Student as Customer: More than Language

In a recent opinion piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education, David M. Perry cogently argued against the use of "corporate-speak" at colleges and universities. Responding to a job announcement that included the provision of "excellent customer service" as a requirement for faculty candidates, Perry concluded by saying, "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." I agree, but think the argument could be extended beyond language.

It is not just that references to students as customers has infiltrated higher education discourse, principally amongst administrators. Indeed, it is increasingly the case that college and university professionals assume that students are consumers who demand consumer amenities. There is a subtle difference between talking about students as customers and assuming that they are consumers, but it is a significant difference. The logic of student as consumer is powerfully shaping the geography of campuses and college towns. It also influences student conduct in potentially alarming ways.

Whereas the customer exchanges one type of valued good or service for another, the consumer buys an identity, or a sense of middle class belonging and comfort. As noted in a rejoinder to Perry's article, colleges and universities should not have to build their service delivery model around customer demands, but they do need to be sensitive to providing high quality products and pay some attention to satisfaction. Yet what does it mean for colleges and universities to assume that students are consumers who demand consumer amenities? It means, for one thing, creating opportunities for students to express their identity, and hopefully their affinity to the institution, through spending on consumer goods. The manifestation of such opportunities would most obviously be the outrageously priced campus book store, where students can proudly advertise their achievement through sweatshirts, hand bags, and bumper stickers.

Moreover, it means allowing, and sometimes encouraging, students to buy the consumer goods that cultivate a sense of belonging and comfort. This means setting up places where students can purchase all of the accoutrement that signals their membership in middle class America. It should come as no surprise that there is a strong cultural link between higher education institutions and middle class status, as colleges and universities have long been considered an essential pipeline to upward mobility. Evidence of encouraging consumerist behavior can be found in the agreements many schools establish with Apple, making it possible for students to easily purchase iPhones and iPads. It is also why Starbucks has become ubiquitous on college campuses: the white Starbucks cup with the brown sleeve is about more than caffeine. It says something about being able to buy a fairly expensive cup of joe and to be seen drinking it. The meaning attached to Starbucks is why there are so many imitator white cups and brown sleeves. It has little to do with coffee and everything to do with symbolism.

When college and university administrators think of students as consumers, they encourage students to spend their way to feeling normal and accepted at a time when many struggle with self-doubt, imposter syndrome, and the exclusivity common to institutions striving for selectivity. The implications of this orientation extend beyond language to the physical constitution of campuses and outlying areas. As I have previously argued, many colleges and universities are now partnering with private industry to create mixed use housing and retail developments. I call these concentrated campus-based consumption areas, as high end student apartments are fused with Chipotle, Starbucks, and other businesses to which students flock. The quaint college town and the brick and pillar campus is slowly being replaced with every variety of space dedicated to consumer capitalism. When higher education spaces as transformed into concentrated campus-based consumption areas, what happens to student behavior?

Quite naturally, those who can, spend freely. These trend-setters and norm-makers tend to be those whose parents provide plenty of discretionary funds, recharging student ID/campus debit cards as needed. Less well-off students seek to emulate their upper crust peers and follow suit by finding ways to spend in similar fashion, sometimes working jobs in order to have the disposable income required to sustain an active consumer lifestyle. No student wants to feel outside the norm, so on campuses where spending dictates belonging, the assumption of students as consumers can shape behavior, yielding a vicious cycle. Perhaps more alarmingly, it can alter student subjectivities, such that one only feels like a true college student if they buy the UnderArmour hoodie, live in the luxury student apartment high rise, surf Facebook on a MacBook, and patronize Starbucks.

In other words, for all the reasons cited above, our sense of outrage should not stop at the encroaching dominance of "corporate-speak," however damaging such public discourse can be. We should challenge the prevalent logic that students are consumers who demand sites of consumption in order to attend this or that higher education institution. It is true that faculty are not cashiers, but language of students as customers is simply one byproduct of an entire logic system that has found traction in higher education. If the college experience, and campus geography, is increasingly dictated by the swipe of a card, it will be difficult to suggest that education is somehow different from anything else or outside the realm of consumption.

Academics: The Next Generation

This blog, which started as gymnasium for thought exercises, may actually outlive my doctoral training and dissertation. I recently accepted an assistant professor position, and writing is built into my job description. This is exciting for a number of reasons, including the fact that I love to write. In deciding to go the academic route, I seek to follow the example of a few others (here’s an example from David Perry) who have worked hard to ensure that they apply their training to issues outside narrow specializations and write for broader audiences. My hope is that this blog may continue to evolve—and improve—in order to serve as a launching point for strong writing about important issues. Ambitious though it may be, I am setting a goal to write one post a week.

When I received my informal job offer letter, the dean of the college remarked that he was excited to share that I will be joining a strong cohort of in-coming assistant professors. I started to speculate about who these other neophytes might be and how we might relate to one another, if at all. Inspired by the Beloit College Mindset List, I started thinking not just about my soon-to-be colleagues, but also about the characteristics of all new assistant professors. What might be the defining experiences of my generation of academics? Here are a few predictions, based entirely upon my own opinions and stories from few friends who recently started gigs at colleges and universities. Empirically-driven? Not at all. The hop from “generation” to “generalization” is a short one.

#1 We won’t be called professor. I’m not referring to whether our students call us Dr. X, Professor Y, or just plain Z. Rather, trends tell us that very few of my generation will be on the tenure-track, and given the inability of academic reward systems to recognize the plurality of scholarship, many of us on the tenure-track will struggle with being evaluated by the standards of the older generations. Not only will few of us be called professor, but virtually none of us will bear the adjunct title. Instead, institutions will respond to the growing ranks of non-tenure-track faculty (both instructional and non-instructional) and develop new titles that reflect the diverse and sometimes specialized job responsibilities of these hardworking friends and colleagues.

#2 We’ll complain about work-life balance. But we’ll have no idea how to achieve it. This is a generation that highly values careers that bring us meaning, and we wholesale subscribe to the idea that work should not conflict with our ability to be well and have a family. And this is a good thing. However, we are also a generation that has been competing in a Darwinian model of academic meritocracy for years. We are hard-wired for achievement and striving for success. Although we will constantly bemoan the difficulty in finding enough time for work and outside life—and frequently blame our employers—we will come to realize that our expectations and goals are the biggest impediment to balance. This realization won’t come until after a long period of talking and writing about the topic.

#3 We’ll teach courses online. Not because this is necessarily our preference or because we are advocates of some innovative revolution in higher education, but because we were hired into departments or programs that were structured around online teaching. We want jobs, so online we go. My generation will largely be responsible for answering lingering questions about quality and scalability in online teaching. We will also be the generation that contends most frequently with the matter of ownership over courseware and other instructional materials designed in the process of teaching online.

#4 We’ll write for popular online publications. Academic publishing is rapidly changing, and my generation will approach the dissemination of our scholarship in novel ways. We are a generation rather accustomed to having a public presence through social media, and we devour listicles and online journal articles with addict-like ferocity. Look out for a generation of academics who are more interested in publishing for Slate, The New Yorker, or The Chronicle of Higher Education than an academic journal. This is not to say that we’ll abandon more scholarly publication outlets—we know we’ll need peer-reviewed books, chapters, and articles to earn tenure. But when we are in charge of departments, we’ll vote to broaden the umbrella of appropriate means for sharing scholarship.

#5 We’ll have less power on campuses. Sure, faculty on some colleges and universities will unionize. However, the power of administrators will continue to grow, and my generation will be ill-equipped to retain the faculty voice in decision-making or protect institutions of shared governance from being hollowed out. We are not a generation of activists, and we express our outrage through Twitter and Facebook, not sit-ins and picket lines. Given the high salaries of administrators compared to faculty, many of us will be motivated to assume administrative roles. This is not a bad thing, but the demands of running complex organizations usually require acquiescence over civil disobedience.

#6 We’ll completely reinvent the academic conference. With a few exceptions, academic conferences are astoundingly out of touch with how my generation communicates. We will work to make academic conferences more developmental and experiential. I’m talking about the death knell of PowerPoint presentations and the excommunication of whomever decided that reading a paper word-for-word constitutes an engaging way of sharing your life’s work. Picture, instead, TED talk-like presentations, more interactive workshops, and partnerships with local communities. And we’ll stop wearing those plastic name badges—just because.

Some of these predictions capture unfortunate new realities in academic life, and I don’t particularly welcome those changes. However, some of them are remarkably exciting and provide opportunities for my generation to translate our work in new, more accessible ways. I look forward to thinking about this list and adding to it. More importantly, I can’t wait to see if my predictions materialize in the future.

What would you add or refute?

The Tyranny of Trajectory

I had already spent a few months on the job market, when I received my first call to phone interview for a tenure-track faculty position. After applying to a few schools, I had become accustomed to the sound of crickets. Given that this was my first interview of any kind for a coveted faculty position, I could feel my heart rate almost instantaneously flare. Blocking from my mind the full implications of those thirty minutes, I developed a simple plan to research the university and talk with my advisers.

What I most wanted to know from my advisers was what kind of questions to expect. Their answers varied. “Be prepared to talk about your teaching philosophy,” said one. Another recommended finding other faculty members with whom I might be interested in collaborating. The one common denominator in their suggestions was that I should be able to explain my research “program,” “agenda,” or “trajectory.”

I sat down prior to the interview and typed out a teaching philosophy. I searched for faculty members who shared my interests and wrote their names down on a legal pad. Each time I confronted the question of my “trajectory,” I paused and, sensing no forthcoming inspiration, moved on to something else. 

What exactly was my trajectory? Looking at my CV, it would be difficult to discern. I suffer from what one might call academic ADD. Try as I might, I can’t seem to stay focused on a research topic for more than two years. As I became increasingly frustrated with crafting some magic bullet that could connect what a search committee might characterize as a meandering mind, I saw that the ramifications of trajectory ripple quite broadly.

One the one hand, I recognize why a department would be interested to learn what it is I hope to examine in the future. Offering a job to an assistant professor is rather like making an investment, and this notion of trajectory is one way to determine the returns. Yet how does one really evaluate trajectory? It seems partially predicated on sameness—how many pieces of scholarship are related. After all, I doubt that someone would look at CV with four journal articles about four different topics and conclude the scholar has a clear trajectory. If sameness is not, in fact, important then surely trajectory is evaluated through the extent to which a scholar shows some sense of direction. Setting aside the fact that neither means of evaluation are particularly scientific, criteria like sameness and sense of direction raise questions that merit scrutiny.

My objection to sameness is not that it is boring. Rather, sameness does not afford much possibility for a young scholar to decide his or her research is old news, ill-suited to the big questions de jour, hopelessly flawed, or perhaps even irrelevant. Radically re-routing is an important part of scholarship, but fear of appearing unfocused may force a young scholar to remain married to untenable projects. Worse yet, it may encourage job-seekers to mine the same data over and over to produce the highest quantity of papers or presentations. Although this tactic may ensure an applicant conveys trajectory, it may be a poor indicator of quality.

Sense of direction is problematic in situations where a researcher is inspired to pursue several directions—to explore the problems that keep them awake at night and embrace the inherent multiplicity of knowledge. Diving deep into a topic, developing expertise, and creating scholarship based upon that expertise over a long period of time has become the norm in academe. Of course, there is good reason for encouraging the pursuit of a single pathway, as expertise can inform teaching, generate grant money, bolster promotion, and produce breakthroughs.

However, the pursuit of a single pathway can also stifle innovation. This point was reinforced in a TED talk upon which I recently stumbled, featuring Liz Coleman of Bennington College. Speaking about the liberal arts, Coleman declared, “The expert has dethroned the educated generalist to become the sole model of intellectual accomplishment. Expertise has had its moments, but the price is enormous.” 

Indeed, it could be trajectory that has led academic work down a never ending tunnel of greater specialization. In order to demonstrate expertise, all of my publications should uncover the minutiae of an issue and analyze every angle of an argument. This hardly seems useful to the public and could render scholarship bereft of meaning for the young scholar.

In the end, I took the advice of a professor with over 20 years in the game. He told me to stay true to myself, as the search committee saw my record and were no doubt aware of my dabbling in many areas. I didn’t search for a magic bullet to connect my work, but rather talked about the evolution of my thinking and the publications that best reflected my diverse interests. This strategy paid off, and I was offered the position. This could, in part, be attributed to the type of institution, a teaching-oriented university, where the “educated generalist” is highly valued.

At least I hope this is the case. I will likely face questions about trajectory again when I come up for tenure. In my previous work in faculty affairs, I saw tenure candidates denied at a research university simply because their research program lacked trajectory. Of course, this is not the sole criterion in tenure decisions, but its influence should be reduced. As scholarship becomes increasingly collaborative and non-traditional, and as many academic seek ways to link their research to community needs, trajectory either needs to be redefined or erased in the assessment of scholarship.