Sure — but to present the option as a binaristic viewpoint between educator-as-server and educator-as-elitist-abstraction is overly simplistic, and — at least in my thinking — just another way of taken as given the increasing transformation of education into a commodity. It’s also not really implied by anything that I said (and I agree with you that the model of the academy you refer to is ‘on it’s way out’ if indeed it’s not already dead).

Sure — educators can always be spoken of in terms of service, but the very idea of service (and it’s implied relationship) itself has a history and to suggest that service must imply an acceptance of the commodification of education is a total non-sequitur and — again, in my view — amounts to little more than political quietism.

Of course we as educators have certain duties to our students, and of course these have to be made sense of in terms of the current arrangements we are given — but academics also have a duty to call those very arrangements into question and challenge them, otherwise we are failing at our wider role by failing to actually use our education.

Students are widely being exploited by higher education institutions — and academics are at least partially complicit within that system, but we owe them more than simply allowing that situation to continue by creating a vision of our duties that does nothing but serve that very system!

The very fact that students are the ones who pay for us is a symptom of a much wider problem within society — and we cannot sacrifice our challenging that for a simple idea of fulfilling a service. Nor do we have to!