By Lee Trepanier, Aug 4, 2009 in Pedagogy and Teaching, Academic Life Outside the Classroom
In an article in the February Inside Higher Ed called “The Business Model is the Wrong Model,” Peter Katopes argues that the market place model of customer satisfaction and efficiency has created a culture of entitlement, instant gratification, and institutional fiscal irresponsibility. Driven by the student revolutions in the 1960s, colleges have placed the responsibility of determining the quality of curriculum to “those—the students—who are least competent to judge.” Katopes does think students should have some say in the instruction they receive but not to the point of “holding faculty hostage to student opinion.” The latter situation turns faculty members “into supplicants for student approval and creates a dangerous imbalance in the power relationship between faculty and students, one which might have a deleterious impact on the very thing—teaching—which it is supposed to improve.”
To certain extent I am sympathetic to Katopes’ argument. It is true that students do have more power than faculty, especially when administrators become involved in disputes; and, generally speaking, students feel entitled to at least a ‘B’ for merely showing up for class. However, I wonder if faculty themselves are at fault, too. It may not be such a terrible thing for students to evaluate the school’s curriculum, for their demands, inarticulate as they may be, are real and should be considered. In some institutions, we see what has happened when the faculty members have complete control over curriculum that is entirely detached from student demand: courses that are so specialized that only five people in the world may care about any one of them. It might be good for some faculty to be grounded in the social and economic reality of students’ demands and concerns rather than isolated in their offices writing articles that will eventually be read by only a handful of people.
However, I do agree with Katopes’ central point that the conception of higher education as solely profit-driven is unhealthy for academia. As Katopes sarcastically writes, “Which business model are we talking about [for higher education to emulate]? Is it the Enron model? Adelphia? Lehman Brothers?” The notion that education can be run like any business is simply mistaken, because the effective relationship between the student and the teacher is not a consumer-driven one; rather, it is a type of mentorship where the teacher acts as a second parent to the child in introducing him or her to the world. The student learns most effectively when he or she is not perceived by the teacher as a customer but as an apprentice to something greater.
Thus, learning, as traditionally understood, can be consumer-driven but not efficient in a strictly economic sense; for college is not merely a place where students learn skills and accumulate credentials, but one where students learn “in addition to history and literature and mathematics, also how to begin to navigate the adult civilized world in an adult, civilized, and responsible manner.” Students require a teacher to guide them in the world in all of its rich complexities and nuances so they become part of the civilization which they inherited. As Katopes beautifully puts it, “Higher education should be training for life as it is—not as it is imagined by the child’s mind.”
