Instructor or Customer Service Representative?: Reflections on Teaching in a For-Profit College
PDF

How to Cite

Madden, J. (2018). Instructor or Customer Service Representative?: Reflections on Teaching in a For-Profit College. Radical Teacher, 110(1), 14–24. https://doi.org/10.5195/rt.2018.324

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.
https://doi.org/10.5195/rt.2018.324
PDF

References

Goldie Blumenstyk, “Conference Brings Together For-Profit Colleges and Scholars Who Study Them.” The Chronicle of Higher Education (23 September 2012).

“Consumer Information.” Virginia College. Accessed 13 June 2016. Available from World Wide Web: < https://consumerinfo.vc.edu/>.

Tressie McMillan Cottom, “Access, Competition, and For-Profit Higher Education.” Conference of the Duke University Research Network on Racial and Ethnic Inequality, Durham, NC, 22 September 2012.

Tressie McMillan Cottom, “How ‘Admissions’ Works Differently at For-Profit Colleges: Sorting and Signaling.” Some of Us Are Brave (blog), 8 March 2013. Accessed 15 June 2013. Available from World Wide Web: <http://wp.me/p28iGT-ki>.

Henry A. Giroux, “Vocationalizing Higher Education: Schooling and the Politics of Corporate Culture” Beyond the Corporate University: Culture and Pedagogy in the New Millennium Ed. Henry A. Giroux and Kostas Myrsiades (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2001).

Henry A. Giroux, Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014).

Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres, The Miner’s Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).

Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).

Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, US Senate, For-Profit Higher Education: The Failure to Safeguard the Federal Investment and Ensure Student Success (July 30, 2010).

Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

Jacqueline Jordon-Irvine, Educating Teachers for Diversity: Seeing With a Cultural Eye (New York: Teachers College Press, 2003).

Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

“A New Classification Scheme for For-Profit Institutions.” Institute for Higher Education Policy, July 2012. Accessed 15 June 2013. Available from World Wide Web: <http://www.ihep.org/assets/files/publications/a-f/(Report)_For-Profits_Classification_July_2012.pdf>.

Richard Ohmann, “Introduction: College for Dollars?” Radical Teacher 93 (Spring 2012).

Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).

The Pacific Institute, Thought Patterns for a Successful Career (Seattle: The Pacific Institute, 2005).

The Pacific Institute, “Workforce Development.” Accessed 13 May 2012. Available from World Wide Web: < http://www.thepacificinstitute.us/v2/index.php?name=social_workforce>.

Bree Picower, “Teaching Outside One’s Race: The Story of an Oakland Teacher.” Radical Teacher 100 (Fall 2014).

Chandan Reddy, Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).

Andrew Ross, Creditocracy and the Case for Debt Refusal (New York: OR Books, 2013).

Brenna Ryan, “Learners and a Teacher, For Profit.” Radical Teacher 93 (Spring 2012).

Sheila Slaughter and Larry L. Leslie, Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades, Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).

Sandra K. Soto, “Wearing Out Arizona.” Rapoport Center Human Rights Working Paper Series, April 2011. Accessed 15 June 2013. Available from World Wide Web: <http://blogs.utexas.edu/rapoportcenterwps/files/2011/06/4-2011-Soto-WearingOutArizona.pdf>

Virginia College at Austin, “Catalog,” Vol. 14 (February 2012).

Virginia College, “Why Choose Virginia College?” Accessed 16 December 2012. Available from World Wide Web: < http://www.vc.edu/about-virginia-college/why-choose.cfm>.