At a faculty meeting last year at Purchase College in New York, a colleague in the administration described students as “consumers.” It was said casually, and I objected. The exchange was short, but it has troubled me ever since—not because the remark seemed malicious, but because it was so exact. Once students are called consumers, every relationship that sustains a university has already been reshaped.
Words matter. Terms such as participant, member, student, client, user, customer, citizen, and constituent each imply a different social order. A participant or member belongs to a shared institution, while a buyer or subscriber belongs to a market. Those distinctions are not cosmetic; they define how an institution understands itself and the people within it.
Students are neither buyers nor consumers. They take part in the making of knowledge, and, just as importantly, they are future members of a public that does not yet fully exist. In that sense, an art school, college, or university is indeed a factory—but what it produces is not a product. It produces the ability to think, to argue, and to ask questions without a fixed answer already in place.
Faculty do not work for students in the way a salesperson works for a client. They work with students toward something broader than any individual transaction. That relationship is not commercial. Faculty and staff are meant to serve a public. Tuition does not prove that students are customers; it shows that the liberal state has failed them, just as it has failed them in healthcare.
Instead of treating education as a public good, elected officials shift the cost onto individuals, weaken institutions through underfunding, and preserve a system that moves wealth upward. Financialization breaks the connection between education, citizenship, and the public world the university is supposed to help create.
