I've raised two children to happy, productive adulthood. I 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, then earned a doctorate and, for forty-six years, was a professor, teacher educator and author. Nevertheless, I was required to submit to anonymous evaluation by immature, inexperienced, sometimes astonishingly ignorant, undergraduates each and every semester.
When our university introduced this process, administrators claimed "the school" needed "course" evaluations to more accurately appraise instruction. They stressed that previous administrations had to rely solely on word of mouth. Faculty were simultaneously reassured that course evaluations would also support fairer decisions concerning tenure and promotion They claimed even though these wer to bee course evaluations.
Frankly, when it came ro promotion and tenure, I think these evaluations had more to do with finance than fairness. When a school is suffering a shortage of tuition dollars, which ours usually was, it's only natural for management to focus on keeping the customer satisfied. And what kept many of our customers satisfied was getting a good grade with little effort.
For over a 100 years, previous administrations never even invited, much less required, students who wer commonly not fully developed, to take the measure of their betters. I doubt they even considered it. After all, t at that stage of their development a lot of students are incapable of mature judgement — especially if they earned a bad grade.
Worse still, these so-called course evaluations were anonymous. Students were specifically instructed not to sign their name. Providing this shield of anonymity increased the probability of would use the evaluation for retributive denunciation. Indirectly encouraged students to down-grade any professor who expected a certain measure of talent, demanded hard work, or disturbed their mental equilibrium with disturbing contrary information.
Of course, students have no doubts about who is grading them. But, given anonymous evaluations, professors can only guess. They might learn something useful if they could identify the respondent. But with this anonymity, they can never know if a bad rating is accurate, or merely retribution from some class-cutting dullard who earned that F.
I scored well on these ratings, evidence my promotion to full professor. But I still found the process degrading. My colleagues bore this humiliation, and resultant disempowerment, in silence. I suspect many remained silent solely because they didn't want to risk displeasing the authorities and worried that any complaint would imply incompetence.
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 they were to leave the classroom. For the professor, that is the way the semester ended. 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. —who had the necessary security clearance.
The collected ratings were perused by an assortment of administrators, then eventually returned to us. We were to examine them and benefit from the feedback, bind them for future use, and record summative statistics on a spreadsheet. These would prove critical in any future tenure and promotion hearings. They served as the equivalent of baseball statistics. Except, in this game there were no umpires.
The "Tenure and Promotion Committee" presided over this process. It was staffed by reliably tractable faculty selected by the Committee on Committees. I once inquired why I was never selected. The committee chairman replied that I was "insufficiently attentive to administrative intent." She later became dean of arts and sciences.
This Tenure and Promotion Committee was chaired by the provost. If a candidate's evaluation statistics were weak, or the Provost hinted disapproval, prospects for tenure or promotion vanished.
Remember too, 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, these fooled 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 — I would have thought those making that demand had taken leave of their senses. I knew, and my classmates knew, that we were green kids in the presence of full-scale adults who had accomplished more and knew a great deal more than we had. So it clearly was the professor's business to do the evaluating and the student's to be evaluated. Not these days.
Perhaps I knew my place better than many teens. That's because I apprenticed for several years in my dad’s barbershop. The shop was chiefly populated by tough, no-nonsense railroaders a lot of whom were also grizzled war veterans. I soon earned, sometimes the hard way, that I should keep my opinions to myself. I remember voicing my opinion on an adult subject only to have a veteran railroader say I reminded him of the barber's cat. I tentatively asked what that meant. He said, "It means you're full of piss and wind." Everyone but me found this quite funny. Thereafter, I kept my own counsel.
We students were even subjected to a summative "Junior Standing" exam. It tested your 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? Closer to the contemporary standard when students are scarce is an old business motto, "The customer is always right."
An abundant supply of applicants collegiate rigor. But when students become scarce, as they are today, rigor starts to dissolve. So does the intellectual quality of the graduates. Making matters worse there are "professors" who actually decry the very concept of rigor. They say it's a form of oppression. Worse, they say, it's "exclusionary." Of course it's exclusionary. college is supposed to be. It's supposed to be rigorous too. That's why it's "higher" education!
Sorting and grading students is an unappealing but vital part of teaching. So the spineless moaners and curriers of student favor are dodging a major responsibility. That dereliction should cost them their jobs. Instead, it tends to improve their evaluations and that, in turn, wins them promotion and tenure.
It's 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 dogmatic ideology to naive adolescents. And many of them are already longing for simple answers to the complex questions of late adolescence and early adulthood.
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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.
