We’re offering our college students stewardship, not a service

I loved studying “A Higher Metaphor: The Pupil as Consumer” (Dec. 10, 2024) by Keith B. Murray.  Whereas I agree utterly with the premise, we have to go farther than to easily think about our college students to be our shoppers.  

College and workers at establishments of upper schooling are stewards of each our college students and their educations. As such, we take private duty for granting them each alternative to succeed, by sustaining robust ethics as recognized in Murray’s article. As stewards, each motion we take is for the care and improvement of our college students, and we attempt for far more than a consumer/vendor relationship.

This is a vital distinction, as a result of solely as stewards can we make moral selections about objects similar to whether or not to just accept late submissions of labor, how we grade scholar work, how we tackle tutorial integrity violations and extra. After we act as stewards, we earn this authority. We will talk tough selections to college students even when college students imagine that our selections might end in a setback. Along with educating on a selected topic, we’re serving to our college students to develop and develop as individuals in a world society.

In increased schooling now we have launched our personal obstacles to this mindset. One easy instance: At my establishment college students enroll in courses by first putting them in a “purchasing cart,” much like what prospects do on e-commerce websites. No surprise college students view schooling as transactional. Might our terminology in small half contribute to among the challenges we face in working with our college students? Clients demand grades. Shoppers demand grades and repair. Nonetheless, as stewards we offer far more. We put our complete selves into supporting our college students.

We make ourselves worthy of this position by sustaining the very best of moral requirements in all that we do in our work, by listening and offering the absolute best options to our college students, even when now we have to disclaim a request, and by all the time placing college students first in our decision-making. The change in terminology and mindset for which I advocate might sound minor, however we have to be very exact in our wording after we describe our values and relationships.