April 4, 2011

  • Customers or Students?

    My office mate sent me a link to this:

    "But maybe times have changed. Maybe students are so used to our consumer-driven society that they have an inaccurate sense of entitlement. They believe the customer is always right. Maybe it's true, and customers are always right. Maybe the academic and business sides of education have become so blurred that my title of assistant professor has actually been changed to 'educational liaison,' and I am only supposed to teach students what they want to know and nothing more.

    I'm sure if that change did actually happen, it would make my job easier. I would no longer have to worry about disrespecting anyone because students—or as they would probably be called, learning clients—would be permitted to answer the phone in class whenever they wanted, to pick which days to come to class, and to determine when, or even if, tests and papers would be assigned.

    If students were dissatisfied with my service, they could fill out a complaint form, and I would tell them that someone would contact them in 24 to 48 hours. Or I could use some of the great customer-service lines I've heard in my life. For example, when my cellphone wouldn't work in my new house, a customer-service representative said that he could see on the company's map that I live near a lake, and the lake was 'absorbing the cellphone waves, and there's nothing we can do about it.'

    So if students ever questioned why they hadn't learned anything in my class, I guess I could simply state, 'The lake has absorbed all of your knowledge, and there's nothing we can do about that.'"

    "Faculty members were being asked to be responsible for students instead of creating a system within the classroom that makes the students responsible for themselves." YIKES.

    "Plus, I had to think of the other customers who earned my respect by taking their academic success seriously. Those students acted like they saw the giant lake and wanted to do everything they could to keep it from absorbing them."

    I don't want to fall into that trap of "kids these days" and "they think they are so entitled to stuff!" but... there is something going on. I don't think I saw the same issues when I taught about a decade ago for a university. And, when I first got here, I only really ran into "English is stupid" and "I'll never need this kind of class" comments; it feels like the "you need to please me" stuff is becoming bigger. But I could be wrong. And I'm willing to admit that.