Few concepts are invoked more confidently in contemporary universities than the student voice. Yet the way the term is framed – and especially the language of championing it – obscures the limits of student judgement while revealing a deeper unease with educational authority. In higher education, what is needed is not greater responsiveness, but the willingness to be deliberately unresponsive.
The student voice
The capitalised, definite-article formulation the student voice treats student opinion as if it were a stable, unified source of authority. Student voices matter, but they are not a single voice, nor are all of them educationally authoritative. Universities should therefore treat them as potential inputs rather than directives.
Surveys and similar mechanisms have legitimate uses. They can help teachers identify what appears to be working with a particular class or reveal missing or inadequate services such as library opening hours or single-sex facilities. But such mechanisms cannot function as definitive sources of educational judgement, especially in relation to curriculum-level decisions. At this level, responses are necessarily partial and inexpert, reflecting immediate and situational impressions rather than long-term disciplinary understanding. Treating them as authoritative inflates their status while obscuring their limits.
Yet universities increasingly do not merely consult students; they claim to champion them.
Championing the student voice
The language here is revealing. A champion does not merely listen or support; a champion fights on behalf of one side in a contest. When universities or educators speak of championing the student voice, the implication is not simply attentiveness but advocacy.
But advocacy against whom?
Increasingly, the implicit adversary appears to be educational authority itself: disciplinary judgement, asymmetries of expertise, or the teacher’s right to determine what ought to be learned. The modern progressive educator often seems to want two incompatible things at once: to advocate for students while simultaneously undermining the authority traditionally associated with teaching.
I suspect this reflects a broader discomfort with hierarchy and expertise. Teachers increasingly present their own authority as something suspect, apologetic, or in need of surrender. In this inverted contest, the educator steps forward as the student’s champion while quietly disavowing the legitimacy of their own traditional role.
Educating desires
The effects of this dynamic are visible across higher education. In English language teaching, for example, literatures in English for Academic Purposes and English for Specific Purposes traditionally emphasised needs analysis. Over time, however, needs have often been quietly displaced by wants. Judgement drifts from disciplinary authority toward consumer sentiment, and educational standards are gradually reshaped around perceived expectations and preferences.
This matters because desires are not necessarily educated or independently formed. As René Girard argues, desire is often mimetic: shaped socially through imitation rather than autonomous judgement. Student preferences are therefore influenced by peers, marketing, institutional culture, employability narratives, and reward structures. They may be sincere, but sincerity alone does not make them educationally reliable.
When institutions elevate unexamined preference into a quasi-authoritative student voice, at least three consequences typically follow:
- Wants masquerade as needs
- Satisfaction metrics substitute for judgement
- Teacher expertise is sidelined
At this point, the issue is no longer merely administrative. It becomes educational and philosophical.
Alasdair MacIntyre argues that a university should ‘be unresponsive, to give its students what they need, not what they want, and to do so in such a way that what they want becomes what they need and what they choose is choiceworthy’ (2001, p. 15).
This is a defence not of indifference but of educational authority properly understood. The university’s task is not simply to mirror existing preferences but to educate desire itself. Students begin with incomplete practical reasoning and untrained desires; teachers speak on behalf of standards internal to disciplines, practices, and traditions. Education therefore requires asymmetry before it can produce genuine intellectual independence.
If universities abandon the authority required to educate desire, they do not become more democratic or humane. They simply abandon the standards and practices that make genuine education possible at all.
References
Alasdair MacIntyre (2001) Catholic Universities: Dangers, Hopes, Choices in Robert E. Sullivan (ed.) Higher Learning and Catholic Traditions. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 1–21.
René Girard (1976) Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
(Jacques Louis David: Oath of the Horatii (1784))
