Customers? Universities and the market ethic

I remembered something that happened a couple of years ago. A colleague returned from a meeting about Freshers' Week* in which students were referred to as customers. If we continue the absurdity of calling students "customers", where do we end up? For a start, the Students' Union becomes the Customers' Union. Lecturers and Professors become Sales Assistants or Sales Staff. The IT Dept become Sales Assistants. The Library staff become Sales Assistants. Everyone in the University is simply divided into buyers and sellers. The whole complex institution of the University becomes a simple market, but a deeply dysfunctional one that lacks the opportunity of switching. Once you walk into this particular market, you pay over your fee, and you are more or less stuck, unless you cancel everything and walk away, which is your right. Indeed, before you choose a University, you are faced with a more or less uniform offering as every University is desperately comparing and measuring itself in relation to the others; never in relation to carving out a distinctive offering. Indeed, they are generally terrified of being different. This fear of being distinctive seems to be the first and most damaging consequence of the market metaphor. It works along the lines of worrying about "losing" customers to a "competitor". In principle, then, the market metaphor means that choosing a university has a lot in common with choosing a car park. It is a space you can occupy for a finite amount of time. In parallel with car parking vis-a-vis customers, the only way of exercising my rights in this marketplace ethic is to leave the employment of the University. If we extend the market metaphor, it falls apart. For example, why do we not refer to passengers, patients, prisoners, pupils, clients, voters, jurors, teachers, police, soldiers, tourists, migrants, refugees, drivers and cyclists, as customers? What is lost when all this glorious richness of the fabric of society is reduced to a series of mere transactions? The truth is that this has never been a zero sum game. The distinction between, say, Oxford University and Oxford Brookes University is real and important. They are not competing with each other.

 

*Fresher's Week, like everything else, has had themarketing airbrush applied and is now called Welcome Week. Where it was once a process of becoming a student