(fruges consumere nati, Horace via Watts via
Franklin, Lemay 977, 'born to eat the corn')WEB RESOURCES (search these documents using "customer" and "consumer")
http://isu.indstate.edu/wbarratt/dragon/ce/v3n1.htm - "[Students as] Clients, Consumers or Designers?"
http://olam.ed.asu.edu/epaa/v3n11.html - "Inflated Grades, Inflated Enrollment, and Inflated Budgets: An Analysis and Call for Review at the State Level": "The purpose of this report is to suggest that a . . . change in college grading standards may be responsible for the low academic standards and rapidly growing budgets recently found . . . . The relationship between inflated grades, institutional priorities, budgetary control, and public higher education's formula funding is analyzed . . . . The concerns, needs, and priorities of taxpayers, employers, parents, alumni, and students, i.e., higher education's patrons and consumers, are given primary consideration."
http://www.bus.lsu.edu/accounting/faculty/lcrumbley/educpoly.htm - Student evaluations of faculty and academic freedom. For further reference: see bibliography, e.g. McMurtry 1991, "Education and the market model."
For blatant use of the metaphor: http://www2.emc.maricopa.edu/selfstudy/Chapter6/chapter6.B/6.B.10.html - "The curriculum process at Estrella Mountain is designed to be guided by the following principles: fosters a student-centered environment; responds to internal and external customer needs; uses appropriate research and evaluation processes; commits to institutional effectiveness and continuous improvement; relates to other College planning initiatives; determines customer satisfaction; promotes flexibility and scheduling of credit and non-credit offerings."
http://www.massey.ac.nz/~wwgeog/LDB/Market.html - "This shift to a 'consumer ideology' is widespread in New Zealand." The point goes much farther than N.Z.'s borders.
http://horizon.unc.edu/projects/issues/papers/kovel.asp - consumerism especially related to distance education: "Institutions will respond to a greater or lesser extent to any of the drivers noted, but the primary drivers are likely to be: Changing Demographics (on campus and off), and the pressures of Consumerism."
Cornell University resists the metaphor: "A sometimes inappropriate consumerism (according to which the student-customer always knows best) that affects higher education may interfere with the University's ability to set both academic and personal standards."
Also see http://olam.ed.asu.edu/epaa/v2n6.html - consumerism and school-choice vouchers in secondary (and earlier) education.
PRINT RESOURCES
McMillan, Jill J., and George Cheney, "The Student as Consumer: The Implications and Limitations of a Metaphor," Communication Education 45: 1-15 (January 1996). Includes a good bibliography, 14-15. Best on the limitations: the metaphor "suggests undue distance between the student and the educational process" and affects other institutional interrelationships; it encourages self-promotion among professors; it "promotes the entertainment model of learning," learning as a product rather than a process; it unduly favors the individual over the community.
Edmundson, Mark, "On the Uses of a Liberal Education," Harper's Magazine 295:1768 (Sept. 97), 39-49. University culture has "gotten little exploration. Current critics tend to think that liberal-arts education is in crisis because universities have been invaded by professors with peculiar ideas....Rather, it's that university culture, like American culture writ large, is...ever more devoted to consumption and entertainment...the cool consumer worldview" (40). Dollars, marketing surveys, "buyer's market." "The teachers have buckled to their students' views" (47). Disparate views of genius (48). Drastic solutions necessary?
Frank, Thomas, "Alternative to What?" in Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland, eds., Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from The Baffler (New York: Norton, 1997), 145-61: "Academics . . . have uncritically reaffirmed the mass media's favorite myths about itself . . . . The real disappointment lies in [scholars'] inability to recognize 'popular culture' anywhere but in the officially-sanctioned showplaces of corporate America." The "alternative" as "of the people." Salvo stuff.
Appadurai, Arjun, "Diversity and Disciplinarity as Cultural Artifacts," in Cary Nelson and D. P. Gaonkar, eds., Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 23-36. "By refusing to recognize that diversity requires more deliberation and more organization, universities allow the unfree play of the market--in students, in staff, and in faculty--to determine actual demographic outcomes" (24-25). Places student-as-consumer within a broader context: competition among departments/disciplines.
Generation X Goes to College, Chapter 13: "Postmodernity and the Entitlement Society," 154-70: see especially p. 161--going to college gets lost among the "many other types of consumer purchases"--and p. 164--Total Quality Management applied to education.
Religion and Science: History, Method, Dialogue, ed. by W. Mark Richardson and Wesley J. Wildman. New York: Routledge, 1996. Hereafter RAS. A collection of essays with Foreword by Ian Barbour: "These chapters draw from recent work in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of religion, such as the claim that a scientific theory (or a religious belief) is not tested individually against data, but is assessed as part of a network of theories (or beliefs) and assumptions tested together" (ix).
Polkinghorne, John, The Faith of a Physicist (Princeton: PUP, 1994). Good bibliography, pp. 200-05. Ch. 1: reality as consisting of more than merely mechanistic properties. Ch. 2: the search for truth, broadly considered, including theological knowledge.
Ferré, Nels F. S., Faith and Reason (NY: Harper & Bros., 1946). Ch. 1, "Religion and Reason": religion as "whole-response" to the experiences of life; this weak definition includes everyone. Stronger, religion is "surrender of the total self to truth and value" (8-9). "Detached reasoning" lets us "dodge our responsibility for living truth" (12). "Self is ... more than reason and is, therefore, a better standard for truth than reason is. Personalism is bigger and truer than rationalism" (21). "Full truth" combines reason and experience (23).
A FEW SOURCES FOR SPECIFIC TOPICS
Brooke, John Hedley, "Science and Theology in the Enlightenment" (RAS 7-27): common to find argument-by-design from Enlightenment onward (12). "The Ambivalence of Natural Theology" (12-14). "The Vulnerability of Natural Theology" (14-17). "In retrospect, the belief that there was a rational core that could be abstracted from all religions and that would eventually triumph as the best and most 'natural' religion seems strangely optimistic" (25).
Wildman, Wesley J., "The Quest for Harmony: An Interpretation of Contemporary Theology and Science" (RAS 41-60): "How can graduated priests and rabbis possibly give an account of their personal faith--a faith historically responsible, in spite of the existential reality for some of their parishioners that the modern, scientific view of the world makes the traditional stories about Moses, Jesus, and the Qur'an seem like fairy tales; a faith hopeful, in spite of the difficulty of believing in life everlasting when consciousness is biological in origin; a faith relevant, in spite of the comic implausibility of traditionally absolute conceptions of redemption and revelation in the light of the vast stretches of time and space that envelop us; a faith scripturally rooted, in spite of the fact that the supernaturalism of the Bible and the Qur'an clashes with our scientific view of the world as a closed causal network with no room for miracle?" (59).
Introduction (probably all by Wildman) to FAS Part II, "Method," pp. 84-92: methodological similarities and differences between theology and science. Faith finding a fairly solid footing in rationality.
Wolterstorff, Nicholas, "Theology and Science: Listening to Each Other" (RAS 95-104): "Control beliefs" in science, as in religion, delimit the kinds of theories and logical moves that are acceptable.
Clayton, Philip, and Steven Knapp, "Rationality and Christian Self-Conceptions" (RAS 131-42) aims to address this subject directly, and does, but doesn't seem to offer anything special to consider. Furthermore Wolterstorff (esp. 147) takes issue with their claim that Christianity partakes in the rational mainly as a form of explanation of pre-given data in the midst of a deliberative (cf. Gutmann) community. But note good references in n. 4, p. 141.
Brooke, John Hedley, "Science and Theology in the Enlightenment" (RAS 7-27): "A dispassionate quest for objective knowledge was proclaimed a virtue in its own right, as by Fontenelle, secretary of the Paris Academy of Science.... In a statement which shows how commitment to scientific research could almost become a surrogate religion, he claimed that physics became a kind of theology when properly pursued" (11).
Rolston, Holmes, III, "Science, Religion, and the Future" (RAS 61-82): quoting Ernst Mayr: "Virtually all biologists are religious, in the deeper sense of this word, even though it may be a religion without revelation" (71-72; orig. = Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, Cambridge: HUP, Belnap, 1982, 81).
Wolterstorff, Nicholas, "Theology and Science: Listening to Each Other" (RAS 95-104): "The Breakdown of Foundationalism in Science" (pp. 97-99). "Control beliefs" in science, as in religion, delimit the kinds of theories and logical moves that are acceptable.
Murphy, Nancey, "Postmodern Apologetics, Or Why Theologians Must Pay Attention to Science" (RAS 105-20): discusses Quine on the web of beliefs developed through experience.