Are Students Customers?
When tuition fees were brought in to the UK higher education system many academics worried that the relationship between students and lecturers would be changed for the worse, as students would be encouraged to see themselves as customers. I haven’t taught in a UK university since 2018 but I have to say I never met any physics students who saw themselves as customers. On the other hand, over the years I have met many parents of students who saw themselves as customers. Maybe the tendency of students to think of themselves as customers has increased over the last six years. I don’t know.
These thoughts popped into my head when my attention was recently drawn to an advertisement for a job at the University of Bristol (which I used to think of as a good university):
Whether or not students see themselves as customers, there is clearly one University that seems to think that’s what they are; at least that’s what the advertisement says.
I have only two comments on this advertisement.
First, it set the ‘Bullshit Job” claxon* ringing very loudly. David Graeber’s book is full of testimonies from people whose job description is just like this! The third paragraph makes it clear that the plan is to bring in someone from outside the higher education system to impose private-sector methods where there is no reason to think they will be productive. I wonder how if the “human-centred approach to experience design” will include anything at all to do with teaching?
Second, I don’t think universities really see students this way at all. The reality is much worse. Students are not really customers, for the same reason that cattle are not customers. They are commodities, the income from which generates profit. A “cattle-centred approach” would have been a more honest form of words…
*If I had time I’d maintain a “Bullshit Jobs” folder in memory of David Graeber…
In the Dark 
December 7, 2023 at 9:45 am
That is a pretty depressing advert….
December 7, 2023 at 11:19 am
Bristol University are at this very moment in the High Court arguing that Universities do *not* have a duty of care to their students.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/nov/20/high-court-to-consider-whether-universities-owe-students-legal-duty-of-care
Natasha Abrahart was in the second year of a physics degree at Bristol University. She sadly took her life in 2018 — worried about an oral presentation in front of all the tutors & students.
The adjustments needed to help Natasha were simple.
Although it was easy to make this presentation less stressful, Bristol University’s Physics Department did not so. Natasha’s father (himself a University lecturer, though not a Bristol), took Bristol University to court and won.
The judgement on the Abrahart case is here:
https://www.judiciary.uk/judgments/abrahart-v-university-of-bristol/
It is upsetting to read because of a lack of basic humanity on the part of Bristol University. Natasha was in serious difficulties, it was — or should have been — obvious she needed help, and no-one did anything to help her.
Bristol University then quibbled over having to pay for specific parts of the funeral expenses; in particular, for the cost of a headstone, and for light refreshments at the reception.
And then, Bristol University appealed the decision — IMO, a cynical attempt to bankrupt the Abrahart’s with legal costs — and are busy arguing right now that there is no duty of care to students. The Abraharts are crowdfunding their legal costs.
This is entirely consistent with the behaviour of University management. They never admit blame or take responsibility. If senior management had any integrity, somebody should by now have resigned at Bristol University.
Instead, everybody hides behind anonymity. Despite enormous salaries at the top of university management, there is never any accountability.
Bristol University don’t need a bullshit Director of Customer Experience. They just need to re-discover some basic humanity.
The timing of the job advert, coinciding as it does with the Abrahart case, is suspicious.
December 7, 2023 at 11:28 am
Appalling. Such meanness of spirit seems to all-pervading these days.
December 7, 2023 at 2:54 pm
Can we separate the case of this poor girl from the grotesque proliferation of university managers? Several people actually tried to help her, but in retrospect I’m not sure she should ever have been on that course. Some people come ‘pre-stressed’ and are pushed over the edge by things that others take in their stride. What the origin of such pre-stressing is, is far from fully understood. But it is largely hidden from view until something goes drastically wrong.
I agree that some obvious flags were missed in her case but what adjustments, please, should have been put in place when for her?
There is a fine line to be trod between ignoring someone and interfering with their life, and I don’t see that academic physicists, mathematicians etc can possibly receive the training necessary to make these judgement calls while getting on with the research and teaching they are there to do. Even expert social workers get it wrong distressingly often.
If universities get a duty of care of this magnitude then they are going to start by closing every campus bar and many sports facilities. This case is both worrying and tragic.
December 8, 2023 at 4:27 am
I do not agree with regard to Natasha Abrahart.
I think the judge was correct when he concluded that Bristol University had discriminated against her because of her disability.
They had therefore breached the Equality Act (2006) which prohibits “discrimination issues in relation to sexuality, religion or belief, age, race, gender and disability.”
The judge specifically made the point that Natasha’s disability was not (as you put it) “hidden from view”.
In fact, that is what the case turned on.
“The Claimant must prove that the University had actual or constructive notice of Natasha’s disability. The simple point is that from October 2017 it manifested itself – it was there to be seen – in contrast, perhaps, to disabilities which can be hidden or only be discerned with expert technical skill. To put this another way, following Gallop v Newport City Council [2013] WCA Civ 1583, the University’s staff could see for themselves that Natasha had a mental impairment which had a substantial and long-term adverse effect on her ability to carry out an otherwise normal task within her course from October 2017.”
Even so, my main point was the behaviour of Bristol University senior management towards the parents after the death of Natasha was conscienceless.
And the contrast between the meanness of that behaviour and the words in this advertisement. These legal cases against the Abrahart’s will have been actioned at the veryhighest level of senior management.
Nothing we have seen in the behaviour of University of Bristol’s senior management suggests they have “a human-centered approach” or ” are committed to building an inclusive, supportive working environment.”
I also find the timing of this advertisement curious. Why did this advertisement of a completely new post come out now?
December 8, 2023 at 10:33 am
This tragedy happened because this poor young woman had a problem interacting with other people which made her fundamentally unsuited to the course she was on – a course which demanded regular oral presentations to others, and regular probing questioning about what she had done in experimental physics classes by experts whom she knew only by sight.
Paragraph 131 of the judgement asserts that “the fundamental purpose of the oral assessments was to elicit from Natasha answers to questions put to her following the experiments and… such a process does not automatically require face to face oral interaction and there are other ways of achieving the same”. But paragraph 17(1)(a) acknowledges that “Communications Skills form part of the programmes at all levels… as part of the assessment of practical work”. This latter quote appears in italics in the judgement and appears to be part of the public material by which Bristol University advertises its courses.
As communications skills as well as knowledge of physics were part of the course, it is unfair on other students to relax them for some. Whether as academics or in tech companies, people need those skills after university. Natasha Abrahart would have been better suited to a physics course that didn’t do assessment in this way, but she was evidently unaware at the start of her course that she would be unable to cope; Bristol University could not have known of the problem and rejected her application on those grounds; and once she was on the course a change to a different course (and perhaps university) would itself have been hugely stressful. Indeed, no such change ever seems to have been contemplated by anybody – herself, her family, her friends, her university.
None of this is relevant to my (low) opinion of university management, which I share with you. But any lawyer will remind you that extreme cases make bad law, and if universities are to be given an enhanced pastoral duty of care of persons who are legally adult then the result is likely to be the mass closure of many social facilities on campuses.
PS I meant that the *origin* of the pre-stressing is largely hidden.
December 8, 2023 at 10:40 am
All of us involved in University teaching are aware of cases where “reasonable adjustments” are made to assessment under Equalities legislation. These do not disadvantage other students. Indeed I have always taken the view that such reasonable adjustments should where possible to be applied to all students. For Bristol University not to have applied an adjustment in this case does seem to me to be unreasonable.
December 7, 2023 at 12:27 pm
Just a reminder of my comments policy (on the front page of this blog), part of which reads
“Feel free to comment on any of the posts on this blog but comments may be moderated; anonymous comments and any considered by me to be vexatious and/or abusive and/or defamatory will not be accepted.”
December 22, 2023 at 6:41 pm
Just came back to this post after bookmarking it for later:
I think an awful lot of societal problems in the UK and US over the last 20 years, especially regarding culture wars and inter-generational conflict, as well as widening inequality and lower social mobility, can be traced back to the high costs and commodification of higher education. The introduction of, and super-inflationary rise of tuition fees at universities changes the relationship between student and university. It sadly does become more “customer-business” rather than “student-teacher”.
Although my circumstances were not typical, I have to admit that at certain times during my undergraduate degree the “value for money” question popped into my head regarding facilities and yes, teaching standards. And as fees have risen in the UK, I have felt more than the usual twinge of guilt if a tutorial I’ve run hasn’t gone great etc. (In the US, the problem is somehow twisted in that universities take vastly more money and seem to use it for extra-curricular facilities and activities in order to show “value”: huge gyms, League One level sports teams etc. But the teaching seems to be done in large part by pools of poorly-paid adjuncts and exploited graduate students.)
How this becomes a wider problem, briefly: as students become more and more aware of the increasing costs, they’ve naturally demanded that the higher-education institutions have to provide more accommodations and care. I’m not entirely against them, but this is how and why student demands for “safe spaces” and sanctions against “outrageously heterodox” faculty etc. arise and are met by administrators (again, I think that in a lot of cases these demands are valid) — the money involved gives the student body a huge material stake in such negotiations, and rightly so. The administration and managerial body expands to meet these demands, which then targets the teaching staff to meet arbitrary guidelines that administrators say “meet student needs”.
As a degree turned from an intellectual endeavour into a useful line in your CV and then into an essential requirement for any reasonably-paying job, I think the role of teaching staff at university has become more and more like schoolteachers than helpful “tourguides to knowledge”. Maybe that is a good thing (it’s hard to learn from a disinterested academic mumbling at you for an hour at a time) but it’s not usually what academics have in mind when they consider their careers.
And of course, the repayment of student loans can be a huge financial drag through one’s 20s and 30s (and often beyond). The selling of a university degree as the key to a middle-class life has left a lot of well-educated people frustrated in low-paying jobs, servicing an almost comically large debt. I think we’re only beginning to see the political consequences of that now.