GB 12/3: If you buy a bicycle, you must ride it in order to get anywhere. If you buy a plane kit, you must assemble it, read the operating instructions, find a field in which to fly it, and then practice takeoffs, flying, and landings. If you buy a hot tub, you have it installed and then you soak. When you buy a product, you expect it to be functional [GH 12/4]. If education is a product and the student is the customer, what kind of product is it? What is the nature of the relationship between students and their education? Where does that put the instructor?
     Many professors and administrators I know fully accept the idea that students are clients and customers. I have been teaching since 1950 and have always thought of the students in the courses I teach as customers. They are paying the university, which hires me to lead them through courses in which they will come to comprehend something about the humanities. What I wonder is, why are others reluctant to use that phraseology, or even hostile to the thought?

SW 12/3: This phraseology has recently become prevalent among the administrators at my university as well. It is causing considerable consternation among the faculty, a consternation that I (an administrator) share. The metaphors we choose to reflect our activities have a way of shaping reality, and many of us do not like the way this metaphor seems to shape education. Here are a few of the reasons why I resist thinking of the student as "customer."
     My discomfort with the terminology--which I believe was a necessary and worthy attempt to make us pay the students a bit more attention--comes from knowing the history of consumerism in America. Consumerism has created an increasingly crude marketplace geared to the lowest common denominator, and those of us who resist this phraseology do so at least in part out of concern that a similar fate might befall the educational system.
     Furthermore, the atmosphere of "the customer is always right" in American consumerism is not the case in education, where a great deal of effort is spent, well, educating people. If they were always right then they wouldn't need education! Our students all too often translate "the customer is always right" to mean "if I fail, it's because you aren't valuing what I value, and if I'm the customer I'm always right, so you're wrong."
     Finally, I am concerned because such phraseology seems to reflect the view that education is a license you buy in order to get a good job. This vocational philosophy focuses less on educating the whole human being than on outfitting the human being to be a working cog in the economic machinery of society.

WT 12/6: Although the terminology "student as customer" has indeed come into common usage within--at least--the community college and vocational programs, its academic usage did not begin there. There has been tremendous pressure on the university to see itself as a provider of services to "customers" from those outside. I see the university responding to community senses about the accountability of university systems.
     Some of those pressures have to do with non-academic issues; can you imagine a business surviving by asking a customer to come back more than once to see (1) the salesman (recruiter/admissions office); (2) the product representative (academic advisor); (3) the credit department (financial aid); and (4) the cashier (business office). While businesses cheerfully give a refund for an inappropriate, broken, or dysfunctional product, our university refunds policies for tuition and fees is archaic. So "customer service" has become, appropriately, I think, limited to administrative services. Even so, when an advisor mis-advises a student, we usually say, "Too bad, you'll just have to go back and take the right course." This is unfair to the student, who now pays extra tuition or needs extra time to complete requirements.
     If students are "business customers," does that make faculty "employees" under the supervision of "administrators"? That is another push coming along from the community and, in some cases, from the regents. Yet the relation of faculty to administration is much more complex than such an image allows.
     Our degrees, as well, have become attuned to the marketplace. Degrees reflect what we "sell" and programs revolve around recruitment of students or community needs. We "sell" some academic programs especially as preparation for employment (business, teaching, etc.). Recently some schools have downplayed both general education and liberal arts, what "any educated person ought to know." So if the community outside the university has responded as if the community were merely the marketplace, we ought not be surprised. We are increasingly being seen as serving customers. But if, in fact, this is not what we are about, we need to change not only the terminology but also the operations.

GH 12/4: Far more troubling to me is the related notion that the student itself is a product. If the metaphorical representation of students leads to the appropriation of ideas like "the customer is always right," the idea of educated students as a product of a college education leads to the appropriation of more insidious ideas like "value added" and "warranty." To ensure that a college "adds value" to the students who experience its educational "process," or to engage in forms of "quality control" and "feedback loops" to ensure that the student product meets certain standards, is an extraordinarily difficult process.

MB 12/3: People resist the implication that the student as customer is buying a result, for example, an acceptable grade, rather than an opportunity. Professors then become service workers whose job is to "keep the customer satisfied" by handing out good grades, whether or not the student's performance warrants it. What, then, do professors really provide? [See PS below.]
     [12/5] While the college/university is in some ways a business, and needs to conform to some basic business standards (for example, accounting practices), the idea of education as a commodity one purchases has several pernicious consequences. One is that the "product" may be altered in response to "consumer" demand. While this has happened before, the most recent manifestation of this should be particularly disturbing to those who teach history or any other "impractical" discipline.
     We are seeing the extent to which corporations are using access to student internships as leverage to gain input on curriculum. In short, if a school wants its students to have the opportunity to get a summer internship, it needs to teach the kinds of courses that the corporation considers useful. Executives from Ford and IBM are unlikely to complain that their workers are woefully ignorant of the complexities of the American sectional conflict or the origins of the British working class. Treating education as a commodity can only accelerate the trend to turn colleges and universities into vocational schools, whose purpose is not a "liberal education" but to make students ready to work on day one.

GH 12/4: My favorite education analogy (another travel analogy) is that a college is like a cruise ship--you purchase the experience. College or ship certainly can offer all kinds of wonderful opportunities but cannot guarantee that its purchasers will have a good time. It is in the long-term interest of each, of course, to try to make sure that its opportunities can in fact provide what it promises. Considering how much a cruise costs, a college education is a pretty good bargain.

MK 12/5: I prefer to think of "student as client." I think "client" and "customer" have different connotations. A client contracts with a professional to benefit from the professional's knowledge or service. The professional is morally obligated to render the highest quality service on behalf of the client. Here the client is not always right. The professional is bound to standards of knowledge and practice that the client cannot influence or change. Should the client not be pleased with a professional's services, the client must switch to another professional. This construct seems more viable than the "customer" concept. The customer may always be right--but the client isn't necessarily right.

SW 12/6: Before becoming a college professor, I worked as a director in a theatre where they had just done a survey of their audience as a means of determining what kinds of plays they should schedule. A great majority said they wanted to see comedies and musicals rather than dramas. But toward the end of the survey, where they were asked to write the titles of a few plays they had seen and enjoyed recently, the two plays that appeared most often were Shadowbox, the story of patients in a cancer ward; and Equus, the story of a boy who blinds several horses because of certain psychological problems. Neither is, by any stretch of the imagination, a comedy or a musical.
     It seems to me that students are similar to these spectators. When they arrive, they often think they want one thing, but once they taste something else they find they really like it. This is where students (and spectators) differ from the stove buyers. Rarely does someone come into an appliance store and discover that, while they thought they wanted a stove, what they really needed to cook their food was a washing machine. But students, when they arrive in the university "store," often have a limited idea of what is available, and what it is they really like or need. If, like good salespeople, we simply "listen" and try to figure out what they "want," I guarantee you that ultimately the student will be disappointed, because education is as much about surprise as it is about knowledge. It is about the look of newness that the world assumes when you discover something for the first time. To do so is to take a leap into the unknown--but if you see yourself as simply responding to the customer's desires, you will never encourage them to make that leap. This requires instructors to be leaders, not salespeople.
     I believe in an education that is student-centered, but I do not believe that they really know what they want, only what they have liked out of what they have experienced so far. Actually, they tend to want whatever it is that an inspired, committed, and caring teacher makes intriguing. [Thus there is a responsibility to inspire the higher passions of the students.] If you are excited, and believe that they will be equally excited, the battle is nearly won. There is a professor of music here who is so excited about the reeds he makes for his oboe that, when he tells his students about the importance of it, and how he makes them, his general education students also get excited about it. He makes it seem exciting when he communicates it.
     The movie Field of Dreams said, "If you build it, they will come." Actually, it would have been more accurate to say, "If you believe in it, they will come," for it is Costner's faith that brings the spirits out of the corn. Instructors might learn something wonderful from that film. Costner never would have seen those spirits if he had said: "If I find out what the spirits truly want, then they will come. The spirits are customers . . . "

GB 12/5: In this whole discussion about clients and customers, I have not seen anyone come right out and say, "Students are ABSOLUTELY NOT customers. There is NO way in which they can be considered clients or paying purchasers. They are plainly and simply STUDENTS who are matriculated into the institution so that they may acquire the knowledge we experts can provide for them. Taxes and tuition and governmental or private corporate service components are wholly irrelevant." What I do hear, however, are "preferences" that they not be considered as clients; feelings of "uneasiness" when these words are used, and significant rhetoric about what the respondent considers to be the implications deriving from any application of the cash payment concept.
     If there is "no free lunch," if the laws of economics have not been repealed, then why is the concept of students as customers so unacceptable? Are we professors so vain as to believe we are transcendent ? How many of us can dance on the head of a pin? Do we not pay taxes? Where do we get the wherewithal to do that? What prevents us from wanting to talk about $$$$? Is it too lowly and crass?
     From where I operate, primarily in Distance or Decentralized Learning and the beginnings of Western Governors' Virtual University, if we don't start thinking in terms of consumers, paying customers and client-driven curricula rather soon, many of us will not have to worry about it at all. There may be preferences for yesteryear here, and some (perhaps many) would "rather that things not be going in that direction"--but frankly, I think that the switchover has already happened, and that many professors have been oblivious.
     [The idea here seems to be that knowledge transmission has become formalized enough that human interaction between teacher and student is no longer needed. If students know what they want, they can buy the internet course. But college provides the flexibility to explore various disciplines, and it provides an environment in which the non-formalized kinds of personal and cultural wisdom can be transmitted. See PS, below.]

PS 12/5: This "student as customer" stuff is, in my opinion, pernicious. While I think all the objections that have been voiced to this notion are valid, I put my own objections on somewhat different ground. I think that the reason why so many of us find this notion so troubling is because it implicitly addresses another, more serious concern: what's a college for?
     Positing the student as customer suggests that we are in the "business of education" (an oxymoron?). It puts the institution of higher education on the same ground as the trade school. My position is that education, while necessary to our purpose, is a secondary effect of that purpose, and that the true purpose of the college/university has to do with the continuation of the culture. The real purpose of our schools is the conservation, elaboration, and transmission of knowledge, the real "stuff" of culture. Our true client (note, not customer), therefore, is not the student but the larger culture itself: Western culture, if you would, or the culture of the human race if you are so inclined. The education of our students, in this sense, becomes a means to an end (and only one means!)--not the end itself.
     This is why we have standards; this is why we flunk some students and reward others. If we did not have standards, we could not successfully transmit the culture from one generation to another. Such transmission is both vital and difficult. For examples of failures in culture, take a look at the Greek Dark Age or the European Dark Age. As these examples show, the transmission of culture is not some airy and abstract concern; when the transmission of culture fails, real people really suffer and die. In all of this I think that it is important to note that we do not expect the culture to remain precisely the same; it will change, mutate, and grow, and parts will vanish and die. But if core knowledge is not transmitted, the culture will ultimately fail, and catastrophe will follow.
     So we do indeed have an obligation to our students, but it has nothing to do with market forces, business, or the "customer" relationship. It is precisely the same obligation that we have to the rest of the society that supports us: to serve as vital, growing, living memory. We would demean our place in the culture and belittle the importance of our students if we were to consider them merely as customers. [The next question is, what specific things make up this culture that we are trying to transmit?]

EK 12/5: Seeing "students as customers" has been a serious concern of mine for about 24 years, during which I have being teaching history in an American college in Athens, Greece. Teachers do have to consider seriously that our students pay to get an education (at least in the private schools) and for this reason we must behave as professionals and do our job correctly.
     What happens when the standards for teachers become confused? How are we to evaluate our job? Again the question is, if we see students as customers, what are we actually selling to them? Grades? Our knowledge? Our thoughts? Our appreciation of the past? Our opinions? Our prejudices? Our methodology in conducting research? All of the above? Who is a "good seller" and who is not? Above all, can the students ("customers") actually evaluate our "selling," especially if they do not really know what they want to "buy"?
     [12/8] Becoming a teacher is, I believe, the second great role that humans could choose to play in life (the first one is that of becoming a parent). College education is the last "chance" young people have to acquire more "skills" with which they would be able to "get into the real world" and to "survive." What a heavy burden now falls upon the shoulders of college instructors! Someone could say that some people have acquired that extra "package" by themselves, by studying and reading in solitude. Well, colleges fortunately still hire us to facilitate that process.
     Beyond the fact that students pay (or don't pay) for their college education, it seems to me that we should always bear in mind, as most of our students realize when they are approaching graduation, that they are reaching the end of the line with us as their models, with us as their last security valves, with us as one of the most dynamic source of influence and inspiration for their future lives. When and after we choose to become teachers, it seems to me we should never forget to ask such questions as: "what do I really want to convey to these young minds when I teach them about ancient Egypt, medieval Europe, the human predicament, or human civilization? I want to believe that when we, teachers, give such a depth to our profession, most of the students appreciate that and they want to learn more from us, because they know that when they quit school, they have passed another deadline.
     [12/5] History and the humanities cannot offer some concrete tool or craft with which a person can earn money. Nor can we offer some kind of "product" which students can use and test its "function" and return if it is "broken." On the other hand history and the humanities (among other things) require mutual participation and cooperation in the educational process, a kind of open and continuous give-and-take from the teachers and students alike. The final outcome depends on establishing and maintaining deep intellectual contact and communication.
     I am trying to convince my students that I do not "give" the good or bad grades, they "take" them. It all depends on how much worth they want to make of their own money: if they just want to throw their money away and fail the class, this is their "choice"! If they want their expenditure to be worth it through their whole life, they must choose to become a part of the class and "discover" who they are and who I am and who we are together.

SK 12/5: First, I agree that "client" is a much better word than "customer"--not because I prefer the one and am uneasy with the other, but because the one more accurately describes what actually happens over the course of a student's career. The student, remember, has a relationship not just with each individual professor, but also with the university itself. The customer paradigm works rather better when we consider administrative matters such as registration, accreditation, graduation, advising, and the like. [See WT below.]
     The main problem I have with "student as customer" is less with the words themselves than with those saying them. I hear this pitch mainly from people who are not actually engaged in the process of teaching and learning; instead, the pitch comes mainly from administrators [those who only deal with the above matters] and legislators and news columnists. Whenever I see this pitch, the advocates invariably invoke business as something we ought to be imitating, and they allude to dark doom if we educators should be so retrograde as to drag our feet.
     This argument is riddled with fallacy. In the first place, American higher education is the most highly-regarded educational system in the world. It got that way precisely by being chaotic, decentralized, and by not following business models. [Hence the recent argument that although American students score near the bottom on international math and science tests, decentralized classrooms serve students best in the long run.] American business practices, on the other hand, do not command such international respect, and undergo changes of style as frequently as a fashion model. There is simply no reason I can see that higher education should begin to imitate the business world.
     And the dark doom? The argument here is that we must change or we shall die; this observation is usually delivered with all the finality of an Old Testament prophet. Intimated, and sometimes explicitly stated, is that we are old-fashioned (that's a sin) and out-of-date (a mortal sin), still practicing methods from the Middle Ages (is there something worse than mortal?). The plain fact is, universities have changed over the centuries and have survived change far more dramatic than the Internet--for example, the Industrial Revolution.
     What we have in our higher education is a system that has proven itself across centuries and across multiple cultures. It has done so because scholarly education is a process unto itself, rather like philosophical inquiry or scientific research. When pressed, the advocates I have spoken to always end up referring to areas of study that are really vocational training and not scholarly education, and at that point I do agree with them. Vocational training has intruded upon the university over the past several decades, and universities have not proved particularly good at providing that. It will probably move away. We will lose students, revenue, and a number of universities will undergo crises, and none of that will affect our central activity of producing learned citizens.
     Those who promote the idea of "students as customers" seem to be aware of none of this. In fact, when I try to present the historical argument, they become impatient and resort to reiterating their pronouncements. It is rather like talking to a UFO buff. I would shrug and walk away, except these advocates are often in positions of power. They have the ability to disrupt our lives, to waste millions of dollars, to demoralize both staff and faculty with wild changes of direction (rarely seen through to completion), and to kill fine academic programs in the name of The Future and a Higher Good. In the hands of a teacher, a reorienting idea like "student as customer" can be liberating and lead to innovation. But too often it is merely a banner waved by people who either misunderstand higher education, or who are actively hostile to academia.

CT 12/5: The idealist in me agrees that "Our true client . . . is not the student but the larger culture itself." But the realist in me cries out that higher education, whether we like it or not, is a business, and a very competitive one at that--just ask any admissions and/or financial aid representative at any college or university in the country. Or ask any department chair who is fighting to preserve, let alone increase, his department's budget from year to year.
     For us the key is to strike a balance: to keep a measure of our idealism while acknowledging the economic realities of contemporary higher education. This is not to say that we should treat students as customers, per se. I like the suggestion of calling them clients instead--they come to us and pay us--that, my friends, is a business transaction--for our wisdom and expertise. Students, just like legal clients, also have goals, usually career goals. A college degree is often a necessary step to reaching these goals, and they expect that college and university professors will help them achieve them.
     Is this too much to expect? I think not, although we as educators need to point out to them, from the very first day they step into our classrooms, that despite our best efforts, achieving their goals is largely up to them. [See EK above.] That said, we also need to make sure that we make the connection, both in what we teach and how we teach it, between what we are teaching the students and the students' goals. Why is it important that they learn history? What does history, and thinking and writing about history, teach them that they will find useful, no matter what their career goals are? Critical thought? Writing skills? Researching skills? Speaking/debating skills? Reading skills? Diligence? A different way of looking at today's world and its problems? A better understanding of people and their histories and cultures? A better understanding of themselves and how seemingly distant or disconnected things can affect them and their lives? The key for students is to see and understand this relevance to their own goals. [Don't we also need to teach students how to determine what goals they want to have or should have? See SW (12/6) below.] Once this is accomplished, the concept of students as "clients," and even "customers," seems much less unsettling.

LS 12/5: What "business" are we in and just what is it we do--if you'll pardon the sordid term--for a living? Strange question? Dumb question? Prattle? Is that too mundane or materialistic for us in the hallowed ivory tower? Maybe. But, I wonder how many of us individually have sat back and have really reflected on that simple inquiry, much less articulated an answer for ourselves. Are we in a business? Is it possible to reach a consensus on what business teachers really think we are in? Is what we do a job, a profession, an art, a craft, a calling, a mission?
     Never mind what we publicly say. What do we privately and honestly believe and how do we act accordingly? Are we each in the "business" of academics, more specifically something solely subject oriented, engaged in the study of history? Are we in the research and scholarly publication business, so that whatever goes on in the classroom is the not-serious-but-needed-to-feed-the-family job? Are we in the business of disseminating and distributing information and/or knowledge and/or wisdom? Professoring? Teaching? Training? Education?
     Each answer has a different meaning and different connotation for our outlook, what we believe, how we perceive ourselves, how we relate to those--especially students--around us, and an understanding of what it is we do or are expected to do. Each makes a difference in terms of perceptions, service, operations, products, and success--survival. If an airline executive distinguishes between the airline business and the transportation business, or an electric utility representative between the power supply business and the electricity business, or an oil executive feels the company is in the energy business rather than just the oil business, the difference in scope and outlook profoundly changes what happens. Look at how the AAA changed once its executives decided they were in the travel and tourist business rather than just the automobile roadside service business. Why should it be any different for us in history?
     So, what business are we in? The history business? The education business? The research business? [The transmission of cultural wisdom business?] Do history teachers see ourselves as researchers thrown into the classroom to justify our presence on campus as well as our salaries, or as teachers of specific aspects of history, or as teachers of history, or as educators here to "provide students the hope and faith that they have the ability to weave their own dream catchers?" How would we shift our attitudes and perceptions, develop our techniques, allocate our time and energy and attention, set our priorities, modify our performances as we danced along this progression of identities and beliefs and perceptions?
     This is why I think each of us consciously ought to give serious thought to the question of what business we are in while we wrestle with the issue of whether students are customers or not.

LS 12/5: Many schools are discovering the truth that if we really were in the business world, we wouldn't last a quarter's report. The medieval days of the exalted ivory tower existing on church tithes, when our word was unquestioned law, and there was no accountability to the lesser laity, are long since passed.
     The cruise ship analogy is hardly self-serving for instructors--the keywords are pampering, catering, patronizing, serving. The cliche that the "customer is always right" is myopic, as any devotee of Adam Smith capitalism can attest. [To say that the customer is always right is to imply that the instructor is generally wrong. Or, you pretend that the customer is right so as to make sure he gives you his money.]
     But this is not to say that the college is always right. When I was selling large household appliances, the owner of the store once told us to push a certain item that was overstocked. His idea was that the good salesman would sell what the store had to move, rather than what would meet the needs of the customer. In other words, our sales pitch started with the desire to sell the store's needs, not those of the customer. So, I wonder: when we say that we are in the business of producing learners, from what point does that production line begin, our needs or the students'? [For example, to what extent does tuition fund our research rather than our teaching?] A lot of us always say that we are student-oriented, but I think we too often tend to define that orientation by looking into a mirror rather than out a window.
     A crackerjack salesman once taught me two things. First, when a customer comes into the store, the first thing I should do is not sell an appliance, but sell myself so that the people have confidence in whatever I say. The second is not to be solely concerned with the appliance, but with the people and their home. If they want an oven, what do they cook, when do they cook, do they like to cook? Do they see the stove as just an appliance or as a piece of the kitchen décor, a work of art?
     So many of us just walk into a class, plop our notes down on a lectern and talk. Even if we use a different technique, we rarely see beyond the narrow confines of the particular class, subject, or major. We really should be getting to know the students to understand why they don't or can't do what we expect, demand, or command. We seldom act like good marketers concerned for the "whole" student, taking care of students' needs in terms not just of the information but of a whole cluster of things related to their character, strengths and weaknesses, skills, learning style, teaching styles, and overall learning and growth--even though all of these play on their particular performances in a course. We tend to talk more about delivering instruction than about facilitating learning with every student by whatever means works best.
     Sometimes this attention requires that we change. We ought to take at least some cues from the students about the subject and the form in which it is presented, under what conditions and for what purpose. If we do not change, the more our knowledge grows about how the mind works and students learn, the greater becomes the chasm between what we say and what we do.
     Note that this student-centered approach is not about watering things down, going "touchy-feely," inflating grades, diminishing expectations, and so forth. Those are straw men that so many of us love to attack, as a rationale for us to keep on doing what we have always been doing. Let's be honest. Too many of us know more about our subject than we know about each student; we are much more comfortable with research and publications than with teaching techniques; we are more conscious of our field of expertise than of thoroughly learning what the students' problems and needs are. We ought not see students as invasions of our intellectual privacy, trespassers on the quiet, reflective inner sanctum, distractions from our higher calling of pursuing knowledge in the labs and archives and field and libraries, drains on the time we need to publish and secure the security of tenure--a way of funding the "higher mission."
     The best names in the field, the most acclaimed research, do not save a school from extinction, but the presence of students can. First we must come to know our students. Then, we have to move further back to develop those techniques by which their needs and challenges are in part provided and offered. Finally, and only then, should we move back still further to find the raw material of the information.

GB 12/5: In this discussion--as solid members of our profession--we have taken up a proposed shift in vocabulary, problematized it, and become busily engaged in its exegesis. As we read each of the contributions to our redefining of what we do ("for a living"?), how much do we learn about the mindset of each author? And think how lucky we are: we are doing this in English, in which we have at least those two words to work with. If we were doing this in Spanish, we would be stuck (except for a few localisms) with "client," used both for customer and for client.

PC 12/8: I prefer the concept of students as "clients" rather than "customers." But even this term simplifies the relationship among student, teacher, and university. The relationships are fluid and dynamic and difficult to quantify. Certainly the role of a teacher to the students is not (or is much more than) one of a salesman or of an information provider, and similarly in this relationship a student is much more than a consumer or customer.
     The relationship between students and their college or university, however, is far more straightforward. As has been pointed out so clearly already, whether we like it or not our institutions of higher learning have become businesses, and they are managed and operated as businesses. Students expect that the support services they require to enable them to successfully complete their chosen course of instruction should be provided--books on reserve, accommodation, food, student services, sports and social recreation facilities, and the myriad range of other essential services are all expected, without question. As universities around the world are moving towards charging their students full fees rather than relying on government grants, then shouldn't students have the right to ask what they are going to get for their money? Purchasing power has shown its strength in a consumer society, and where universities fail to provide facilities and services that come up to students' expectations, then like dissatisfied customers, they will take their money and go elsewhere.
     I face a similar dilemma myself as a disabled student. My college has not provided the means to allow me access to facilities in order to participate properly in college life, yet I am expected to pay exactly the same fees as every other student. As a customer, would any of us ever pay for a service or facility that we could not use? Am I behaving too much like a customer and not enough like a student?

RW 12/9: I would never refer to my students as customers or clients. I am 66 years old with a 1952 B.A. in history and a 1963 Ph.D. Much of this discussion about "customers," "consumers," and "clients" is an indication that the university in America today as a place of "higher learning" has declined. It began its decline about 1970, in my view. Politically the 1990s are similar to the 1920s. We are living in a Wall Street culture. Can the independent college or university recover in the next century?
     Some of the corespondents in this discussion are ready for such a reform of the university; some are not. Those who are ready do know that a historian is an intellectual, and a Ph.D. is a doctor of philosophy who has a philosophy higher than the mere profit motive. A salesman or administrator can be trained, but a philosopher must be independent, at least in his classroom. If the pupil who thinks he is a customer does not like that philosophy, he should drop the course.
     We should be teaching the student how to think, more than what to think.