ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the evolving relationship between universities and their students. From the late 1960s and into the 1970s, students fought against universities treating them like children (which is what those under 21 legally were, in the UK, until 1970). Their apparent victory paved the way for a transactional relationship in which adult students paid universities for a defined – educational – service. However, this relationship was unstable because ‘the customer is always right’. The need to satisfy students as consumers created a dynamic in which it was safer for universities to pander to student demands than stand up to them, and this created a new kind of student-led infantilisation. Rhoades and Harwood explore the example of (some) students demanding that material they find upsetting or offensive be removed from the curriculum. When those demands are met, students appear to have been empowered, but at the cost of changing – perhaps diminishing – the quality of their own education. In considering the period of Covid, Rhoades and Harwood show how students became victims of the ‘safety culture’ they had previously used to assert power over universities.
