I'm not sure how you're making the distinction between customer and workers. I'm talking about graduate students here, particularly research-producing Ph.D. students.

I think we both agree that academia and businesses compete, but by humane I mean that the people producing the work are invested in by the faculty and universities. That the graduate student's life-long success is the university's success, and that the output is the scholar as much as the work they produced.

My point is simply that a corporation doesn't care for a person besides the work they do for them, which is a different culture from academia.