I enjoyed reading “A Better Metaphor: The Student as Client” (Dec. 10, 2024) by Keith B. Murray. While I agree completely with the premise, we need to go farther than to simply consider our students to be our clients.
Faculty and staff at institutions of higher education are stewards of both our students and their educations. As such, we take personal responsibility for granting them every opportunity to succeed, by maintaining strong ethics as identified in Murray’s article. As stewards, every action we take is for the care and development of our students, and we strive for much more than a client/vendor relationship.
This is an important distinction, because only as stewards can we make ethical decisions about items such as whether to accept late submissions of work, how we grade student work, how we address academic integrity violations and more. When we act as stewards, we earn this authority. We can communicate difficult decisions to students even when students believe that our decisions may result in a setback. In addition to educating on a particular subject, we are helping our students to grow and develop as participants in a global society.
In higher education we have introduced our own barriers to this mindset. One simple example: At my institution students enroll in classes by first placing them in a “shopping cart,” similar to what customers do on e-commerce sites. No wonder students view education as transactional. May our terminology in small part contribute to some of the challenges we face in working with our students? Customers demand grades. Clients demand grades and service. However, as stewards we provide much more. We put our whole selves into supporting our students.
We make ourselves worthy of this role by maintaining the highest of ethical standards in all that we do in our work, by listening and providing the best possible solutions to our students, even if we have to deny a request, and by always putting students first in our decision-making. The change in terminology and mindset for which I advocate may sound minor, but we need to be very precise in our wording when we describe our values and relationships.
