Consideration One:
May 2016 -This month is finals time at colleges and universities
across the country. In the midst of grading, an instructor at a university
posts a note to Facebook lamenting the receipt of the first of possibly several
emails pleading “but if I don't pass this
class, I'll lose my financial aid.’
A flurry of empathetic responses immediately appears from
academics around the country.
One describes an incident in which the student said that if
she didn't pass the class, she couldn't graduate, which meant she couldn't get
a divorce from her “horrible husband.” Another instructor spoke of bracing for
a meeting with a student coming in to plead for a mercy grade who had actually
engaged in plagiarism during the term. Yet another had just concluded a meeting
in which the student begged for a grade saying that if he didn’t pass the
class, he’d lose his visa.
Rumbling around in the background
of the discussion are the
cases of students hacking into college computer systems to change
grades already recorded.
Consideration Two:
From May 5, 2016 Insider
Higher Education:
“Looking for a Lifestyle - Most branding experts will say
that a degree is an emotional purchase. During the college search, prospective
students are told to walk the campus, to stay overnight with a current student,
to really get a feel for the place. They are asked: What does your gut say?
Does it feel like this place really fits?
Savvy marketing is a big part of that feeling. But too
often, colleges’ branding experts look to other colleges for inspiration, and
similar ideas take hold across institutions, said Darryl Cilli, founding
partner at the branding agency 160over90. “When you’re a prospective college
student, you’re looking for an education and you’re looking for a lifestyle,”
he said. “You want something that is completely customized to you.”
A few years ago, 160over90 published a book on the clichés
that plague higher education marketing, called Three and a Tree. A college
suffers from Three and a Tree (or TAAT) when its brochures feature pictures of
“three students of varying ethnicities and gender, dressed head to toe in
college-branded merchandise.” Then there are the worst cases, which suffer from
TAATPTDPF: Three and a Tree plus Two Dudes Playing Frisbee.
Consideration Three:
April 2015 - At my Sister’s request, I accompany my Nephew
on the prospective student tour of the university where I then worked:
The high school seniors follow the tour guide wearing the
university brand polo shirt. The group stops periodically at various sites the
guide deems important. “This is the largest Starbucks on any college campus in
America…This is one of the three Subway restaurants on campus…This is the
Student Union where you can get free printing and there are all kinds of
electronic games in the restaurant here…Here is where you can buy your
tee-shirts and rent DVDs, oh, and you can also buy your textbooks here….”
The potential customers listen carefully as the guide shows
off the dormitory (“This one is called the Club Med dorm”) and reminds them
several times of the tailgating parties before the games in the campus green
space. Not once is class attendance mentioned and the only time study is
mentioned is in a promise that if students will join SG sponsored study groups,
they can raise their final grade an average of one letter grade.
The tour was concluded with the invitation to “Get ready
for the best four years of your life.” As we walked back to the Union to meet
my sister, I ask my Nephew what he thought of the campus: “Looks like some
great parties at that dorm back there.”
The brand the university would use in a commercial during one of its televised football
games that fall would assert that “UCF stands for the University of Comfort and
Fun!”
Grandparents’ Genocide Month
The original comment and the
responses from academics around the country suggest that manipulative behavior surrounding
grades is fairly endemic to college undergraduates today. Indeed, my guess is that
all of us who have taught in higher education in the past two decades know
these sob stories and dishonest behaviors personally. This is hardly to say all
undergrads today engage in these behaviors, but it has become reasonable to
anticipate them every semester.
I used to remind my students
two weeks ahead of finals that we were entering Grandparent Genocide Month. I told them that statistically
speaking, if a grandparent is going to die, it will happen in the weeks before
and during finals, a pattern observed by Mike Adams in a satirical “study” reported in the Annals
of Improbable Research. Adams
found that “A student’s grandmother is far more
likely to die suddenly just before the student takes an exam, than at any other
time of year.” Even
more incredibly, the same grandparents reappear to die every semester about the
same time.
Clearly,
Lazarus has got nothing on
these octogenarians.
Of course, the chances of that
actually happening are non-existent even as the chance that a loved one might
actually die during finals remains a remote possibility. My point in bringing
Grandparents’ Genocide Month to the attention of my students was always to
remind them of two facts: 1. that their teacher’s understanding had limits and,
2. that their class performance – and thus their grades - remained their
responsibility.
But aside from snarky
pseudo-studies about grandparent death rates during finals and the raw appeals
to guilt trips designed to ostensibly save a student’s entire career, I wonder
if there aren’t some underlying substantive issues here that merit more than our
usual cynicism.
It seems clear to me that at
some level these students are behaving in the manner we have taught them is
appropriate. Though they were on their way to understanding themselves as well-trained
consumers long before they arrived at our doorsteps, they did not come to us
fully formed. The particular attitudes, values and behaviors they exhibit once
here all arose in a context. I would argue that the entitled consumers we face
are exactly what we have created them to be.
How so?
So what is being sold?
Today’s imitative and
incredibly costly use of marketing by cash-starved institutions of higher
education is, like all advertising, designed to create a false sense of need in
those they see as potential customers. It seeks to manipulate raw human desires
and provide the means to rationalize the desired responses.
Actual students rarely come to
a university to serve or even to purchase a brand. They attend universities to
become educated human beings, taking seriously the opportunity institutions of
higher education actually provide them. A university or college offering a quality
educational experience will speak for itself. But in an age of cuts to
education which must be made up for somehow by cash starved colleges and
universities, the tidal wave of marketing to attract potential customers which
has ensued would suggest that higher education is ultimately not what is being sold here.
So what is being sold?
The advertising of UCF as “the
university of comfort and fun” is very telling as to how it is selling its
“brand.” Add to that the official campus tours which never mention academics
because they are too busy marketing consumer goods (the largest Starbucks on a
public university campus in America) and partying (this is where the tailgating
happens, the best four years of your life) to potential customers and the
message is pretty clear: You are the
consumer. This is all about you.
And UCF is hardly alone in
this pitch.
The consummate values of consumerism
in a 21st CE technological age are comfort, convenience and instant gratification. The wide spread use
of online classes serves as a good example. They largely serve financial
demands of administratively bloated, fiscally challenged universities which are
thereby relieved of the obligations to provide clean, climate controlled
classroom meeting space and can maintain huge online sections run by poorly
paid adjuncts.
It’s a good deal for someone.
But these classes are
inevitably sold to students in consumerist terms. Official sales pitches for
online courses and programs always use minimalist language: “just… as little
as… only...” The omnipresent sales pitch
is that “You can even take your classes from the comfort of your home in your
pajamas if you want.” In short, don’t worry, this won’t take you outside of your comfort zone.
The consumerist value of
comfort can also be seen in the demands for intellectual climate control on
many campuses today. These take the shape of the landmines of micro-aggressions,
perceived slights by faculty often unrealized until they detonate in upheavals that
sometimes result in discipline if not termination. While universities are
supposedly places of learning, there are rarely second chances for those who
wander into the unmarked minefields of the culture wars.
They also appear in the
designation of campus free speech zones which by implication suggests that in the
remaining campus spaces free speech is not permitted. Similarly, they appear in
the avoidance of controversial speakers of all political stripes who might
somehow tarnish the brand of the university, causing waves in the university’s comfort-driven
consumer base as well as among alumni and potential donors.
At the heart of all such
concerns is often the stated desire to maintain campuses as safe places for
students, a noble goal which actually serves free expression. But safety is
never the same thing as comfort, and their conflation often arises from a consumerist
presumption that one should never be confronted with discomforting ideas with
their potential cognitive dissonance that one does not wish to consider. When
constant comfort is the expectation by which one has been recruited, is it not
reasonable that customers would insist that the terms of that bargain be lived
into by universities?
Which flavor did you like best?
Students come to universities feeling
entitled to demand that the consummate values of consumerism - comfort, convenience and instant gratification
– be honored in their increasingly costly engagement of higher education. But
those attitudes are decidedly reinforced in the university’s response to their
customers once on campus in the form of end of term surveys. Instructor
evaluations may have begun with the good intentions of providing needed
feedback to teachers from their students but they have long since devolved into
often unconscionable exercises in consumer satisfaction.
Surveys that inquire of
consumers “What did you like best? What did you like least?” (actual questions)
certainly have a place at chain restaurants or ice cream parlors featuring
multiple flavors. Such feedback from paying customers can readily help
providers of goods and services hone their products to meet the demands of
consumers whose ongoing patronage is the business’ primary concern.
But students are not customers.
They are not buying education. Indeed, they couldn’t if they wanted to. Contrary
to the promises of the technotopians and the corporate interests they serve, learning
cannot simply be “delivered,” either online or in person.
Students pay for an
opportunity to engage a process that can possibly
lead to their becoming educated depending upon how seriously they take it. If
they do not engage that process, education simply does not happen. And they
cannot do it alone. They must rely on the expertise of those they have paid to
direct them in that process.
And here is where the rub
comes. Students do not come to classes knowing what they need to learn nor do
they arrive with expertise regarding how the learning process should occur.
That is what their payment for the expertise of already educated and, in most
cases, experienced teachers, provides them.
This is hardly to suggest that
students do not have valuable feedback to offer teachers about how that process
has occurred and should occur in the future. In fact, they do. But to procure valuable feedback,
students must be asked questions they actually have the expertise to answer (e.g., How much of the reading did you actually complete and what was your
experience of it? How frequently did you attend class and what was your
experience of those you attended? Explain). More importantly, they should not be asked questions which suggest they
have the ability, much less the right, to somehow direct the content of the course
or the methods by which it is taught.
Students are not only not consumers, they are also not
instructors.
Students’ educational needs
and consumerist concerns are rarely the same thing. When those two disparate
drives are deliberately confused, as they are in most end of term surveys, two
things occur. First, the surveys provide feedback that is largely useless in
pedagogical terms and potentially injurious to instructors when such statistically
dubious feedback (response rates rarely approach 60% participation) is used by
administrators who know better for purposes of hiring, firing and promotions. But
second and far more importantly, they reinforce the tendencies of students to see
their experience at the university in consumerist terms.
It is simply not reasonable to
expect that a student who has been recruited to their university on consumerist
terms and reinforced in consumerist behaviors once on campus will not come to
think of themselves in consumerist terms. They are, after all, simply relying
upon the promises made to them in the recruitment process and emulating the
behaviors modeled for them once on campus.
Bait and Switch?
So what happens when
well-trained consumers - reasonably expecting that they are entitled to
comfort, convenience and instant gratification at institutions which advertise themselves as universities of comfort and fun - encounter the actual demands of
higher education? What happens when they encounter educators who demand that
they actually perform academically in their classes or face the possibility of being
assigned grades which reflect their failures to do so?
Might it be that universities
are engaging in a form of bait and
switch here? Can they in good faith recruit customers and reinforce consumerist
values through their institutional practice and then turn around and say to
them “But you are students here with adult responsibilities that you must live
into?”
Might the objection of the consumer
who has arrived expecting comfort, convenience and instant gratification - which clearly cannot be realized by being
required to invest time and energy in studying for comprehensive exams or
writing major papers – be on target here? Would we not find the objection
of a purchaser of a costly BMW whose repayment will stretch indefinitely into
to the future - sold on promises of ready-made long afternoon drives with the
convertible top down but who instead receives a box of parts and instructions on
how to assemble it - to be well founded?
It would be easy to dismiss
such objections by resorting to common arguments that students fresh out of
high school are adults – they aren’t,
they’re late adolescents learning how to be adults – and that they know
coming in that they will have to actually work once here. Clearly they should.
But, if that is so, why do
universities spend millions of dollars in advertising which rarely if ever
mention that work or the adult expectations that will be made of those who are
the targets of their marketing? If we really believe that the targets of our
recruitment efforts can see through our efforts to entice and retain them, that
what we will expect from them is very different from what we are promising
them, have we not just wasted millions of already scarce dollars?
Of course, student resorts to guilt-tripping,
plagiarism and cheating are all issues of maturity if not character. Such
behaviors speak volumes about the individuals who engage in them even as most
of their peers may not. But all behaviors occur in contexts. And to the degree
that a student has devolved into a well-trained consumer, willing to do
whatever it takes to procure the biggest bang for their buck, s/he reflects the
context we have created for them and the values they now emulate.
Post-Scriptum
In the interest of truth in
advertising, I feel the need to add the following. Anyone who has known me for
any length of time knows that my times in undergraduate education at the
University of Florida were marked as much by industrial strength partying as by
regular class attendance and intense studying. Nothing in any of the comments I
have made above should suggest that I do not think college should be an
enjoyable experience. While universities may not be sources of constant
comfort, there is absolutely no reason the college experience cannot be fun.
But selling a college
education as a four year party, “the best four years of your life,” is
profoundly misguided. Indeed, discovering how to balance study with fun is an essential
part of the learning process as any freshman facing the weekly French quiz at 8
AM Friday after nickel beer night at the Rathskellar the night before knows
only too well. The key word here is balance.
Consumerist recruiting which focuses
on comfort, convenience and instant gratification by definition undermines an
academic process which demands engagement, seriousness and, yes, sobriety in
all senses of that word, at appropriate times. If we do not want our children
to take their educational opportunities lightly and seek to compensate for
their failings therein by deception and intellectual shortcuts, we need to stop
sending them these at best mixed messages. Otherwise, we, like the consumers we
have created, will simply end up getting what we, too, have paid for.
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Harry Scott Coverston
Orlando, Florida
If the unexamined life is not worth
living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is
not worth holding.
Most things worth considering do
not come in sound bites.
Do not be daunted by the enormity
of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are
not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon
it. – Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Ages, Commentary
on Micah 6:8
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