Customers &amp; Markets:<i>The Cuss Words of Academe</i>

Abstract

customers. As you listen, you can sense the hair rising on the backs of professorial necks. . During the coffee break following one such presen1 1 tation, I overheard two professors conducting a postmortem. To view students as customers, one argued, leads inevitably to pandering. Students don't know what they don't know. That's the teacher's job to guide them. All this talk about being responsive to the the other suggested, about economics pure and simple. It has little to do with education. The market, he said, paraphrasing Charles Dickens' famous observation about the law, is an ass. It was, frankly, a troubling conversation one I've thought about many times since. I don't lack some sympathy for the views of these colleagues. A nostalgic part of me wants the campus to be a cloistered walk, a retreat from the market's incessant clamor. Students should