Don’t Serve Students, Serve the Work

When higher education professionals talk about why they do what they do, you often hear platitudes about their passion for serving students or that students are their top priority. This may be sincere and true for most of us. And it’s certainly noble. But this career objective might lead to a false sense of purpose and competency, and feed into an unhealthy “vocational awe” that might subject higher education professionals to exploitation.

So if you’re not serving students, then what should you be doing?

It helps to first distinguish between a job and work. Your job is for making money: labor for salary. The more you know this, the better.

“The rhetoric that a job is a passion or a ‘labor of love’ obfuscates the reality that a job is an economic contract,” wrote Simone Stolzoff in his New York Times piece, “Please Don’t Call My Job a Calling.”

This makes sense when you consider the reasons why people leave jobs for others. More than half of higher education staff said in a recent survey that better pay was their motivation for conducting a job search, and 86% ranked a salary increase in their top three reasons.

Work, however, goes beyond an economic contract. It gives us purpose. It’s how we contribute to society with our unique talents. If work was all about making money, we’d leave our jobs in higher education and try to become investment bankers.

Saying that we work in the service of students might seem like a given. We all serve students in some way, and even if we don’t leave one job for another to better serve students, there are varying degrees of what we would consider purposeful work.

But maybe we should rethink why we work.

In 1942, English novelist and playwright Dorothy Sayers wrote a famous essay, “Why Work?,” that was included in her book “Letters to a Diminished Church.” This theological piece, which warned about the dangers of working to serve a community, can apply to a secular audience and our current work as higher educational professionals.

Sayers provided the following three reasons NOT to serve a community:

1. You cannot do good work if you take your mind off the work to see how the community is taking it. She compared this to golf, in which you can’t hit a good drive off the tee if you take your eye off the ball.
2. The moment you think of serving other people, you begin to have a notion that other people owe you something for your pains, be it applause or appreciation. You begin to think that you have a claim on the community.
3. You will probably end by merely fulfilling a public demand — and you may not even do that — which is a changeable thing. In other words, don’t try to be a people-pleaser because in doing so you won’t be effective or even pleasing.

For teaching faculty, these reasons might immediately bring to mind student course evaluations, which is a deeply flawed practice in higher education. But everyone working at college and universities has at some point encountered the notion that students are customers and providing effective customer service is good for business.

As an aside, I tend to agree with Randy Pausch, the late Carnegie Mellon faculty member who said in his popular “The Last Lecture” that professors are more like personal trainers in an athletic club, giving people access to the equipment (books, labs, their expertise), than they are serving consumers of a product.

The same way that serving their customers helps universities keep the lights on, higher education professionals must do what they need to do to survive. Some of that is fulfilling students’ demands, appeasing donors, or following orders from a supervisor. Some might have to do with what’s rewarded in the tenure process: publish or perish. None of these survival tactics answer the existential questions of “Why are we here?” or “Why work?”

Students are obviously a big part of the answer. Some of us have to provide direct care to students or respond to needs in ways that are a classic definition of “customer service.” And everyone should care about students and help people when they can. That’s part of being a human, not just a good, competent worker.

But by doing our jobs the best we know how, and honoring our discipline and craft by doing our work well, that’s a better way to serve students.

As Sayers would say, don’t serve students, serve the work. You serve the work by doing your work with excellence, whatever it may be.

“The only true way of serving the community is to be truly in sympathy with the community, to be oneself part of the community and then to serve the work without giving the community another thought,” Sayers wrote. “Then the work will endure, because it will be true to itself. It is the work that serves the community; the business of the worker is to serve the work.”