What it means to be a student has changed over time. Unlike in the past, today’s universities are generally diverse places, often with more women than men, and income is only rarely a barrier to entry. At the same time, a more fundamental and existential shift in student identity has also occurred. In western nations in particular, to be a student has transformed from being a lonely scholar to being a vulnerable customer, an identity which is detrimental to the pursuit and transmission of knowledge.^[i] But the meaning of being a student is not set in stone; it changes with new understandings of the purpose of higher education. A return to the age of the student as scholar is possible.

The word ‘student’ originates from the Latin ‘studium’ meaning ‘painstaking application’. In 1398 the Oxford English Dictionary defined ‘student’ as someone engaged in or ‘addicted to’ studying.^[ii] At this time, scholars lived in secluded communities and devoted themselves to theological study, which often involved painstaking application to religious texts. By the end of the fifteenth century, the word ‘student’ was used more generally to indicate a person undergoing instruction at a university.

In Britain, prior to the mid-twentieth century, two dominant images of students emerge from historical sources, literature and contemporary news reports. The first is the dedicated scholar ‘addicted’ to his studies, or, later, the female equivalent, the ‘bluestocking’. These students are portrayed as casting aside all material interests in their devotion to scholarship. The second is of young men from wealthy families far more interested in enjoying themselves than in intellectual pursuits. Mr Wickham in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Sebastian in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, who spends his time at Oxford engaged in anything other than studying, fit this picture.

Despite these polarized images, the reality for most students was probably a mixture of revelling in the freedom to make new friends and experiment with living away from home or school, and time engaged in reading or studying to meet the demands of their tutors. As more public financial support made university accessible to students from less wealthy backgrounds, the image of the upper-class hedonist, if he ever really existed, began to wane.

After the Second World War, higher education expanded and what it meant to be a student began to change rapidly. In the 1960s students in many countries in western Europe were perceived to be increasingly demanding and self-confident. Students began to be seen as political radicals and change agents. The phrases ‘student demonstrator’, ‘student revolution’, ‘student riot’ and ‘student violence’ first appeared in British newspapers in 1968 with ‘student activist’ and ‘student revolt’ appearing in 1969.^[iii]

‘Many students made being anti-war, pro-free speech and supportive of women’s liberation central to their identity’

Not all students were political activists but many made being anti-war, pro-free speech and supportive of women’s liberation central to their identity. They began to question not just global events but hierarchical structures within the university and the very nature of knowledge itself. They argued that what ‘counts’ as knowledge must be expanded beyond traditional canons within the humanities and positivism within the social sciences. Writing in The Closing of The American Mind, American academic Allan Bloom argues that ‘Commitment was understood to be profounder than science, passion than reason, history than nature, the young than the old’.^[iv]

Significantly, when students petitioned for change within the academy, they found that their professors’ doors were open. Rather than defending the western canon, many academics were open to challenges. The goals of traditional academic inquiry—rationality, objectivity, the pursuit of truth—were undermined by postmodernists, social-constructivists and pragmatists. Some of this questioning of tradition opened up new and exciting intellectual pathways. But it also ushered in the relativism and subjectivity that would later lead to the dominance of critical theory and, ironically, the assertion of new truths premised not on empirical evidence but on group identity.^[v]

By the 1980s, a time of economic recession across western Europe, a new student identity began to emerge. Students were no longer predominantly viewed as political activists but as impoverished young adults too busy studying or working in part-time jobs to attend protests. The instrumental idea that higher education served a national economic purpose gained ground. Universities were celebrated for turning out doctors, engineers, teachers and other skilled workers who contributed to the public good either directly through their work, or indirectly as the knowledge they generated led to scientific advance and increased economic productivity.

By the 1990s, this sense of purpose became more personal. Students were viewed less as contributing to the national economy and more as investing in their own future employability. Going to university came to be seen as a private good: gaining a degree was a personal investment that would be rewarded with higher future earnings. In Britain, more institutions became universities and the number of students grew. With higher education perceived as a private good, it was difficult to make the case for public funding. Generous maintenance grants were slowly replaced with means-tested loans, to be paid back when students began working. Towards the end of the decade, this was taken further and plans were introduced to make students contribute financially not just to their living expenses but to the cost of their university tuition.

‘Going to university came to be seen as a private good: gaining a degree was a personal investment that would be rewarded with higher future earnings’

The 2000s gave birth to the ‘student as a consumer’. Universities began to compete for students who, as fee-payers, brought revenue to institutions. The image of the student as consumer was often one of a young adult seeking satisfaction in a ‘student experience’ while expecting high grades for minimal intellectual effort. Such students demanded comfort and this often meant not freedom of speech, as their 1960s counterparts fought for, but freedom from speech. While consumer-status legitimized complaints about the student experience, it inadvertently called into question the assumption that students would have their voices heard on unrelated issues, perhaps sounding a death knell on the age of the student political activist.^[vi]

The student as consumer model further undermines higher education. Professors may be reluctant to criticize undergraduates for poor academic performance or lack of application for fear of being penalized in satisfaction surveys or teaching evaluation questionnaires. High expectations give way to grade inflation. Politically, this lowering of standards is justified as necessary in self-consciously anti-elite institutions that aim to appeal to so-called ‘non-traditional’ students—that is, working-class, black or ethnic minority students or students with disabilities. Whereas in the past, students were viewed as political radicals for demonstrating about global events, now they are perceived as bringing about change simply as a result of who they are. The black, female, working class student is celebrated as a challenge to traditional social structures.

The image of the student as a demanding customer comes to be tempered by the view of students as vulnerable because of their ‘non-traditional’ status, the anxiety induced by high levels of debt and the pressure to combine study with part-time employment, or the mental health struggles now deemed to be prevalent within the population as a whole. In response, universities prioritize diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and mental health support including a range of wellbeing initiatives and therapeutic interventions. This results in a loss of faith in the potential for students to engage in high-level scholarship. The way is paved for a further attack on academic freedom; it is assumed that students need to be protected from offensive ideas in order to safeguard their mental wellbeing.

Today’s professors are expected to practice ‘compassionate pedagogy’ to nurture emotionally-fragile students through work that affirms their own identity.^[vii] This means that the curriculum—and, ultimately, knowledge itself—must be decolonized to root out work by dead, white, European males now deemed to be outdated, irrelevant, racist and elitist. One university in the UK recently applied a ‘trigger warning’ to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to warn students that the content contained ‘expressions of Christian faith’.^[viii] Students are often expected to engage in practices such as sharing their personal pronouns with others at the start of seminars in order to help transgender students feel included and for the group as a whole to acknowledge the assumed importance of respecting gender identity.

Students have moved from being political change agents to being themselves the object of political change. Rather than imposing their ideas on the world, they are to obey edicts from radical lecturers and diversity officers. To accommodate these developments, objective measures of what students know are replaced by more subjective measures of their own personal and psychological development. Knowledge itself moves from ‘truth’ to ‘my truth’.

‘Today’s professors are expected to practice “compassionate pedagogy” to nurture emotionally-fragile students’

This brief history of student identity shows us that what it means to be a student is not fixed for all time but alters with the economic, political and cultural developments that occur in wider society. Often, universities are not responding to changes in the nature of what it means to be a student but are, in fact, contributing to the creation of those changes or reinforcing an identity already shaped by the popular imagination. When universities ask students if they are satisfied with their student experience, they are helping to create the model of the student as a consumer. When universities display posters advising students to check on their mental health, they are helping to create the model of the student as emotionally fragile. When professors provide trigger warnings for course content, they are helping to create the model of the student who is easily offended and censorious.

The good news is that, by the exact same token, professors who take themselves and their subject seriously and have high expectations that students are capable of rigorous application to complex bodies of knowledge can help recreate the model of the student as a scholar, addicted to painstaking study. Professors who have a love of the canon and a desire to promote the gains of western civilisation can help create students who share in that goal. The meaning of being a student has changed over time and will undoubtedly change again. Whether or not these are changes for the better is for us to determine.

^[i] Joanna Williams, Consuming Higher Education, Why Learning Can’t Be Bought, Bloomsbury, London, 2013.

^[ii] Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, 1989, https://www.oed.com/dictionary/student_n1?tab=meaning_and_use#20295760, accessed 29 January 2025.

^[iii] Ibid.

^[iv] Allan Bloom, The Closing of The American Mind, Simon and Schuster Inc., New York, 1987, 34.

^[v] Richard Bailey, ‘Overcoming Veriphobia: Learning to love truth again’, British Journal of Education Studies, 49/2, 2001, 159.

^[vi] Louise Morley, ‘Reconstructing students as consumers: power and assimilation?’ in Maria Slowey and David Watson eds, Higher Education and the Lifecourse, SRHE and Open University Press, London, 2003, 90.

^[vii] Joanna Williams, ‘Compassionate Pedagogy: The politicisation of emotion and the degradation of higher education’, Cieo, 2023. https://www.cieo.org.uk/research/compassionate-pedagogy/, accessed 29 January 2025.

^[viii] Frankie Vetch, ‘The Canterbury Tales given trigger warning over “expressions of Christian faith”’, The Telegraph, 13 October 2024, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/10/13/canterbury-tales-trigger-warning-christian-faith-chaucer/, accessed 29 January 2025.

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