When Students’ Prejudices Taint Reviews of Instructors

Anti-discrimination laws clearly prohibit colleges from firing faculty members based on their race, nationality, or gender. But what if instructors get bad reviews from students whose complaints betray such bias?

That’s a central issue raised in litigation brought against the University of Kansas by a faculty member whom it denied reappointment. In lawsuits filed in federal court last week and state court last summer, Catherine A. Joritz, an assistant professor of film and media studies, accuses her employer of improperly relying in part on discriminatory feedback from her students in deeming her work subpar. She argues that Kansas administrators violated the law by refusing to acknowledge that students’ negative evaluations of a video-production course showed that they had discriminated against her, and subjected her to a hostile work environment, based on national origin.

“These discriminatory, anonymous comments were included in every important evaluation the petitioner underwent, negatively affecting her chances for salary increases and continued employment,” says the lawsuit Ms. Joritz filed in the U.S. district court in Topeka. The university, which has not had a chance to respond to Ms. Joritz’s federal complaint, has denied similar accusations made by her in state court.

Ms. Joritz’s lawsuits unusually describe her as the victim of anti-German bias, widespread in the United States during the World War I and World War II but mostly unheard of today. Ms. Joritz, an American citizen who has spent more than 30 years in Germany, argued in her federal complaint that the students’ evaluations of her course “included handwritten angry, aggressive, anti-German comments” betraying a hostile environment that administrators refused to confront.

Her broader objections to the use of biased student feedback, however, are likely to be echoed in a growing number of faculty lawsuits against employers, predicts Peter F. Lake, director of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy at Stetson University. With society much more polarized on matters such as sex discrimination, and colleges having become more likely to deny faculty members promotions or contract renewals based on considerations such as student feedback, “it does not surprise me to see these issues coming forward,” he says.

In reviewing students’ anonymous feedback on instructors, Mr. Lake says, it can be “hard to interpret whether what you are reading is hateful or helpful.”

Harsh Critics

The practice of using students’ anonymous course evaluations to judge faculty performance has long been controversial, with a growing body of research finding that students’ assessments are biased by race, gender, age, and factors such as personal attractiveness.

About half of colleges have shifted from asking students to submit written course evaluations to asking them to fill out such forms online, and the online questionnaires have much lower response rates and are more likely to convey strongly negative or positive opinions, the American Association of University Professors found in a 2014 survey that asked faculty members about their teaching evaluations. Many of the survey’s more than 9,000 respondents reported that students filling out the anonymous, online questionnaires had begun using an “abusive and bullying tone,” an AAUP summary of the survey’s findings says.

“I have read student evaluations that use language that I would not repeat to anybody unless I was forced to in a court of law. It’s gross,” says Linda B. Nilson, director emeritus of Clemson University’s Office of Teaching Effectiveness and Innovation and a researcher of the use of such instruments.

In judging teaching performance, administrators often focus on students’ overall ratings of instructors without delving deeper into course evaluations to look for evidence of bias underlying students’ opinions, Ms. Nilson says. Especially if denied an opportunity to examine such evaluations, faculty members might never know how much their students’ discrimination skewed their supervisors’ assessments of their work.

Side-Door Risks

The law, for the most part, offers little guidance on how colleges should use such student feedback. Under federal laws dealing broadly with employment discrimination, says Mr. Lake, of Stetson University, “you certainly cannot hide behind a third-party evaluation — whether anonymous or attributed — if it is purely based on racial animus or improper motivation.”

If students’ course evaluations contain complaints related to instructors’ race or sex that no administrator could voice legally, colleges that rely on the evaluations put themselves at risk of litigation, he says.

The tougher calls for colleges are situations where a student’s criticisms could stem from either bigotry or legitimate educational concerns, as is the case when students say an instructor’s thick foreign accent made classroom lectures incomprehensible. In such cases, Mr. Lake says, colleges are well-advised to independently verify whether students’ complaints have any real basis, by, for example, observing one of the instructor’s classes. “If you have set standards for communication that are clear, then you can enforce them,” he says.

When clearly biased comments do show up in students’ course evaluations, administrators need to decide whether to ignore just those comments or the entire evaluation. Ms. Nilson argues that “the whole evaluation should get tossed in the trash, because that student does not have a professional attitude toward the task of evaluating a faculty member.”

Kenneth R. Ryalls, president of the IDEA Center, a nonprofit group that researches and develops such assessments, agrees that administrators should ignore evaluations with passages that are “clearly inflammatory or threatening.” He argues, however, that, because all people have biases, more subtle evidence of them should not be seen as disqualifying evaluations from consideration. “You just have to use them wisely and try to get a big picture over time,” he says.

The Kansas Board of Regents, which governs that state’s six public universities, has directed them to use anonymous ratings by students in evaluating teaching, but says such ratings instruments “must be norm-referenced and corrected for major sources of bias as demonstrated by research.”

Pronounced Differences

Both the University of Kansas and Ms. Joritz declined this week to comment on their legal dispute.

The university’s administration last spring informed Ms. Joritz, who had begun teaching there in 2012, that it had denied her reappointment and that she would no longer have a job there at the end of the current academic year. Her state and federal lawsuits ask the courts to order the university to reinstate her to her tenure-track position, as well as a previously awarded fellowship and her right to a university-supported research-intensive semester. They also demand that she be given an extra year to prepare for her tenure review, to offset the disruption caused by her reappointment denial.

The lawsuits cite, as evidence of bias against her by students in a 2014 video-production class, passages in their course evaluations calling her “a Nazi sympathizer” and complaining that she “talked about Germany all the time” and “drove us nuts frequently mispronouncing well-known words.” She accuses university administrators of refusing her requests to remove anti-German comments from her record, disregarding her complaints that the students’ comments reflected a hostile work environment, and suggesting that such comments reflected her own inability to adjust her communication and teaching skills to a new environment and culture.

Ms. Joritz’s lawsuits also accuse the university of denying her due process, subjecting her to sex-based discrimination by a tenured male colleague who evaluated her, and retaliating against her for complaining. She similarly had made accusations of sex-based discrimination in a 2007 lawsuit, settled in 2011, that challenged her dismissal by Edinboro University of Pennsylvania.

The University of Kansas, in its responses to Ms. Joritz’s lawsuit in state court, has denied that she was the victim of discrimination or inadequate due process. It has argued that it did not reappoint her because she had not made sufficient progress, in terms of her research and service, toward tenure.

Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.