Abstract
Conversations about the state of higher education in the US are increasingly attuned to the predatory practices of for-profit colleges. The essay offers a critical retrospective engagement with my experience teaching at a for-profit institution of higher education. It provides a theorization of what I found to be a "customer service orientation"--a distinctive expectation the college has about how instructors interact with their students, as well as a skill instructors are asked to foster in students. After briefly outlining the institution's spatial configuration and how that supports its customer service orientation, I focus on two aspects of the for-profit educational experience: 1) the classroom experience within a generic sociology course, where students and I worked against the customer service orientation; and 2) a close reading of a course textbook assigned to all incoming students, which reveals most clearly the dual operations of neoliberal individualism and a customer service orientation. The classroom scenes detailed in this essay depict the complex and calculated negotiations of teachers and students with academic capitalism.
Highlights
A few years ago at a meeting of the National Women’s Studies Association, I found myself describing to a colleague my experiences as an instructor at a for-profit educational institution in Austin, Texas
Virginia College was familiar to my colleague, a resident of Georgia, since the college has twenty-seven campuses located throughout the southeastern states, apart from its one campus in Virginia
The motivational posters, which we might usefully recognize as simultaneous producers and products of neoliberal individualism, are deeply entrenched in Virginia College’s customer-service orientation
Summary
A few years ago at a meeting of the National Women’s Studies Association, I found myself describing to a colleague my experiences as an instructor at a for-profit educational institution in Austin, Texas. I look back at my classroom experiences and I offer a theorization of what I term a “customer service orientation” in for-profit institutions— both a distinctive expectation the college has about how instructors interact with their students, as well as a skill instructors are asked to foster in students.[5] It is an orientation that refers to the expectation that instructors serve students, as others have noted, but in this context references the college’s intention to teach students how to serve customers in their promised future jobs. While each motivational poster does include a Virginia College logo, it is their lack of specificity—and their general and customizable definition of “success”—that implies, coercively, that all current and prospective students are responsible for defining and achieving “better” and more secure futures. This is a message intended to be widely applicable and to allow current and prospective students to identify with former students, who seem to tell them: “My new life can be yours, too.”
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