A spirited attack on the idea of the student as customer went down a storm with academics assembled at the recent British Academy of Management conference.
Prof Greg Bamber of Griffith Business School, Australia, said the trend for universities to develop courses that academics deliver 'flexibly' to students as 'customers' whose wishes were paramount had produce unintended consequences in an "underclass" of academics on short-term contracts.
Prof Bamber", whose paper with Dr Jennifer Sappey, of Charles Sturt University, Australia, received an award at the conference at Warwick University, said: "Students are increasingly trying to take greater control of the 'purchasing' of credentials and more involvement in the delivery of 'the product' (education).
"Especially as they are paying higher fees, students are putting more pressure on academics to meet their short-term demands. Student-customers are trying to negotiate everything e.g. course content, forms of assessment and assignment deadlines," he added.
Bamber warned that "students do not always know what is best for them and that a student-as-customer framework means more time spent on student-focused matters and less on research. This contradicts university goals, as universities are aiming to improve their research performance."
The trend has gone furthest in business schools and in newer universities where student evaluations of teaching have become the norm. These give effect to student-customers' indirect control over academic employees by setting the agenda for management, argued Prof Bamber.
"Student evaluations of teaching also give effect to student-customers' control over academic employees, as staff respond by self-censorship and increased responsiveness to student-customer demands. Failure to do so may bring academics into conflict customers and management, and have consequences for career prospects," he wrote.
Universities are fracturing into inner groups of high status academics and an "underclass" of staff on contracts, who are assigned information processing tasks of forum monitoring and e-mail response.
He and Dr Sappy found younger academics were far more supportive of the student-as-customer. In the words of one junior academic quoted: "Students are definitely your customers ...students always come first...it's part of my teaching ethos, but also partly the customer driven focus of the place".
Prof Bamber concluded: "For the academic in the 21st century, flexible delivery takes on a whole new dimension: a flexible (expanding) workload, flexible hours as decided by management; flexible teaching duties as a generic teacher instead of a specialist; and a flexible employment contract."
