Going more meta: I think the students should have the right to fire professors whose political opinions they dislike. The customer is always right.
Harvard isn’t primarily funded by tuition. The large majority of students receive some aid, and most receive a lot of aid. The real customers are the alumni who build up the endowment. And those people are quite effectively represented in institutional governance, via the board of trustees (“the Harvard Corporation”).
I’m also not sure quite how you would envision changing things. The students are perfectly free to take whatever courses and attend whatever lectures they want. However, if they want a Harvard degree, they need to meet the requirements of the College and of their department, and that might mean passing a required course with a professor the student dislikes.
I can’t quite picture a “customer is always right” university. I could imagine a system in which a university has no degree requirements that a student would find objectionable, but I don’t think the students would want or benefit from such a thing. Part of the signaling value of a degree is that subject experts are attesting that the student has acquired a breadth and depth of knowledge.
I can’t quite picture a “customer is always right” university.
That’s pretty easy—imagine a fourth-rate university the only interest of which is extracting as much money from students (and the federal government) as they can.
Yes, fair enough. I was being hyperbolic about “can’t imagine”—I should have said, “a university run purely for the preferences of the students would be very far from modern American universities, which are accountable to accreditors and donors, and which have a long tradition of faculty governance..”
Harvard isn’t primarily funded by tuition. The large majority of students receive some aid, and most receive a lot of aid. The real customers are the alumni who build up the endowment. And those people are quite effectively represented in institutional governance, via the board of trustees (“the Harvard Corporation”).
I’m also not sure quite how you would envision changing things. The students are perfectly free to take whatever courses and attend whatever lectures they want. However, if they want a Harvard degree, they need to meet the requirements of the College and of their department, and that might mean passing a required course with a professor the student dislikes.
I can’t quite picture a “customer is always right” university. I could imagine a system in which a university has no degree requirements that a student would find objectionable, but I don’t think the students would want or benefit from such a thing. Part of the signaling value of a degree is that subject experts are attesting that the student has acquired a breadth and depth of knowledge.
That’s pretty easy—imagine a fourth-rate university the only interest of which is extracting as much money from students (and the federal government) as they can.
Yes, fair enough. I was being hyperbolic about “can’t imagine”—I should have said, “a university run purely for the preferences of the students would be very far from modern American universities, which are accountable to accreditors and donors, and which have a long tradition of faculty governance..”
Faint memory—weren’t medieval French universities run by students? I think they hired the professors.
I believe you’re thinking of medieval Italian universities.