The Student Is Always Right?

The second prexy during my time at the Collegium Excellens was a "businessman" who clawed his way up the greasy pole of success at our hallowed sanctum. President Chuckles replaced my first wacko prexy (Duke) who had gotten the Collegium placed on the censure list of the AAUP for the longest term in that organization's recent history. President Duke had summarily fired (before my time) a tenured faculty member who got on his nerves and the AAUP investigating committee was stonewalled by both Duke and the Board of Regents who decided to back their man. In any event, Chuckles was brought on board by several business types on the Board of Regents to serve as a buffer between Duke and the outside world. Chuckles was a graduate of the Harvard Business School (BBA, not MBA) who had married an Amarillo woman and managed to run her family's business into the ground (bankruptcy) when he was plucked out of the madding crowd in Amarillo to perform PR repairs following the AAUP censure of the Collegium. Chuckles moved up the ladder at the Collegium by outwitting the nitwits who were above him in the administrative food chain. Ultimately, Chuckles manipulated the faculty to support him as a less wacko alternative to Duke. After retirement, Duke spent a two or three years in an Amarillo retirement home. One day at lunch, Duke excused himself from the table in the dining room and told his wife that he had forgotten something in their apartment. Then Duke went into a broom closet on his floor and ate a .38-cal. revolver. In the meantime, Chuckles began to make proclamations of his own. Early in his reign, Chuckles proclaimed that the "unofficial slogan" of the Collegium should be "The student is always right." Brilliant! It was a play on the retail bromide that "The customer is always right." In his own way, Chuckles was as paranoid as Duke. My department, housing history and government teachers, was suspect. In fairly short order, I ended up on Chuckles' enemies list. I came up for promotion to professor in Chuckles' last year on this earth. Word was passed along to me that my promotion was "in trouble." Later that same month, Chuckles — with a history of heart trouble — was found face down at his desk. I remain convinced that my promotion file was under Chuckles' face when the EMTs lifted his head to remove the body. The Collegium never recovered from Chuckles' nonsense over the next quarter-century. Today, a president I didn't know sits on the throne at the Collegium. I did hear this guy's pitch to the faculty during the search process prior to his hire. The current prexy said that he "really liked" the idea that the student is always right at the Collegium. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. If this is (fair & balanced) hucksterism, so be it.

[x NYTimes]
Brand U.
By Stephen Budiansky

I recently did some research for a satirical novel set at a university. The idea was to have a bunch of gags about how colleges prostitute themselves to improve their U.S. News & World Report rankings and keep up a healthy supply of tuition-paying students, while wrapping their craven commercialism in high-minded-sounding academic blather.

I would keep coming up with what I thought were pretty outrageous burlesques of this stuff and then run them by one of my professor friends and he'd say, Oh, yeah, we're doing that.

One of my best bits, or so I thought, was about how the fictional university in my novel had hired a branding consultant to come up with a new name with the hip, possibility-rich freshness needed to appeal to today's students. Two weeks later, a friend called to say it was on the front page of The Times: "To Woo Students, Colleges Choose Names That Sell." Exhibit A was Beaver College, which had changed its name to Arcadia University. Applications doubled.

I also had created a character, a former breakfast-cereal executive who returns to his alma mater as vice president for finance (to give something back) and tries to get everyone to call the students customers. It turns out Yale was already doing that.

I knew that Tom Lehrer, the great satirical songwriter of the 60's, had said he had to give up satire when it kept being overtaken by reality. The final straw, he said, was Henry Kissinger winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

My final straw came when a friend at Case Western Reserve University (now referred to as Case, after their consultant concluded that all great universities have single-word names) sent me a packet of information on the university's new showcase undergraduate seminar program. Called SAGES (this supposedly stands for Seminar Approach to General Education and Scholarship), the program offers as an essential component of its core intellectual experience an upscale cafe that serves Peet's Coffee and is "staffed by baristas whose expertise in preparing espresso is matched only by their authoritative knowledge of all things SAGES."

As the program's Web site explains (complete with footnotes, bibliography and quotes from the urban theorist Jane Jacobs): "In the bustling personal-but-impersonal rhythms of campus activity, as in the streets of a big city, proprietors of public establishments occupy a special position... The SAGES cafe staff are patently not interested in providing grades or passing judgment." And, not only that, but "there are no compromises that would undermine the quality of our drinks.... Our chai latte is made not from a bottled concentrate, but from a fresh-brewed base made from scratch every day on site."

As a model of pandering to students in the guise of lofty academic purpose, I thought that was pretty hard to top. Then I started reading the 92-page guide Case has created for teachers of these seminars.

If students fidget, talk or walk out of class, the guide advises seminar leaders not to "manage" such behaviors, but to explore their underlying causes. Instructors must remember that to such characteristically American cultural beliefs as the importance of morality, rationality and personal responsibility, there are equally valid alternatives that must be respected.

Instructors must be wary of spurious objectivity, such as a 0-100 grading scale; much better is a 0-5 scale, or, best of all, a check, check-plus, check-minus scale. And finally, if students do not contribute to discussions at all, seminar leaders should "make space for silence."

It's enough to drive a satirist to something stronger than chai latte.

Stephen Budiansky is the author, most recently, of Her Majesty's Spymaster.

Copyright © 2006 The New York Times

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