In this chapter, we will examine three different ways that liberal arts students’ identities are constructed on institutions’ promotional websites, by academics of different stripes and by students themselves. The first is as good citizens: the idea that the liberal arts approach to education creates politically engaged and critical (but respectful) individuals with a concern for social justice. The second, connected student identity is the cosmopolitan: the well-travelled, and therefore open-minded, citizen of the world. Finally, we turn to the idea of the consumer student. This refrain, which can often be heard in relation to England's fee regime, suggests that modern students consider themselves to have bought a degree and that they appeal to their consumer rights whenever they are dissatisfied with their product.

You might notice that these are quite different sorts of student identity, for while citizenship and cosmopolitanism are generally thought of as positive attributes, a consumerist mentality is not. The purpose of bringing them together in this way is to show how a hierarchy of ambivalence operates differently in different contexts.

I have argued throughout the book that there is an inverse relationship between power and insight, so that, for instance, modern institutions’ promotional websites tend to seek to disentangle complex value systems in ways that the websites of old and post-war universities do not. Similarly, students in interviews offer insights about what is the most appropriate educational value to bring to bear in particular contexts, which academics may instead glide over. Even further than this, those students who are at some remove from the supposedly traditional higher education student (by virtue of class, ethnicity or nationality, for instance) work harder to pull apart different values in order to make claims about what is important in a particular context and what is not, in comparison to more privileged students; the same can be said for junior academics as opposed to those who are more senior. The three aspects of liberal arts students’ identities discussed in turn in this chapter (citizenship, cosmopolitanism and consumerism) build from one another in such a way that we are able to see these processes of disentanglement move from the gentler to the more significant.