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Comment by throw_m239339 | Hacker News Reader

> How far should free speech extend while you're on the job and talking to the customers of your employer?

Students aren't customers. Otherwise professors would only issue good grades. Second if professors are deemed "employees" then employees have rights.

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By that logic, auto emissions test locations would never issue failing tests for their customers cars, and IT cert companies would never issue failing grades to people who take their cert tests.

Sure they do. But not the right to say whatever you want at your job.

College students are consumers not customers. From the article in Inside Higher Education:

>>There is a fundamental tension between applying the student as customer paradigm vs. society as customer paradigm to higher education. If students are the customer, then the retail model requires them to be right. The aphorism “The customer is always right” is the guiding principle. Some faculty members express experiencing a tacit pressure to relax standards based on serving the student as a customer. Customer-service logic suggests: A grades make happy students; happy students are good customers; good customers are repeat customers; repeat customers tell friends; referrals are good for business.

Yet students are not always right. And neither are universities. Not fully understanding who the customer is in higher education tends toward granting students academic concessions. At four-year colleges, the A grade has increased between five and six percentage points every decade for the last 30 years and is now three times more prevalent than in 1960. Today, the A is the most common grade at four-year institutions. Some students and parents believe that, if they complain enough, a faculty member will change a grade. And if the faculty does not, then they call the manager.

The retail model is not only about grades. Most retail establishments maintain return and exchange policies when customers are not satisfied. Students erroneously try to apply the same policies. I’ve had students who have argued, “I paid for this class and didn’t get anything out of it, so I shouldn’t have to pay.” Usually at semester’s end, a number of students inquire about getting refunds for classes they want to drop because they may not pass the class. Most recently, I encountered a graduate student who wanted a “store credit” for a class that she never completed to be applied to a different class in an upcoming semester<<

https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2017/06/05/higher-ed-sh....

Exactly what right as an employee do you have which allows you to create a hostile environment for customers?

> Exactly what right as an employee do you have to create a hostile environment for customers?

What right does the employer has to violate my religious rights? And students aren't customers.

Which religion governs pronoun usage?

There is no "religious right" to be an abusive asshole. Further, there is no religion whose tenets require you to be abusive to trans people, or which even suggest such behavior.

I know that's the same argument the professor was making, essentially, but forget the specific details of this case for the moment and look at it in the abstract. You -- and he -- are essentially arguing that the legal right to religious freedom carries an ancillary right to be actively insulting to others who are required to interact with you in entirely non-religious contexts. That strikes me as a hell of a reach. If you genuinely feel that your religion obligates you to be an asshole to people who you believe are violating its tenets, then maybe the onus should be on you to not choose a career that may put you in regular contact with those people.

If everything is hostile to your sensitivities, at what point are businesses, customers or polite people no longer obligated to accommodate you?

That has always been left to the employer's discretion. This is not a new issue.

And here, the customer is the federal government.

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