Thank You, Come Again

In my readings about the great Phil Knight and his great donation to the "University of Oregon," I have learned a couple of things that I'd pass on to my academic friends.

By now we're all very tired of familiar with the idea that the university is a business and the students are customers. You give good grades because you want to keep the customers happy. You show movies because you want to keep your customers happy. And, if your department is in financial straights, the only reasonable solution is to attract more customers to your department by, you know, not teaching, well, history or anything else the young people might not like.

But did you know that not only students are customers in the university setting? No sir (or ma'am, if you happen to swing that way), donors are also customers. That's right, Phil Knight is the UO's biggest customer and, like all good businesses, the UO needs to be responsive to its customer. And when an employee, say a track coach, basketball coach, and/or athletic director upsets a customer, then that employee needs to be dismissed. That's the way it's done in the business world, and it's high time the eggheads realize that this is what it is like in the real world.

Another customer of the university is the taxpayer. You are probably familiar with this one. It is the university's duty to provide the customer with a product they can be happy about. And believe me, they are not happy with these egghead professors and their anti-America horseshit. Thank God at the UO we have successful athletic teams or we'd be getting even less money from our customers.

Thank God indeed.

Yes, the only people in the entire world who are not customers of the university, and therefore have nothing to say about how the business should be run, are, of course, the faculty.