After more years in academe than I care to admit, holding positions from faculty member to department chair to dean and even interim provost for a long year and a half, I have witnessed more faculty histrionics than I care to remember. However, the most extreme performances I have seen have been in response to student evaluations.
The first occurred on a cold, rainy Friday afternoon at a small liberal-arts college where I was a young faculty member. A colleague—we’ll call him Professor X—asked if he could come to my office to discuss “something really serious.” He was a friend, a man whom I trusted and thought of as a reasonably good teacher, though one student had confided to me that he was a “my-way-or-the-highway kind of guy.”
He came to my office looking distressed, carrying with him a stack of papers, among which were his own student evaluations and a set of graded term papers. He had wound up with the evaluations through what he proclaimed was no fault of his own. After the class filled them out, he had assigned a student the task of taking them to the dean’s office. But alas, the dean’s office was closed. Professor X said that he would take them himself after class. “And then,” Professor X explained, “I couldn’t help myself—I read them.”
I was astounded by so flagrant a violation of the rules of the evaluation process. But what came next was even more amazing. The evaluations were dismal, and now Professor X wanted me to help him decide if he should change the grades on all of their term papers to show “those little bastards.”
Later, when I was a department chair, an elderly faculty member proclaimed that student evaluations were “an absolute violation of academic freedom,” while jabbing a trembling, crooked finger in my face with a swordlike flourish. “No one has the right to come in my classroom,” he said. (I assume he allowed the students in.)
Those are two of many examples of faculty members’ turning themselves inside out over what should be one of the most important contributions to their life’s work. Sure, student evaluations have their limits. They should never be the only means of evaluating faculty members, and they should never be used to snoop on professors who deal with controversial subjects in their classes. Yes, administrators have been guilty of misusing them. But the benefits far outweigh the risks, and faculty members who actually want to become better teachers—and who believe that good teaching skills are not bequeathed to them in perpetuity with the awarding of a Ph.D.—should read them over and over again.
Professor X’s great objection to student evaluations was one I frequently hear: “The student does not know the subject, so how can he or she judge my teaching?”
True, students’ perspectives are limited. But so are professors’. A professor cannot know what it is like to be 20 in an age of text messages, Facebook, and YouTube, and to be forced to endure lectures from someone who does not inhabit their socially networked world. I’m not suggesting that faculty members necessarily use that technology in their teaching, only that the point of view of those who do use it might be valuable.
Furthermore, excluding students from the evaluation system ignores two basic laws of human psychology: We cannot see ourselves as others see us, and our profession, like any other, distorts the way we view the world. Is any professional in this litigious world of ours beyond being questioned by constituents? Imagine going to a neurosurgeon who tells you to ignore the complaints her patients have made to the medical board: She has a medical degree, so she can do surgery in any way she damn pleases.
Students are also very good at picking up on mundane aspects of one’s teaching that over time can significantly undermine our educational system. Is the professor late? Do the tests the professor gives have anything to do with the subject of the classes? Does the professor show respect for the students? Comment on student papers? Return them promptly? Cancel class every Friday when it is sunny? Waste class time discussing personal problems or political or even spiritual concerns that have nothing to do with the subject of the course?
Most professors consider those matters to be issues of basic competence. But when faculty members become administrators and read volumes of evaluations, they generally discover that some professors are late every day, do not return papers, and think that the “little bastards” are their private audience for whatever they want to discuss. The newly minted administrator also discovers how overwhelmingly positive most evaluations are and how few of them have anything to do with the professor’s politics. If academic freedom protects incompetence, then God help our educational system.
On their most basic level, student evaluations are important because they open the doors of our classrooms. It is one of the remarkable ironies of academe that while we teachers seek to open the minds of our students—to shine a light on hypocrisy, illusion, corruption, and distortion; to tell the truth of our disciplines as we see it—some of us want that classroom door to be closed to the outside world. It is as if we were living in some sort of academic version of the Da Vinci code: Only insiders can know the secret handshake.
Clearly there are good reasons for protecting the classroom from those who would limit free inquiry, and there are many people out there waiting to do just that. Still, used properly, student evaluations have nothing to do with academic freedom. They enable academe to maintain quality instruction in the classroom and, equally important, to sustain a conversation about teaching.
When I began teaching, I assumed that one day I would learn how to do it. Now, all of these years later, I am still trying to get it right. In the process of trying to be a good teacher, I have been helped enormously by colleagues in the profession and by reading some of the vast pedagogical literature that is out there. But teaching is more than a body of knowledge. It is a complex array of skills used to communicate an enormously complex body of ideas to an even more complex, unpredictable, and ever-changing procession of students. It is students who have helped me more than any other resource in my efforts to master the art of teaching, for only they can tell me when they understand what I am trying to do.
And what became of Professor X? He has wandered from job to job, never happy with “those little bastards.” I may say of his fate what Lemuel Gulliver said in Gulliver’s Travels of Captain Pocock of Bristol: “He was an honest man [sometimes], and a good sailor, but a little too positive in his own opinions, which was the cause of his destruction, as it has been with several others.”
