As the realities of the Alberta government’s cuts to post-secondary education begin to take shape a couple of weeks before the return to campus, I’ve heard and read many defenders of the cuts explain that our colleges and universities are government-funded businesses. In some ways, this metaphor is true. Obviously, these institutions are government-funded. Clearly, there are business-like transactions: students pay for what the cut-defenders call “a service,” so tuition is kind of a service fee; we have “stakeholders,” including students, staff, faculty, sessionals (but that’s another topic unto itself), administrators, board members, the government, tax-payers of Alberta, and tax-payers of Canada; post-secondary institutions have assets and expenditures; they spend and receive money. My salary is partly paid by tax-payers. Many of these transactions look a lot like business.
They look like business transactions because we have made them look like business transactions. We have made education, particularly post-secondary education, a business through metaphor. However (and this is the only academic reference I will make), Lakoff and Johnson (Metaphors We Live By) suggest that metaphors both highlight and hide: they highlight similarities and hide differences. What has happened with education is that many have begun to cling too tightly to the similarities of business without recognizing the differences. This is not to say that education does not benefit business; far from it. I only hope to point out that the metaphor that “education is business” fails in many ways.
Before I begin, I think it is necessary to bring to your attention that I am not a tenured faculty member: I am not, in fact, in a tenure-track stream; I am not, actually, a member of faculty. I was hired to teach and not to research (and that is another topic unto itself). Despite my “second-class status” in the post-secondary education system, I will defend tenure and tenure-track positions. But I want you to know that I am not a six-figure professor defending my high pay out of self-interest. I am the lowest of the low, except for contract workers. I actually have benefits, while sessionals do not. I don’t have to apply for a job every four months, while sessionals do. My “continuing appointment” is effectively “tenure-light.” I’m not sure I have the same job protection as tenured members of my department, since I have to have written permission from my Dean to engage in research. (Sorry, that was wee bit of a rant.)
But enough about how people employed by universities (who have been eviscerated by these cuts) are all a bunch of loafing leftists who contribute nothing to the economy; I can tell you that after twelve years of post-secondary education, my salary is not “commiserate” with my experience. I can’t tell you about administration or finances or give you numbers. All I can do is tell you about my practices teaching students and how the metaphor of business absolutely fails in my classroom.
The business metaphor fails because I do not produce products in my classroom. I do not directly contribute to the economy in my classroom, and I never intend to do so. Students are not products; they are not “human resources;” neither are they consumers in a literal way. They do not buy my words, my ideas, my expertise. They do not buy their degrees; they earn their degrees by studying with people who know the most about their areas of specialty, who are experts in their fields, who want to instill in their students a love of what they love. In this way, education is not a business.
I should say, though, that many students don’t “buy” my ideas metaphorically, either. Many times I have had students who disagree with me. I have had students with whom I have fundamentally disagreed regarding their interpretations of texts who have earned A+s in my class. I recall one incident while I was teaching Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and one male student spoke up against the argument of the text, against feminism; his statement provoked, as you might imagine, numerous responses from the class. At the beginning of the next class, I began by saying that I admired that student’s courage; even though I disagree with his ideas, I absolutely admire him for speaking out. A university is a place where ideas need to be opened to criticism, where ideas need to be discussed. That is how knowledge is created.
What does this anecdote have to do with an argument against literally making education a business, you may well ask? My response: in what business transaction would my discussion with that student have happened? In what business transaction could I see a student’s eyes blink into awareness, into understanding? In what business transaction could I see students discussing important ideas, important authors, new authors, with passion and admiration? Booksellers might be the only other business I know.
My final anecdote is one I heard second-hand, and it perfectly encapsulates how the failure of the metaphor that education is business harms everyone invested (metaphorically and literally) in education: while at the University of Calgary, a professor explained to me that, after three weeks after the first essay had been returned, a student asked, “when do we get our essays back?” The professor replied, “I have already returned them. If you would like yours, see me during my office hours.” The student responded, “I don’t work for you; you work for me.”
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