In-Reply -To: Measurement in Education LO1523 responding to Barry Mallis
Barry says:
>You ask who the customers are. You indicate that the issue of customer
isn't clear in the university.
But then, at the end of your piece you define it most succinctly:
Customers in business also provide services. This is crystal clear in the
traditional sense of the home consumer customer, and also clear in the
manufacturing plant where we are customers downstream in a process, and we
serve those downstraem of us. So how is this any less complicated in the
university, whether the post-doctoral student at Rockefeller University or
the freshman at a Greenfield Community College?
My personal, still jaded view of education is that the proof is in the
pudding. Students as a group, on the whole, are customers of the teachers
who interact with them, who move them, who shape them, who open them to
knowledge and conceptual thinking, etc. etc. AND students are the
products of all the processes. Yup, we can get pretty confuses with the
words, but IMHO its the teaching cadre which is responsible for providing
continually improving product and services to fashion the best possible
customer environment for the recipients of such product and services. <
end of Barry's message
I meant to indicate that I believe there is much to learn from the
customer focused approach of organizational development and that Higher
Education needs to addend more assidiously to learning from business in
this area. However, there are differences that make a difference with
respect to the "customer" and the "product" of education. In the end we
aim to change people in fundamental ways --not unlike the church or
psychotherapy. If we were to adopt the customer focused approach to the
exclusion of other aspects of our mission, we would, ironically fail in
serving the student as our customer. I suspect, although I don't know
that something of the sort holds in many businesses as well. Most
organizations, I believe are more complex that the customer focused TQM
paradigm allows. Hence the appeal of the more complex model Senge and
others are suggesting.
-- David O. Justice Dean School for New Learning DePaul University Chicago, IL <djustice@wppost.depaul.edu>