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...learn in college, and what expertise our professionals and future teachers acquire in graduate school. One can read the very essence of a culture's values in the knowledge it chooses to transmit to its younger generations. And one can bet that--if something goes wrong, terribly and tragically wrong, with this knowledge- and value-transmission process--society will pay a heavy price in lost opportunities for a better, more refined, more noble quality of life among generations still to come.
What, then, do we make of the trend toward customer orientation that has blossomed throughout American commerce and culture during the latter part of the last century under the tutelage of such management gurus as Drucker (1954) and Levitt (1960)? Various social commentators have criticized this trend toward customer orientation as encouraging attitudes that extend the principle of consumer sovereignty into areas where it does not properly belong (Holbrook 1995b, 1995c; Jacobson and Mazur 1995; Keat, Whitely, and Abercromibie, eds., 1994; Schwartz 1994; Shorris 1994; Washburn and Thornton, eds., 1996). Such extensions would include the emerging role of customer orientation in politics, hospitals, psychotherapy clinics, courtrooms, religions, and arts institutions (Keat,
Whitely, and Abercrombie, eds., 1994). One such area of extension, of course, is education.
In the latter connection, social critics have lamented the objectives of education oriented toward embracing populism based in place of performance (Henry 1994); egalitarianism in place of excellence (Sewall 1996); self-esteem in place of real achievement (Macdonald 1996); pandering in place of discriminating (Slavitt 1996); size of class enrollments in place of merit in course materials (Sacks 1996); pleasure in place of soul-searching (Edmundson 1997); an economic rationale in place of the traditional cultural mission (Readings 1996); political correctness in place of academic freedom (Kors and Silverglate 2000); or careerism in place of intellectual attainment (Rotfeld 1999, 2001). In the words of Rotfeld (1999):
Once students are told to see themselves as customers for education degrees, they expect customer service with a smile.... Seeing graduation as a job certification, not a mark of education, students want the degree but not the education. They want to earn, not learn (p. 416).
In this spirit, besides those just mentioned, numerous other authors have explicitly inveighed against the shabbiness of an educational system that appears to be oriented toward catering to the potentially low-brow and careerist tastes of students redefined as customers (Bennett 1992; Bloom 1987; Fulton 1994; Fussell 1991; Holbrook 1995a, 1995b; Hughes 1993; Schwartz 1994; Sykes 1988).
As an example, consider the recent piece in Harper's by Mark Edmundson (1997), a professor at the University of Virgina, entitled "On the Uses of a Liberal Education... As Lite Entertainment For Bored College Students." Symptomatic of the pervasive problems that prevail, Edmundson singles out the course-evaluation process in which his normally lethargic students get to play "the informed consumer, letting the provider know where he's coming through and where he's not quite up to snuff" (p. 39). He deplores "the attitude of calm consumer expertise that pervades the responses ... the serene belief that [his] function ... is to divert, entertain, and interest ... in an enjoyable and approachable way" (pp. 39-40). This attitude, in his view, embodies "the university culture"--which, "like American culture writ large, is ... ever more devoted to consumption and entertainment": "My students ... bring a consumer weltanschaung to school, where it exerts a powerful ... influence" (p. 40). Edmundson sees his students a s passionless (p. 41), conformist (p. 42), committed to appearing laid-back (p. 42), cautious (p. 42), fragile (p. 42), oriented toward financial incentives in general and toward their careers in particular (p. 43), and inveterately unresponsive, as when only timidly answering questions in class-all because "kids come to school immersed in a consumer mentality" (p. 43). And he sees the university as playing a collaborative role in encouraging such consumerist attitudes:
More and more of what's going on in the university is customer driven. The consumer pressures that beset me on evaluation day are only a part of an overall trend. ... From the start, the contemporary university's relationship with students has a solicitous, nearly servile tone. ... Colleges don't have admissions offices anymore, they have marketing departments. ... The university now [pursues] a tendency to serve--and not challenge--the students. Students can also float in and out of classes during the first two weeks of each term without making any commitment. The common name for this time span--shopping period--speaks volumes about the consumer mentality that's now in play (pp. 43-44).
Ironically, Edmundson (1997) cites a commencement address by Oprah Winfrey at Wellesley as emblematic of this tendency toward customer orientation--never anticipating that, within two years, Ms. Winfrey would be teaching her own course (on leadership) at Northwestern's prestigious Kellogg School of Management. Commenting on the latter development and tying it to the offering of a finance course taught by Michael Milken at UCLA, Jennings and Happel (1999) "fear that higher education is being reduced to little more than a talk-show format": "as the distinction between pop culture and higher education has become increasingly muddled, ... we have witnessed the dumbing-down of the curriculum (p. 14). Indeed--when contemplating Mr. Milken's recent move into distance learning, a computer- and Web-assisted plan to offer electronically delivered university degrees to anyone who will pay the price--who can ignore the potential danger of the frightening scenario in which today's superficially attractive Internet-confere d diploma becomes the intellectually bankrupt equivalent to an educational junk bond of the future? In describing Milken's plan to use materials developed by professors at five major B-schools (Carnegie-Mellon, Chicago, Columbia, the London School of Economics, and Stanford) to offer MBA degrees via Cardean University--owned by UNext (a subsidiary of Milken's Knowledge Universe) and accredited by virtue of its affiliation with ISIM University (which UNext purchased for that purpose)--Pizzo (2001) allows that "Some professors were outraged that their...
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