Stephens: Customers aren’t always right and should be told so

By Bret Stephens / The New York Times

On its face, there’s nothing necessarily political about the mantra that the customer is always right. It can buck up the patience of an exasperated shopkeeper dealing with a finicky patron or push manufacturers to think harder about evolving consumer tastes. It fosters a service culture that, as visitors to the United States often remark, is notable for its niceness.

But the idea that the customer is always right also contains a worldview, a kind of market fundamentalism that typifies much of the American right today. The more pervasive it becomes, the more pernicious it gets — and the more it diminishes the values conservatives claim to hold dear.

When are customers “always right”? When they want the beige interior but not the black one, or the subway tiles for the downstairs bathroom but not the upstairs one, or the sauce on the side; that is, anywhere within the broad spectrum of personal preference that typify most consumer choices.

The problem starts when our decisions are not merely subjective: when questions of truth, moral or factual, are involved. This is a particular concern when it comes to two American institutions that have come to grief in recent years by bowing too often to the demands of their customers: universities and the news media.

There was a time when being a college student meant that you submitted to the rules, expectations and judgments of a professor or a department. You didn’t get to grade your teachers at the end of the term: What mattered to the university was its opinion of you, not yours of it. The relationship was unabashedly hierarchical. As a student, you were presumed ignorant, but teachable. You paid the university for the opportunity to become a little less ignorant.

Much of this has been overturned in recent years. Students today, whose parents often pay fortunes for their education, are treated like consumers, not apprentices. University curriculums have moved away from core requirements — the idea that there are things all educated people ought to have read, understood and discussed together — to a kind of mix-and-match set of offerings. Disciplines that don’t double as explicit job training have endured frequent budgetary cuts.

The result has been the hollowing out of higher ed. Professors cater to students, with higher grades and diminished expectations. At Yale, nearly 4 of 5 grades are in the “A” range. At Princeton, studying Latin or Greek is no longer a requirement for classics majors. During the recent student protests, I kept wondering: Where did these kids get their sense of total certitude? Part of it is youthful idealism, and part of it stems from ideological currents in elite academia. But an equal part is the substitution of critical thinking with the ceaseless affirmation fostered by applying “the customer is always right” to education.

As for the news media, here too there was a time when Walter Cronkite could end his program by saying, “And that’s the way it is …,” and be largely believed. His authority derived from the accuracy and quality of his reports. But his audience also understood that the news wasn’t simply what they wanted it to be. Facts shaped opinions, not the other way around.

That’s a bygone world. Conservatives, including me, have long complained that “mainstream media” too often present a left-tilting slant on the news. But the right’s answer hasn’t been to seek or create news media that provide straighter news or a better balance of opinion. It’s been to turn the tables.

This has proved immensely profitable, especially on cable TV, radio airwaves and now podcasts. It has given previously disaffected consumers a much wider range of options for where they obtain their news, but it hasn’t produced a better-informed country. It’s a land of cacophony, confusion and conspiracy theories. When market forces provide you with alternative cushions or chocolates, the world is better for it. When those same forces provide you with alternative facts, it isn’t.

Can we reverse the trend?

In “Memoirs of Hadrian,” novelist Marguerite Yourcenar’s Roman emperor protagonist observes: “There is more than one kind of wisdom, and all are essential in the world; it is no bad thing that they should alternate.” The wisdom of customers and markets has a lot to recommend it. But there’s also a wisdom rooted in knowledge, expertise and experience that collectively goes by the name of authority. It’s time to restore it.

What if higher education responded to plummeting public confidence by demanding a whole lot more of students, especially through extensive core requirements? Or if professors gave grades that reflected actual performance? Or if administrators responded to rules-breaking with summary expulsions? What if the news media, also facing declining levels of trust, stopped catering to their least literate readers, stopped caring about their angriest ones, stopped publishing dumbed-down versions of news and stopped acting as if journalism was just another form of entertainment?

Maybe moves like those would spell the death of academia and the news media. I think it would help save them both. The words today’s consumers almost never hear — “You are wrong” — are sometimes the ones that, unknowingly, they most yearn for.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times. C. 2024.