Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
Sign In
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
  • More
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
    Upcoming Events:
    College Advising
    Serving Higher Ed
    Chronicle Festival 2025
Sign In
First Person

Faculty Members Are Not Cashiers

Why the ‘customer service’ lingo in academe is bad for students

By David M. Perry March 17, 2014
Caeers-Cashier
Istock

This month Texas A&M University at Kingsville posted a new job ad for a faculty member in early-modern/Renaissance literature. The first line of the “job summary” reads, in all capital letters: “PROVIDE EXCELLENT CUSTOMER SERVICE.” A bit lower, the job description mentions that the selected candidate will have to teach four courses a semester while remaining “active in research, professional development, and service to the university and profession.”

To continue reading for FREE, please sign in.

Sign In

Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.

Don’t have an account? Sign up now.

A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.

Sign Up

This month Texas A&M University at Kingsville posted a new job ad for a faculty member in early-modern/Renaissance literature. The first line of the “job summary” reads, in all capital letters: “PROVIDE EXCELLENT CUSTOMER SERVICE.” A bit lower, the job description mentions that the selected candidate will have to teach four courses a semester while remaining “active in research, professional development, and service to the university and profession.”

The ad represents a culmination of dangerous trends in higher education that threaten to erode the single most important relationship we form in our profession: the complex, multifaceted one between teacher and student.

For years now, corporate language and thinking has invaded academe, correlating with many other trends—the decline of public funding from states, the rising price of tuition, the amenities arms-race in student housing, the administrative bloat, the demands of assessment culture, and, most of all, the general saturation of corporate-speak into academic life. Institutions, especially branch campuses of public university systems and small private colleges, feel perpetually strapped for cash and desperate for tuition revenue.

In that context, the attempt to shift the world of higher education into the business paradigm seems rational to administrators: Without customers—i.e., students—faculty jobs will be cut, programs shuttered, and staff members “downsized.”

Meanwhile, students (and their families) are taking on ever-increasing amounts of debt, paying higher tuition, and fearing that they will never earn enough to make those costs worthwhile (although a recent study from the Pew Research Center found that “for millennials, a bachelor’s degree continues to pay off”). It’s no wonder that American students in particular bring the cult of “the customer is always right” to the college campus. They’ve paid their money—or they will over the next 30 years or so—now they want service.

But public discourse has consequences for how we think and act. Tell faculty members that they are obligated to treat students like customers, and the instructors will either eschew rigor in favor of making satisfaction guaranteed or work defensively lest they be harangued by the irate customer. Tell students that they are consumers, and they will act like consumers but ultimately learn less and perhaps not even receive the credential that they think they are buying.

Students who believe that they are mere customers are selling themselves short, as are the faculty members and administrators who apply business-speak to the classroom. Students are not customers to be served. They are far more important than that.

Customer service implies participating in a system of transaction or exchange in which one side provides a service to another. While plenty of money changes hands, universities don’t really sell a product, not in the sense that “customer service” implies, anyway. At most, I think we might argue that students are purchasing a well-structured opportunity to learn or obtain (we hope) meaningful credentials. The “well-structured” point is critical. When I hear students explicitly define themselves as customers, it’s often in the context of perceived bad teaching, a sense that the structure surrounding the learning opportunity is somehow deficient.

It’s not just that students want simply to buy a degree. Students place reasonable desires—faster grading, fewer lectures, more lectures, more preparation, clearer grading standards, etc.—into the framework of commerce. It’s a way of reversing the power dynamics. A customer holds a special place in our society. They have the right to complain, pressure, and go over the head of the worker to the management.

I sympathize with students who employ the language of commerce in order to get redress for real problems, even as I resist the ones who demand customer satisfaction in the form of easy As for little-to-no work. But I can’t blame those students for unrealistic expectations when it’s the institution itself that has introduced business-speak to the education process. As Melonie Fullick noted in a 2012 essay, “Can Education Be Sold?,” once a student has been indoctrinated into the discourse of education as commerce, it’s difficult to then say, "’You’ve paid $6,000; now you have to do the work,’ because that arrangement simply doesn’t fit with consumerist logic.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Education is created, not consumed, but we cannot expect students to believe that when every message from academe itself tells them that they can just buy it.

In addition, any short-term power that students gain over their professors by introducing a controlling commercial metaphor into the classroom dynamic is more than mitigated by the losses. Faculty members respond to the student-as-consumer by teaching defensively, fearing the management that we formerly referred to as administration. But administrators administrate on behalf of the faculty. Employees delivering customer service get managed.

The syllabus is one place where the defensive crouch of the customer-service professor hurts student learning. Many faculty members and some teaching centers talk about the syllabus as a contract, an explicit use of the corporate-speech in the classroom. The contractual model has some positive aspects. It’s a way of increasing the stakes in order to push students to actually read the syllabus and try to create a sense of reciprocal obligation. In a contract, both sides are obligated to hold to its terms.

I’m not at all sure that works because, in my experience, students actually treat the syllabus more as an End User License Agreement—something for which one glances at briefly, clicks “agree to terms,” and moves on to the product without reading any of the document.

ADVERTISEMENT

In any case, I don’t think encouraging notions of reciprocity lie at the heart of the emergence of the lengthy, faux-legalistic syllabus-as-contract. Instead, such a document functions as a form of pre-emptive defense from lawsuits or disciplinary complaints lodged by students upset about their grades, wanting special exemptions, or otherwise responding to challenges in the classroom—much like a customer angry at a business for providing lousy or incorrect service.

So we wonder: Maybe the syllabus as end-user agreement is the right model? After all, we know many students don’t read the syllabus, and in a dispute we can wield it like lawyer underlining the fine print. And in hearings and lawsuits, the defensive syllabus works pretty well. It just doesn’t help with learning.

A learning-centered syllabus, like a learning-centered class, offers a well-organized (one hopes) plan and an opportunity to learn. It’s not a defensively legalistic document or a way to trick students into agreeing to your terms.

Some of my absolute best classes have resulted from enabling the students to shift the trajectory of the course over time, an approach that’s difficult with the language of contract hemming us in. As a teacher, my goal isn’t to sell a product or to “PROVIDE EXCELLENT CUSTOMER SERVICE.” At my best, I push my students, encourage them, beg, plead, cajole, debate, critique, and praise. Perhaps I’m a romantic, but I believe in teaching as a vocation and a craft, not a sale. I believe that it’s possible to turn a class into a microcommunity of learners and teachers. Such an approach yields some of the power back to the students and makes us collaborators, all governed by expectations, feedback, evaluations, and conversations.

So let’s move past this language of customer and service. For all that we need revenue, students are not mere customers to be wrung out for tuition in the short term and donations in the future. 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.

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
About the Author
David M. Perry
David M. Perry is senior academic adviser in the history department at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, and formerly a professor of history at Dominican University. His website is at Davidmperry.com. Follow him on Twitter @lollardfish.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

More News

Vector illustration of large open scissors  with several workers in seats dangling by white lines
Iced Out
Duke Administrators Accused of Bypassing Shared-Governance Process in Offering Buyouts
Illustration showing money being funnelled into the top of a microscope.
'A New Era'
Higher-Ed Associations Pitch an Alternative to Trump’s Cap on Research Funding
Illustration showing classical columns of various heights, each turning into a stack of coins
Endowment funds
The Nation’s Wealthiest Small Colleges Just Won a Big Tax Exemption
WASHINGTON, DISTICT OF COLUMBIA, UNITED STATES - 2025/04/14: A Pro-Palestinian demonstrator holding a sign with Release Mahmud Khalil written on it, stands in front of the ICE building while joining in a protest. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators rally in front of the ICE building, demanding freedom for Mahmoud Khalil and all those targeted for speaking out against genocide in Palestine. Protesters demand an end to U.S. complicity and solidarity with the resistance in Gaza. (Photo by Probal Rashid/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Campus Activism
An Anonymous Group’s List of Purported Critics of Israel Helped Steer a U.S. Crackdown on Student Activists

From The Review

John T. Scopes as he stood before the judges stand and was sentenced, July 2025.
The Review | Essay
100 Years Ago, the Scopes Monkey Trial Discovered Academic Freedom
By John K. Wilson
Vector illustration of a suited man with a pair of scissors for a tie and an American flag button on his lapel.
The Review | Opinion
A Damaging Endowment Tax Crosses the Finish Line
By Phillip Levine
University of Virginia President Jim Ryan keeps his emotions in check during a news conference, Monday, Nov. 14, 2022 in Charlottesville. Va. Authorities say three people have been killed and two others were wounded in a shooting at the University of Virginia and a student is in custody. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
The Review | Opinion
Jim Ryan’s Resignation Is a Warning
By Robert Zaretsky

Upcoming Events

07-31-Turbulent-Workday_assets v2_Plain.png
Keeping Your Institution Moving Forward in Turbulent Times
Ascendium_Housing_Plain.png
What It Really Takes to Serve Students’ Basic Needs: Housing
Lead With Insight
  • Explore Content
    • Latest News
    • Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Professional Development
    • Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Chronicle Intelligence
    • Jobs in Higher Education
    • Post a Job
  • Know The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • Vision, Mission, Values
    • DEI at The Chronicle
    • Write for Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • Our Reporting Process
    • Advertise With Us
    • Brand Studio
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Account and Access
    • Manage Your Account
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Group and Institutional Access
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
  • Get Support
    • Contact Us
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • User Agreement
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2025 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is academe’s most trusted resource for independent journalism, career development, and forward-looking intelligence. Our readers lead, teach, learn, and innovate with insights from The Chronicle.
Follow Us
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin