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 betraying 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. Many are mimetically shaped (René Girard) and are at best partial. A university committed to education rather than (customer) satisfaction should therefore treat them as potential inputs, not directives. Surveys and similar mechanisms have their uses – for example, helping teachers identify what seems to be working with a particular class, highlighting missing or inadequate services such as single-sex toilets or library opening hours – but they cannot be treated as definitive sources of insight, especially for curriculum-level decisions. At this level, responses are by nature inexpert and reflect only immediate, situational impressions; treating them as revelations inflates their authority and obscures their limits.
Alasdair MacIntyre is right to insist 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, page 15). In other words, their task is to shape desire, not mirror it.
Championing the student voice
Champion is first recorded as a verb in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Act 3, Scene 1), where Macbeth cries:
Rather than so, come fate into the list,
And champion me to th’ utterance!
Here Macbeth summons fate into a decisive contest – either challenging it directly or asking it to fight on his behalf. In either reading, the verb is agonistic: a call to combat rather than passive support.
Though the dominant modern sense has shifted toward advocate for or defend (from c. 1830; Harper, 2026), this older martial resonance – from the verb’s original challenge and fight for meanings (c. 1600) – lingers in contemporary usage. When educators today declare they are championing the student voice, the metaphor thus still implies an element of challenge or contest, even if now framed in moral rather than martial terms.
And there is more to be said here. The modern progressive teacher seemingly wants two incompatible outcomes at once: they are advocating for their side (the student voice, the progressive cause) to win, yet the implicit adversary appears to be the teacher themselves, or at least the expertise and authority they represent.
I sense this reflects a modern discomfort with authority and hierarchical expertise, in which teachers treat their own disciplinary authority as something to apologise for or relinquish. In this inverted contest, the educator steps forward as the student’s champion – ostensibly to secure victory for the underdog – while quietly wishing for defeat in their own traditional role.
Educating desires
The effects of this dynamic are visible in many contexts. For example, in English language teaching, literatures in English for Academic Purposes and English for Specific Purposes traditionally emphasised needs analysis; over time, needs have been quietly displaced by wants. Judgement has drifted from disciplinary authority toward consumer sentiment, resulting in a gradual erosion of educational standards (needs) in favour of perceived expectations (wants). And as Girard reminds us, desires, including student preferences, are often mimetic: they are shaped by peers, marketing, institutional culture, and reward structures. They may be sincere, but they are not necessarily educated or independently formed.
So 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
If Girard explains the origins of desire, MacIntyre explains why this matters and how desire must be educated. A university, he argues, must be deliberately unresponsive, giving students what they need rather than what they want – at least until the two align. Its responsibility is not to satisfy initial preferences but to educate desire so that, over time, wants come to reflect genuine educational goods. This presupposes asymmetry: students begin with incomplete practical reasoning and untrained desires; teachers speak for the standards of a practice and a tradition. 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.
Douglas Harper (2026) champion. Online Etymology Dictionary. Available at: https://www.etymonline.com/word/champion
René Girard (1976) Deceit, desire, and the novel : self and other in literary structure. Johns Hopkins paperback edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
William Shakespeare (2015) Macbeth. Edited by Pamela Mason and Sandra Clark. Arden Shakespeare, Third Series. London: Bloomsbury.
(Jacques Louis David: Oath of the Horatii (1784))
