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University Business, Oct, 2003 by Kenneth Evans

I teach at a private university in the Eastern U.S. I know from personal experience what happens when business principles and business terminology are at the core of running a university. Profit almost always comes before students. Open-door policies are standard and many students are badly placed and served in such an institution. The debate about customers and students ["Who's a Customer?" Editor's Note, July] goes back to the ancient distinction between liberal arts education and training. Liberal arts education has always been aimed at educating the student as opposed to educating a student to get a job. Liberal arts education is what makes one free in a modern society. The "university," as the term itself indicates, is a place to learn universal knowledge, not a place to get training. It is not a place to turn out hordes of trained technicians who know nothing but their chosen skill. If students want to get training, they can go to other places and get it and often get it a Lot cheaper than at a university. Indeed, there have been so many successful craftspeople without much education that one could argue that for universities, trying to train students [in] skills is a waste of time. The best way to learn a skill is from a master of that skill. As for business, it aims at making a profit. ALL business principles are aimed at that goat. When business principles and terminology are applied to activities that are not by nature businesses, it is no good for business or for those activities. Business schools are not universities. Indeed, since so many successful business people have little education, any attempt at teaching business in a university is also fruitless or at [east Less than successful. [A university education] gives students the knowledge that training and skills are built on. It is not a kind of work but a kind of leisure Like the arts and religion. Learning and truth are ends in themselves. Americans have been trying slowly to turn every human activity into a business, even religious and educational activities. America is worse off for it. Thus, we have, for example, teacher unions, arts unions, game-player unions, and police unions. But unions and strikes have too often strangled school teaching, artistic expression, sports, and public safety. And developing athletes in the university to enter into the businesses of professional sports and to make profit for the university is nothing but a capitulation to business. It is clear, too, that recruitment, registration, food services, facilities, marketing, housing, etc. are "auxiliary" to the main core of a university. They do not have educational value. They are there "to serve" the education core of the university. None of them should be run exactly Like businesses. The tuition payments of students are fees or honorariums not payments for a product, and the funds paid to teachers should also be thought of and termed honorariums, not salaries. Students are not customers or products, both business terms. They do not purchase education. Teaching like farming and medicine is a cooperative art. Universities should be supported by the government, foundations, and alumni. They are not by nature part of the free enterprise system. They are not in competition like businesses. A university run like a business cannot help short-changing the education of its students. Applying business aims, principles, or terms to so many human activities is sooner or Later to ask for more confusion and chaos than we now undoubtedly possess.

KENNETH EVANS, Professor

[Name of School Withheld by Request]