The Death of the Art School
The rampant corporatization and "administrification" of American higher-education institutions has turned students into mere consumers.
In a faculty meeting last year at Purchase College in New York, a colleague in the administration referred to students as "consumers." It was a casual statement, and I pushed back. The exchange was brief, but it has deeply bothered me ever since. Not because the intention was sinister. Because their statement was precise. Once you call students consumers, you have already restructured every relationship on which the university depends.
Definitions matter. Terms like participant, member, student, client, user, customer, citizen, and constituent carry distinct social logics. A participant or member belongs to a shared institution. A buyer or subscriber belongs to a market.
Students are not buyers or consumers. They are participants in the production of knowledge. More importantly, they are future members of a public that does not yet exist. In that sense, an art school, college, or university is a factory. But what it produces is not a commodity. It is a capacity for thinking, for argument, for questioning without a predetermined answer. Faculty do not work for students the way a salesperson works for a client. They work with students toward something larger. That is not a transactional relationship. Faculty and staff are meant to serve a public. Tuition is not proof that students are customers. It is proof that the liberal state has failed them, just as it has failed them in healthcare. Rather than treating education as a public good, elected officials shift the burden onto individuals, underfund institutions, and protect a system that redistributes wealth upward. Financialization destroys the relation between education, citizenship, and the public world that the university is supposed to build.
