LEACHING
PROFESSOR

 

Volume 8, Number 9

The “Customer-Driven”
Classroom: A Rebuttal

by Dale Clifford, University of North Florida

Editor’s note: An article on the “customer-driven”
classroom in our August/September issue was the
“straw that broke the camel’s back” for this subscriber.

The popularity of Total Quality Management may be
relatively new, but the attempt to make an analogy be-
tween the university and business is old. The analogy
has always ultimately failed, and it will in this case as
well.

Why? It’s not that there is anything wrong with
TQM. In fact, TQM itself (not the popularized and intel-
lectually gutted version that consultants everywhere
are pressing on us) contains much of value that can be

pplied to part of what we do in academia. It is particu-
‘arly useful for student services, the scheduling of
classes, and registration. But the business metaphor
can never encompass what occurs in the university
classroom. Here are a few major reasons.

The Student as Consumer

Most of our students want a degree; not all of those
who want a degree actually want an education, or want
the education we define through general education and
major requirements. Thus, as customers, they are
forced to “buy” things they do not want. This is hardly
the case in the business world, and it does change the
nature of the relationship between “provider” and “con-
sumer.” Some of the principles of TQM can help with
the problem of the unwilling customer, but nothing can
change the fact that the customer is forced into the con-
tract.

The university also confronts the obverse of the un-
willing customer problem — the customer who should
not be allowed to buy. As academic dean for first- and
second-year students, I once had a long and frustrating
conversation with the parents of a student who had
been suspended after two terms on academic probation,
during which he succeeded in lowering his GPA to .98.
At the end of our conversation the parents argued that

ey were willing to pay for their son’s education and,
since ours was a state university, we were obliged to let
them buy his admission to classes.

A business analogy immediately occurred to me:
we are not, I told them, in a business like selling

November 1994

toothpaste. A grocery store will sell you toothpaste even
if you have no teeth; the university is not obligated to
“sell” you classes if your performance clearly indicates
that the “service” we are providing is not doing you any
good.

Customer Satisfaction

As academics, we regularly seek student “customer”
input about the quality of our teaching. Though we
often argue heatedly over the type and use of student
surveys, almost all of us generally agree on the impor-
tance of student evaluation. However, there are limits
to the applicability of immediate student satisfaction
surveys. For example, students will often prefer old
and stale knowledge that is “well-packaged” to up-to-
date course material that is less than excitingly pre-
sented and possibly more difficult. How are they to
know the information is outdated?

Further, surveys concerned with general education
indicate that the level of satisfaction with these re-
quired courses grows with the amount of time since the
student took the courses. Students may report as sen-
iors that they hated their general education courses,
and then report as 10- or 20-year alumni that general
education courses were among the most valuable
classes they took. Businesses, especially American busi-
nesses, don’t plan for satisfaction after 20 years.

It is the fundamental nature of our “business” that
real success is measured over the lifetime of the cus-
tomer — which ought also to be the lifetime of the
“product.” That’s education. Tp

Editor’s Note

Dale Clifford isn’t the only one concerned about the
business metaphor. Alfie Kohn objects in an article in
Educational Leadership: “I believe that a marketplace
model, even correctly applied, does not belong in the
classroom.” Kohn writes specifically against the appli-
cation of TQM principles.

Among a variety of objections, Kohn observes:

What is striking about the articles and books
on the application of TQM to education is
their failure to address any fundamental ques-
tions about learning per se, or even more re-
markably, curriculum. Incredibly, page after
page, written by educators enamored of busi-
ness models, typically contain not a single

 

The Teaching Professor November 1994

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