If you work in higher ed these days, you hear a lot about "customer service." This has been going around in different contexts for a long time; it's been rampant in IT, at least in the "user support" world for decades. (OK, maybe using the plural is a bit hyperbolic.)
The students, after all, are our customers, we are told. And there is a lot of truth in this, considering where the revenue of most IHEs comes from. Many people, of course, resist the very sensible idea that we should strive to please the people paying our salaries. To wit, this piece on student classroom behavior by Brian Hall of Cuyahoga Community College.
My immediate reaction was, "here we go again." Another professor bemoaning the bad behavior of these kids today. Why, in my day... And although I thought the article was somewhat tiresome, because of its retreading of a subject endlessly rehashed over the years (generations?) (eons?), I found myself sympathizing with Dr. Hall. Interrupting when another person is talking? Taking phone calls? Pretty damned rude, right?
But aren't the students right? They do pay for these classes, right? (Or somebody does; don't get picky on me.)
The problem, in my view, is that there has been a breakdown in the understanding of what is being sold. In order to criticize today's students we must, of course, hearken back to the students of an earlier age, who were responsible, polite, hard-working, and respectful of their professors. They didn't get that way because the professors had power and stature that they don't have today, or because the students of that age had politeness to (if not actual respect for) authority beaten into them. (Though it is possible that they did, and they did. It's also possible I'm being overly polyannaish for dramatic effect.)
In a nutshell, I suggest that past cohorts of students understood that they were submitting their work to the professor in order that the professor would pronounce judgment on that work. Judgment on the work, and on them in relation to their peers, in the case of grades given out "on the curve." Did the students expect to receive value for tuition paid? Of course they did. But the value they expected tended to be the judgment (in every sense of the word) of their professors.
Fast forward to today, and we see students.... well, like the ones in Dr. Hall's piece. There is, in fact a word for a place you can go where you can pay your money and the management will uncritically supply you with what you want. And that word is.... no, sorry, it's not "brothel," it's Diploma Mill. Really, I'm serious! You think of a place where you go ask for, say, a B.S. degree, they name a price--"Would you care to supersize that to a summa cum laude?"--you pay it, and you take away your degree.
"My college is not like that!!!"
Isn't it?
Don't get me wrong. I am happy to see the Paper Chase era recede in the distance. But the more we enable people who don't want to learn to avoid doing so, and still pass their courses, the closer we get to diploma mill-hood.
Yes, I'm painting with a broad brush and overgeneralizing in my contrast of the halcyon past with the decadent present. But one doesn't have to accept anecdote as evidence to observe that there are a hell of a lot of anecdotes out there. If you're not satisfied I've proven my point, well, neither am I. I intend to develop this theme in future postings, as I bring it back home (well, home for me) to the world of information technology.
I work in an industry where diploma mills are common. And, even in those institutions, teachers are still trying to teach and a few students are still trying to learn. In this context, corporations who cannot choose from the top universities have one effective solution, training. Fresh graduates are now hired not based on their degrees, but based on their trainability.
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