Let the Market Decide

Gabriel Conroy says:

I roughly agree with @james-k and @tod-kelly above. I will say that just because students can’t really be the final judges on what they’ve learned–or at least they can’t until having had a few years, maybe longer, to reflect on it–they can judge how clearly a professor presents things, how respectful the professor is for them, and how much the professor honors his/her office hours or makes time to meet outside of office hours.* Students may not be “consumers” in the sense of being entitled to that B they’ve “purchased” when they enrolled for a class, but they’re consumers in the sense of being entitled to instruction in what they’ve signed up and paid for and entitled to respectful treatment.

There’s also the phenomenon of venting about students. Most people (TA’s, adjuncts, profs) do it, and maybe some of it is healthy, but sometimes it gets to the point of being something like contempt. That’s almost similar to the way customer service personnel talk about their customers when out of earshot. In that sense, students are treated like customers already.

Sometimes some adjuncts/professors I know like to post on facebook less-than-anonymized comments about their students. In my opinion those comments veer into the mean spirited at least sometimes. Is that’s really how they’re supposed to be treating people who pay their salary? We can complain the salary is not enough. We might even object that the instructor’s pay is more from other sources than from tuition. I won’t necessarily concede that, but if I did, I’d still point out that instructors wouldn’t be instructors without their students.

There’s lots to decry about an over-focus on evaluations. Maybe they don’t really measure the instructors’ true value and maybe they encourage instructors to pander and be entertaining rather than actually do their jobs. But a little bit of the “students are customers” mindset is needed.

I would soften a little Tod’s point about some researchers not liking teaching. As an undergrad, I did get the sense that most of my professors really did care about teaching, at least in the upper-division major-oriented classes. (The intro levels were mixed bags). In my experience in grad school, however, most professors claim to love teaching (undergrads) but in practice showed varying degrees of commitment to it.

Finally, I did read the Slate article and realize what the author is describing is the typical bloviations we have grown accustomed to from that side of the political spectrum. So yes, the shibboleth of “customers” probably doesn’t work for those types of policy questions.

*And let’s face it, if all the students showed up at a professor’s office hours, which at some schools is only ONE “office hour,” then there wouldn’t be time to meet with most of the students. Of course, professors often claim they want more students to show up at office hours. Sometimes the same professors leave their office hours/hour 15, 30 minutes early because “if nobody’s showed up by now, they won’t.”Report