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There is a tendency in universities today to think of teachers as, like sales people and politicians, interested in outcomes. And so there is a tendency for teachers to treat their students in the way sales people treat their clients and politicians treat the voters: without respect. Professors these days, as well as our graduate student assistants, are encouraged to approach the classroom as a social engineer might. We are prodded to think about how most effectively to seat the students, to organize them into working groups; journals, wikis, presentations, and such like, are devices we are told to use to restructure the classroom experience. And we are encouraged to get ourselves videotaped and so, in general, to come to think of ourselves as teaching professionals whose main concern is student outcomes. Now there is nothing wrong with working hard to make the classroom the most exciting place it can be. But we are not social engineers and students are not products we are manufacturing. To think of students that way is to insult them and it is to make genuine teaching and learning impossible. Students, like citizens, are free and equal, and they have the power of reason; they can make up their own minds and can discover and enforce their own conceptions of value and truth and meaning. To view them as any less is to view them the way politicians so often view the public, without respect.