Teachers at colleges and universities deserve job stability and a living wage.
Students at colleges and universities deserve to be classified as free, autonomous adult consumers of educational services.
Students' parents are entirely irrelevant and should have nothing whatsoever to do with decisions of any kind.
These are not in conflict.
The reason teachers are underpaid and struggle with poor working conditions is not that students are considered people now.
I support everyone's -- college faculty included -- right to a living wage, job stability, and decent working conditions.
But when you pair your (entirely valid!) complaints about pay and working conditions with complaints about "And we have to treat students as adult consumers instead of passive children now!" or "Parents entrust us to mold and shape their children," I have to conclude that your cause is less about economic justice for all, and more about desiring paternalistic power over students and young adults.
And since I have yet to read an article about the (admittedly terrible!) working conditions of college faculty that doesn't also include at least one aside referring to students as "children," making reference to "molding" or "shaping" or "forming" them, or complaints about being required to treat them as the paying consumers they are... I have a pretty strong inkling about what the goals of this movement really are.
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