The other day I overheard a conversation between two college students. The first guy was complaining because one of his professors has a rule that students need to be on time for class. The student said something along the lines of, “I’m the customer, I’m paying the professor’s salary, and if I want to be late that’s my right.” The second student wasn’t so sure about this.
I’m a college professor, and I’m not so sure about it either. In fact, I think the first guy is wrong. Students aren’t customers, they are…Oh, I know what they are! They are students! It’s not like a student in my classes is buying potato chips from me. When a student enrolls in my class, we enter into a relationship with some mutual obligations. For example, I have an obligation to effectively teach the student the subject matter of the class. The student has an obligation to respect certain rules of the classroom; for example, he or she should not try and shout down the instructor or other students or otherwise disrupt the class. The fact that he or she is paying tuition does not give the student the right to control the classroom.
If an instructor wants to make a rule that students need to be on time for class, that’s within the instructor’s rights. Actually, I don’t have such a rule, but if a student is consistently late, I’ll ask them to arrive on time. Being late shows disrespect for the classroom, and it is not fair to the other students either.
But hold on! Let’s take the perspective of the social scientist here. Maybe the student really is a customer, because maybe things have changed and that’s the way people think these days. And in fact, I’ve not only heard the “students are customers” line from students, but from a former president of my university, who wanted to instill a “service orientation” among the faculty.
In fact, this is a great example of something I keep trying to say about our culture of entertainment and consumption, namely, that in our society the logic of entertainment and consumption have started to dominate in areas of life that didn’t originally have anything to do with entertainment. So, for example, my students, who have grown up spending a lot of time in entertaining activities, expect their classes to be entertaining. And you, dear reader, are probably hoping that this blog will be entertaining.
Another thing that happens is that we start to understand many different kinds of relationships in terms of consumption. If you have paid for something, you are a customer, and the other party should try and guarantee your satisfaction.
Personally, I still don’t think that as a teacher I am selling a good or a service to students. But the fact that many people evidently disagree with me makes an important point: In a culture oriented around entertainment and consumption, people will increasingly understand many different realms of life in terms of entertainment and/or consumption. Want another example? Well, Christmas comes to mind; I’ll talk about that in my next post.
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As an instructor at a community college, I sometimes hear this point myself–and also, sometimes, from administrators. I suppose one way we could respond to the students who call themselves our customers is to say, “Yes, you are my customer, and to provide you with the excellent service you richly deserve, I require that you be in class on time. You’re paying me to educate you, and educate you I shall.”
Or we can point to the astonishingly uncritical assumption inherent in the entire analogy: if you pay for something, you can do whatever you want with it. “This is my plastic fork, I paid for it, so you can’t tell me not to jab it in your eye.” “This is my education, I paid for it, so you can’t tell me to do work.”
And of course, since I teach at a public school, I remind students that they are not the only ones who pay for their education.
(No, I wasn’t looking for the blog to be entertaining, but I was looking for it to be thoughtful. Got my wish.)
I agree that one could just go with the customer language, because in fact there are many different sorts of provider/customer relationships and they are often governed by different sorts of understandings. I suppose in one sense a patient is a doctor’s customer, but it’s not in the patient’s interest to think that therefore they control the transaction. Rather, you must grant the doctor some authority, and I think that’s true of a teacher as well.
Thanks for reading and commenting, I’m happy to have thoughtful readers.