Student satisfaction in higher education: settling up and settling down

Abstract

Student satisfaction measures serve to provide a measure of ‘quality’ in the current audit culture of universities. This paper argues that the form of satisfaction valued within contemporary Higher Education amounts to a form of settling, where the primary aim is to settle the students’ expectations, and meet their needs. Drawing initially on the etymology of ‘satisfaction’, the paper then turns to the work of Martin Heidegger and his notion of the ‘uncanny’ (das Unheimliche), to discuss how we are ontologically unsettled. The uncanny will be discussed in relation to the Greek play Antigone, and illustrated with examples from the novel Stoner. In provoking angst or anxiety by leaving students ‘unsettled’ in terms of their thinking, this may open students up to a consideration of more ontological concerns – within their Higher Education but also in their lives more generally.

Keywords:

• Student satisfaction
• settling
• unsettling
• Heidegger
• the uncanny

Notes

1. Student satisfaction surveys may be increasingly seen as a measure of ‘quality’ with the introduction of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) in the UK, which is set to be implemented in 2018. For a further discussion of this, see Higdon (2016).

2. See: http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/outlines/history-1994/early-america/early-settlements.php.

3. It was part of Heidegger’s aim in writing Being and Time (1962) to bring ontological concerns to the fore, and to engage with the question of Being which had been ‘doubly forgotten’. As Heidegger saw it, within the history of philosophy, the question of Being had been both ignored and passed over.

4. For further details, see: Freud (1919).

5. For the translation of the choral ode in full, see either Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics (2000), 156–157, or see Holderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister’ (Heidegger 1984/1996), 58–59.

6. The Greek ‘deinon’ translated into English is ‘suffering’, but Heidegger interprets this as ‘on the one hand, the fearful, but also the powerful, and finally, the inhabitual’ (1984/1996, 67).

7. Jeff Frank has offered an excellent reading of Stoner, in which he discusses William Stoner's change of direction as follows, that 'he can't decide but to dedicate his life to study and teaching' (2017, 236). see: Frank (2017).