I'm eighty four years old I have raised two children to happy, productive adulthood and was married to the same loving woman for more than half a century until she was torn from my side by Parkinson's Disease. I've worked as a day laborer, a janitor, a night watchman, a store clerk, a barber’s apprentice, an Army officer, a seventh-grade teacher, and, for forty-six years, a professor, teacher educator and author. Nevertheless, I was required to submit to anonymous evaluation by immature, inexperienced, often astonishingly ignorant, undergraduates each and every semester.
When our university introduced this process administrators claimed "the school" needed "course" evaluations to more accurately appraise instructional effectiveness. They stressed that previous administrations had relied solely on word of mouth to evaluate course effectiveness. Faculty were told that coming to fair decisions concerning tenure and promotion required more precision. But at the same time they stressed these were course evaluations; not evaluations of professors. Frankly I think this initiative had more to do with finance than fairness. When a school suffers a shortage of students and resultant tuition dollars, it's only natural management focuses on keeping the customer satisfied and rewards professors who do the same.
For more than 100 years, previous administrations never invited, much less required, students to take measure of their professors. I doubt they even considered it. After all, it's transparently obvious that a lot of students are incapable of mature disinterested judgement. Especially if they know they earned a bad grade.
Worse still, these evaluations were anonymous. Students were instructed not to sign their names. Providing a shield of anonymity had the effect of greatly increasing retributive denunciations. It encouraged students to down-grade any professor who demanded hard work and disrupted their mental slumber by impoosing the discomforts of thought. After all, no potential costs were risked.
Students certainly have no doubts about who is grading them. But when evaluations are anonymous, professors can only guess. They might learn something useful if they could identify the grader. But with anonymity, they can't ever know if ratings are from some class-cutting dullard or serious student.
I generally scored high on these ratings, evidence my promotion to full professor, then professor emeritus status. Nevertheless, I found the process humiliating. My colleagues bore this degradation and disempowerment in silence. And I suspect many remained silent only because they didn't want to risk displeasing the authorities and worries that complaint would be interpreted as a sign of weak teaching.
A degrading finale topped off this process. Professors were instructed to make no comment about the process. They were to have a student distribute the evaluations, then were to leave the classroom and not return. Completed evaluations were to be deposited on the front desk, collected by the last student finishing, sealed in the provided envelope, and delivered to the department secretary. She had the necessary security clearance. The collected ratings would be perused by an assortment of administrators. (Some of whom had secretly taken administrative jobs to escape the burdens of teaching.)
These "course" evaluations were eventually returned to the subjects, who were to examine them, bind them for future use, and record the evaluative statistics on a spreadsheet. This documentation would prove critical in any future tenure and promotion hearings.
These hearings were presided over by a Tenure and Promotion Committee. It was staffed by reliably tractable faculty, as well as chaired and heavily influenced, by the provost. If a candidate's evaluations were critical, prospects for tenure or promotion evaporated. The primacy of these statistics suggest that the underlying managerial view was, "the customer is always right." If it wasn't they wouldn't have taken student ratings as gospel.
Remember, this entire ritual was accomplished under the pretense that these were "course" evaluations, not evaluations of any professor. Hopefully this charade fooled no one. If it did, they weren't smart enough to be professors to begin with.
Had I been told to evaluate my professors when I was an undergraduate — way back in neolithic times, of course. I would have instantly thought those making that demand had taken leave of their senses. I knew, and I think my classmates knew, that we were green kids in the presence of full-scale adults who had accomplished a great deal more than we had. Clearly it was the professor's business to do the evaluating and the student's rightful plight to be evaluated. We students were even sujected to a summative "Junior Standing" exam that tested our knowledge of the required core subjects we took in our first two years. Fail this exam and you failed to become a junior. But remember, in those days at my school there were 3 applicants for every opening. Imagine a junior standing type test today. One with real teeth. Impossible, right?
An abundant supply of applicants supports demands for rigor. But when students become scare, as they are now, rigor plummets. So does the quality of the graduates. Only nowadays there are "professors" actually decrying the very concept of rigor. They say it's a form of oppression. Worse, it's "exclusionary." Of course it's exclusionary. College is supposed to be exclusionary. That's why it's called "higher education!"
Sorting and grading students is an unappealing but vital part of teaching anything that matters. So these spineless moaners and curriers of student favor are failing in a key responsibility. That should cost them their jobs. Instead, their every concession tends to improve their professorial evaluations and win managerial approval. In short, they are rewarded for shirking a critical responsibility.
I knew a student's proper place better than most of my classmates. That's because, as a teenager, I apprenticed for several years in my dad’s barbershop. It was populated by tough, no-nonsense railroaders and grizzled war veterans. I soon earned, the hard way, that I knew very little and should keep my opinions to myself. I remember voicing an opinion on an adult subject, only to have a veteran railroader say I reminded him of the barber's cat. Naively I asked what that meant. He said, "It means you're full of piss and wind." Everyone but me found this quite funny. Henceforth I kept my opinions to myself.
It's also noteworthy that professors at my university were denied a commensurate opportunity to evaluate chairs, deans, provost, or the president. I once asked our dean, a lady who was particularly adroit at currying favor, when we would be afforded this opportunity? I stressed that mature, experienced, learned professors were obviously better qualified to evaluate administrators than immature. inexperienced, frequently ignorant youngsters were their professors. Looking both defensive and annoyed, she muttered this would be decided at some future date. Unsurprisingly, that date turned out to be never.
College administrators know full well that granting professors the power to evaluate them would result in the same disempowerment "course" evaluations visit on professors. What's sauce for the goose is indeed gall for the gander in this case. At my college professors were also expressly forbidden from initiating communication with any trustee. In other words, they were forbidden to evaluate administrative performance with any the administrator's bosses.
"Course" evaluations are part of the current disempowerment that is rendering teachers at all levels more and more impotent and less and less satisfied. Teachers are sometimes held accountable even when a student doesn't attend class, Should a chronically absent student fail to perform well on standardized tests, for instance, it can't possibly be that chronic truancy, or lousy parenting or even growing up in a crime ridden, drug addled, pest hole. Nope, the teacher is somehow at fault because it's his or her job to leave no child behind. What a colossal humbug!
Political correctness nourishes this silliness. Indeed, it is its all-purpose vitamin and mineral supplement. Too many academics, often concentrated in the softer disciplines, have become self-righteous converts to this new religion. The lengths to which they take this faith are truly astonishing. For instance, child molesters are no longer pederasts, but "minor attracted persons." Worse, the religious zeal characteristic of converts motivates these academic evangelicals to preach their hare-brained ideology to naive adolescents . They frequently are already longing for something or someone to blame other than themselves. So this is a godsend.
This quasi-religious indoctrination emboldens some students to self-righteously examine their professors for signs of deviation. In fact these true believers become tamer equivalents of Mao's Red Guard. Emboldened by evangelical true belief, they self righteously denounce any professor they deem to be a heretic. Meanwhile, too many administrators forget all about academic freedom or rigor. After all, there's their job security and total enrollment to consider. Some are even true believers themselves — or at least pretend to be. They become academic Torquemada's.
I know a professor who was denounced by one of his Black female students. Her most obvious academic achievement was cutting two thirds of the time. Plainly, she had only fragmentary knowledge of what was being taught. Nevertheless, when she denounced the professor the department chair, he treated it seriously.
What was she objecting to? That the professor had cited research showing that female professors are paid just as well as males once their discipline is factored in. She found this offensive, emotionally troubling and heretical. It violated her new conviction that the world was in the clutches of an all-powerful white male hegemony. It wasn't that she was lazy and didn't put forth the requisite effort. She was a victim! It's not hard to guess how she came to believe that.
The chair entertained the girl's denunciation; then summoned the accused. He acknowledged that the professor had presented accurate and subject appropriate information. BUT, he added, the professor must remember that he is a white male. So, he must be more careful regarding which facts to present. "
Such advice should be anathema in academe. Instead it is now commonplace because political correctness rules. In fact it's just a tamer version of Mao's "Cultural Revolution." Professors aren't being beaten, imprisoned, or murdered as they were in Mao's China. But they are subjected to name-calling, public ridicule, administrative muzzling and job loss. And to make things worse, this politically correct zealotry is provoking a right wing backlash that also threatens academic freedom. Guess who's caught in the middle?
Current indications are that political correctness may be fading. The election of Donald Trump and corporate giants backing away from DEI indoctrination of their employees suggests as much. But in many institutions of higher ed it is firmly in charge and it will take courage to restore freedom, fairness and reason. And this is especially true when opponents of DEI and its unfair consequences risk being depicted as out-dated, homophobic, racist reactionaries. And professors willing to risk such defamation are in as short of supply as new collegiate applicants.
So far as abolishing student evaluations of professors is concerned, that possibility is as dead as road kill. And it likely will remain so even if, some time in the future, there again are an abundance of college applicants. Once a new ideology is in place, especially when it is coupled with financial necessity, we can expect it to have Toyota-like durability.
