Don’t Tell My Friends, But… is a seriesin which we asked Times columnistswhateveryone else is wrong about. On its face, there’s nothing necessarily political about the mantra that the customer is always right. But the idea that the customer is always right also contains a worldview, a kind of market fundamentalism that typifies much of the American right today. The problem starts when our decisions aren’t merely subjective — that is, when questions of truth, moral or factual, are involved. Students today, whose parents often pay fortunes for their education, are treated like valuable customers, not lowly apprentices.

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Persons: “, didn’t, —, Walter Cronkite, That’s, It’s, Hadrian, ”, Marguerite Yourcenar, there’s Organizations: Conservatives, University curriculums, Liberal, Yale, Princeton Locations: United States