First, the entering student is defined as the customer, the same way as the patient in the post-Thatcherite health service. Then the accountants redefine the student as a product, to be fashioned according to the requirements of the end-user, or in simple old-fashioned language, the employer. This is a serious confusion of categories (what Oxford philosophers like Gilbert Ryle called a category mistake) and a highly damaging mischief, for how can the student be both customer and product at the same time? And if the student is indeed a customer then it only shows that customers have no real rights and they’re being short-changed. But our students are not our customers, they’re our students. They are not buying our services and we are not selling them. That is not the nature of the relationship—and the dialogue—which we have with them.