All this customer BS is pure corporate BS. Almost each and every time some monstrously large institution announces that the new politics are to make it "more welcoming and less intimidating," you have to figure that they're reemphasizing talk and planning to ignore your needs.
As part of our "new" student-as-customer library service, the institution just cut staffing a bit more than 20%. After years of having to work the bugs out of the IDs, it finally got them working...so they threw them out and assigned everybody spiffy new IDs, which you aren't given but have to contact the library to get. And, not having enough people to staff the place, they have a spiffy new phone tree. These things come in cycles, of course. A few years back, the lobby of the library was basically a large and comfortable lounge. Then came a new version of the "we-need-to-serve-the-student" rhetoric which gutted the lounge. A few years later, the "we-need-to-serve-the-student" rhetoric means we should put a few new sofas into the lobby. I think all of this is a matter of whether we have furniture salesmen in authority or not. Btw, just before the big layoffs, I had an email exchange with one of the Grand High Poo-bahs of the Library just before they cuts. I pointed out that they had a very good, well-trained staff but they didn't have enough people. I was assured that they were going to take measures to reduce complaints by becoming much more user-friendly. (Again, you never know what complaints or how many--but that's part of the BS-ing). And, it's certainly true....If you take measures that result in reducing the numbers of people that come around pestering the library for books and things, there probably will be fewer coming around to complain.... The ultimately perfect university will have no annoying students or faculty. And very little in terms of staff. It will be just administrators evaluating each other on their innovativeness and vision. ML
