it (which is why so many of them end up switching majors two or three times), and they often don't appreciate difficult professors until they're finished with the class. Often they'll end up saying things like "I really hated Professor X, but three years later I realize the value in why he made me do such and such." Universities already use a form of "customer satisfaction" surveys in the evaluations that students have to fill out at the end of each course. What students often put in these surveys doesn't match what the teacher is actually doing in the classroom. In other words, if students really disliked Professor X, were thrilled to get out of his class, and ripped him a new one on his evaluations, the logical conclusion is that Professor X is bad for university business, and he should be fired. Turns out these same kids, though, three years later decide that Professor X's strategy was what really taught them about critical thinking, or lab work, or whatever. Unfortunately, Prof X has already been out of a job for three years, because the business model says "The customer is always right." Most of the time in education, they are not.

Witness the fact that many universities are cutting out their Classics programs and sometimes their entire philosophy departments. Why? Because the number of students taking the classes doesn't justify the cost of keeping the department going. After all, who needs philosophy? And what linguist in his right mind would bother taking Latin? It is a dead language, after all, isn't it? Universities could so easily reroute the fate of these courses and have them packed out simply by requiring philosophy, for example, as part of your liberal arts core. But they often don't require it, and almost always that decision is made because the student customer isn't interested in it and because the administration is made up of businessmen rather than academics, or a decent mix of both. And so many students miss out on something vital to their "well-rounded" education just because they don't like the look of Logic 101. The customer is always right.

Education is not particularly suited to a capitalistic business model, because the process of learning is not about transactions. Quite frankly, it's not my job to wipe their asses, and that's what the consumer model of education is all about. I'm not carrying shit to their car, metaphorically speaking. Students don't learn by having me do all of the heavy lifting. Learning isn't a transaction, like so many other capitalistic metaphors are about. It's an evolution.

As such, I really don't care if they're "satisfied", because so much in education requires you to dig down within yourself to be satisfied with your learning. It is true that there are bad teachers, and I'm not insinuating that students are completely ignorant and cannot tell the difference whatsoever. I do, after all, teach Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which is aimed at educational practices. But so many students use such incredibly ludicrous standards to judge a professor (believe me, I've read plenty of evaluations, although mine are almost always good)--they are rarely in a position to understand why teachers make certain pedagogical decisions. They often judge the teacher's personality rather than the presentation of the material, and that is what is so dangerous about putting the "end user" solely in charge of the direction of the university.

And quite honestly, the results of them having been "in charge" of universities are very, very apparent. Philosophy departments gutted and gone are but one example. The best example? Students kept complaining about how "hard" the analogy part of the SATs were. So the SATs got rid of it, and the colleges didn't even make a fuss. That's just like..........well....it's similar to........well, geez, not having learned how to make a proper analogy, I really can't finish the sentence, can I??

The reason universities stink today is because we've lowered our standards, not because it's easier for people to afford them. Sure, there are some people who are totally blowing through their government loan or their scholarship money, and it would probably be better spent on somebody else. But students wouldn't feel so entitled to a college degree if their parents and their society didn't cuddle them from the time they were babies to think they deserved everything for absolutely no good reason. They don't know how to work any more. I've seen it slip from the time I've been an undergraduate, and people, that's not really been all that long ago.

If we keep lowering our standards, our kids will keep sinking to meet them.

-- Virgil

*And MD, no, I'm not pissed at you. I'm just declaring my position.