In the long history of the University, back to medieval Europe, and the longer history of its noble precursors, back to the schools of antiquity, back to Aristotle’s Lyceum and to Plato’s Academy, if the phrase “student evaluations” had been heard, it would always have meant the evaluation, more exactly the judgment, teachers give of their students, but suddenly, as the University was about to begin its second millennium, in the New World, in the United States of America, ‘evaluations’ by students of their teachers were instituted.
Although they arrived in a stormy time, the late 1960s, these ‘evaluations’ did not take American Academe by storm. Although campuses are usually filled with discussion, although universities are (at least till recently) proud of their freedom of speech, and although professors praise the examined life, ‘evaluations’ were not much discussed. They seem to have been an innovation, like wheels on suitcases, that needed only to be proposed to be recognized as beneficial.
What made ‘evaluations’ seem reasonable are three opinions: that they would help teachers learn from students, that they would help senior faculty judge junior faculty, and that they would help administrators judge all faculty. These seemed nearly self-evident. Let’s examine them.[1]
I. Of teachers, Nietzsche says, “Whoever is a teacher through and through takes all things seriously only in relation to his students.”[2]
If so, then the first thing a teacher would ask about any innovation is: “What will this teach my students?” Thinking of the long view, such a teacher will also ask: “What will this have taught my students when they have reached my age?” and “What might the students of my students learn from them?” Should such a teacher also teach politics, he will ask: “If such students become the rulers, what will they do?”
Let us glance at a typical student evaluation. It consists of a series of ‘questions’ that the student is to ‘answer’ by checking boxes, circling numbers on a scale, or marking pre-chosen phrases on a continuum, with a soft-lead pencil, whose mark can be easily scanned and tabulated by a machine. Clearly, very little, in effort, or time, is required to fill out such a form. It does not ask the students for examples, thoughts, or a story. Little even in penmanship is required. Little is also insisted upon. If a student wrote a letter instead, it would not be welcome.
These forms also belittle students. Taken en masse, tabulated en masse, evaluations melt whatever individuality a student manages to express into an impersonal mass rating. “You count only as you add to a sum into which you disappear without a trace,” they say to each student. That many such things exist in our era does not make these forms diminish any less the dignity of each student responding to them. Kafka would understand.
There is something else missing from these forms, like a face without features. Unlike even the most impersonal teaching, such as lecturing to large numbers or writing a book, in a typical evaluation form there are no human beings. The name of the author or authors appears no where, and the student is not addressed by name, or even as a class. Without introduction or greeting, these forms come at the student, and they depart without a thanks. The very casualness of their disregard demeans. “Hey you” would be superior. These questionnaires do not ask the student to respond in a way that would require, or invite, another human being to respond in kind.
Like a man who won’t look you in the eye while he questions you, evaluations ask the student for something personal, a judgment of another human being, but they give nothing personal themselves and they promise nothing personal in return. Like a one-way mirror, the author of an evaluation hides and yet wants the student to expose himself, or herself. Good manners are not something these forms teach students.
Of course, much in daily life is impolite, evasive, even devious, and demeaning. Good students learn to slight or endure such things, and even forgive them in a teacher, but only if they are learning something important. Do student evaluations teach something important?
II. The most obvious thing evaluations teach is that writing is not very important. To be sure, sometimes the student is allowed a line for writing, but seldom more than a sentence or maybe two would fit in the box permitting no more; and students know it is not the important part, perhaps a concession to humanity, but more likely a cynical stroking. After all, written responses would be a hindrance to the devisers of these forms; only what can be tabulated can be facilely combined, and whipped into statistics facilely comparing teachers. “I do not want to read something from you, I am not interested in you, I don’t have time,” whisper evaluations to the student. Not surprisingly, these forms are not well written. Nothing pungent, colorful, or savory is permitted. Anything subtle, sharp, or distinguished would violate the genre. In truth, there is nothing intelligent in these forms. They ask for opinion, not insight, and for that they have arranged it that no one need write to take them. “I myself am not interested in writing well; I got here without writing well. What’s the fuss?” they boast. And thus they discourage students from learning to write, and demean all teachers passing them out who on all other days do teach students to write.
My objection is not trivial. Thinking and writing are more than yoked. ‘Words are not to thought what garb is to the body, but what the body is to the soul. They are the incarnation of thought.’ (After Wordsworth) Accordingly, although Homer, the skalds, and the Beowulf poet were thoughtful without perhaps being able to write, few graduates of colleges today will become thoughtful without writing. Only those who can describe in a letter some important experience in their own lives, are likely to think for themselves, deliberate about important choices in their lives, come at the end of their lives to look back on a rich one, which may well enrich ours. Every student I teach to write may sometime become my friend and will soon be my fellow citizen (a consideration I will return to later).
Today, however, those who cannot write well will be captivated by images —one image is worth a thousand lies— or glide contentedly on the surface of an ocean of clichés. Kept afloat by them, they will enjoy lots of warm fuzzy communication, or hot fuzzy political dispute, but howsoever quarrelsome will always be united with others like themselves, safe from straying into thought. They are like passengers on a cruise ship who think they are “seeing the world” as they put it (in a cliché); who don’t care to know the language where the ship stops; who are satisfied with the little the tour guide says in front of the David; who spend more time buying things to impress others back home; and before dark hurry back to the comfort and drinks on board; and who in the nights, rings-off cruising, will never meet a friend worth keeping or an experience worth recounting. Thought lies deep in the ocean, but the layer of clichés has been thickened immensely in the last hundred years by the vast media-news-entertainment complex. A century ago, immersing yourself only in the Bible and Shakespeare would render you thoughtful, now so much intervenes. And our ubiquitous advertising, which combines false images and false words, by admitting it is seduction, weakens our very fidelity to truth. What others feel ashamed of, advertisers glory in. The highest ambition of an ad man is to coin a cliché. The NAZIs gloried in their production, and the Soviets too.[3] Except for the pleasure of satirizing them, all writers abhor clichés. In Mme. Bovary Flaubert shows how a whole life may be lived in clichés —and not.[4]
“Evaluations” are not, however, made with clichés; at least none stand out. They stifle thought in a different way; their language is so familiar, so pedestrian, so grey, so inevitable, you might never notice they do not invite you to think. They may speak of “quality”; they may mention “thoughtful” and “learning”; and they may ask about “effective” and “useful” and “benefit.” But their complacency about these is so utter, they are themselves so devoid of quality, of thought, and of the good, they never encourage the student to examine their chosen terms. To ask “what is quality?” to muse “what does it mean to be thoughtful?” or examine the relation of the effective, the useful and the beneficial, would seem impolite. And to ask what is the good? would seem impertinent. (As to ask “what is justice?” seems to Cephalus in the Republic.) You cannot engage evaluations in conversation, invite them to inquire together, or ask them questions. Are the faceless authors of evaluations dumbing-down, or just somewhat dumb? It is not worth learning. No one reading one of these forms ever wanted to meet its author. Few reading one would suppose it had an author. Behind them there seems to be no human being, no mind, and no teacher. The writer of them does not care for such things; it—no other pronoun than ‘it’ will do—never asked a question it did not think it had the answer to. This self-satisfaction puts it in that rare minority, the unteachable, whom it really would be vain to offer help.
Bacon tells us, “Reading maketh a full man, conversation maketh a ready man, and writing maketh an exact man.” Student evaluations maketh the opposite. No student ever finished a student evaluation form and said, “Boy, that was worth reading; I’m going to reread it this weekend.” No student ever finished an evaluation, sought a friend to converse with, and exulted: “Wow, did you notice how interesting the second question was. How did you answer it?” And no one ever finished a student evaluation so filled with thoughts he spent the rest of the day writing, because he had been provoked to ask: “What do I think?”
Evaluations are not designed to elevate the understanding of the student. On the contrary, at work in these forms is a hostility to intellect all the more injurious because stealthy. Choice there is, but not if you think better than the boxes, numbers, and clichés. Qualifications, additions, and substitutions are not permitted. Even clarifications, queries, and questions are not permitted. “Please do not be troublesome,” the form intones. “Just mark the box, like the other students. You understand. There are so many of you, we have to frame the questions and provide our own answers to choose from. Elsewhere we have provided a place for some of you to write something. You understand, I’m sure.” And thus if a spirited student refused to “understand” and assailed them, he would hear “Do not try to be more intelligent than us.“ Which really means, “we are not interested in your intelligence.” Evaluations remind one of those teachers who, upon hearing a comment more intelligent than they are capable of turn to the class and say, “Well, class, what do you think of Johnny’s comment?”[5]
Intelligence is not something “evaluations” are looking for. That institutions claiming to promote the achievements of intellect now judge the inculcation of intellect, called teaching, by a form contemptuous of intellect is revealing. It ought to be scandalous. That it is not scandalous is also revealing.
III. Of course elsewhere in college, there may be experiences in writing, in thinking, in learning, just the kind of things it is worth telling a friend about. Yet it is just such experiences that student evaluations teach the wrong things about.
Consider the questions asked in a typical form. They range from: “Did your teacher come to class?” proceed through: “How well was your teacher prepared?” and go all the way to: “Is your teacher knowledgeable?” I believe the first question is within the capacity of almost all students, but of course not those who have not come to class, and the questionnaires have no way of discovering that. Even if they asked the student: How often did you come to class? there is no way evaluations, being anonymous, could confirm the veracity of the student’s answer. No way to compare a name to the attendance checklist.
The second level question, about the teacher’s preparation, is ambiguous. Yes, a complete absence of preparation ought to be visible to the meanest intellect (again supposing the intellect has come to class). Thus, if the teacher has assigned the Declaration of Independence and during class cannot remember any of the twenty-eight charges against George III, it is fair to say that she did not prepare. And if the teacher regularly comes to class late, reads his mail, and leaves early “to get a call from Washington,” it is fair to say that he is doing no teaching that day. But beyond the grossly obvious, what student could know about the teacher’s preparation?
How long does it take to prepare a class: a day, a week, a lifetime? It is hard for us teachers to say. Some preparation is the day before, some the months before, some your whole life. Moreover, though it is undoubtedly good to prepare, every experienced teacher knows of discussions he prepared for seven days, had five different plans for, and it flopped. Free will exists, and students can exercise it. Most teachers also know of discussions that went so well you start fancying comparison with the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the Constitutional Convention, and Plato and Aristotle in Raphael’s School of Athens — but, truth to tell, the teacher did not feel well prepared, for there were wars in the world, crises in the college, emergencies at home, and insomnia all night. Free will exists, students can exercise it, and teachers can, too. And free will comes in different doses, weak and strong.
Evaluations do not ask the students about their own preparation: How many hours a week did you devote to this course? Did you attend all the classes? Did you do all the reading? All the assigned reading? All on time, before each class? And what about the recommended reading, any of that? Did you write the “journals” your teacher requires as preparation for each discussion? With how many other students did you regularly discuss things you were learning? How many drafts did you do of your papers? Even if the forms asked such questions, there would be no way to ascertain the truth about the students’ preparations, except of course the old way, through papers and examinations, which do encourage self-examination, as “evaluations’ never do.
At the same level are questions such as: “Could you follow her lectures easily?” “Did he follow his syllabus closely?” “Did her tests reflect the material covered in class?” “Were his reading assignments realistic?”[6] I suppose some students are capable of giving some response to these questions, but only provided they have been to class, and only provided they answer honestly, which once again cannot be checked in an anonymous “evaluation.” Of course, the teacher would know if the student attended class and in a small class, with lots of discussion and lots of writing, the teacher would know best which students have the habit of honest self-judgment, but it is the teacher who is not to judge, but to be judged by “judges” shielded by anonymity.
However, even if such conditions were met, even if students who missed classes were excluded, and even if the evaluations were weighted according to a rank-list the teacher provided separately, it is not good for students to be asked such questions. The very institution of “evaluations” suggests that a student’s opinions about the class are more important than what he or she learned. And the institution of “evaluations” teach this anti-intellectual flattery complacently. “This is the way we do things, of course it is right, don’t ask why.”
In particular, each question listed above assumes something quite dubious about teaching, for example, they teach that tests should concern only “material covered in class,” that a syllabus should be followed closely, and that lectures should not be hard or readings long. Notice what all these assume: that the student’s ease is the measure of good teaching. On the contrary, “good students like hard tests.”[7] They like the challenges a good teacher will put to them. Such teachers will certainly ask questions on ‘material’ not ‘covered’ in class. At my college there was a “reading period” at the end of each semester and always a question on the final about a book read outside and not ‘covered’ in class. Most class syllabi also included lists of recommended “extra” books; and the lists for “comps” included more books than even the best, or most diligent student was likely to finish, let alone master. Such vistas and expectations taught the student your education is more than all the courses you ever take. In your tutor there was one teacher and in the Houses more with whom to discuss what it was all adding up to. And we soon felt, if I’m not reading one book a week not required in any of my courses, I’m not being educated; Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge, in which I first discovered the passions of the life of the mind, was one such. Such discoveries (like Nietzsche’s of Schopenhauer in a bookstall) feel special, and personal, but we shared them, and even then would have acknowledged our college as the invisible enabler of them. Thoreau was right to emphasize the importance of fellow students, but ungracious not to thank Harvard for bringing him and them together.[8]
Should there never be surprises on exams? The best question I ever met on an exam was a complete surprise; it asked us to tell how three of the Victorian novelists we read “would put you into a novel of theirs.” And every time I ask a similar question of my students I thank that teacher long ago (Edgar Rosenberg). The best lectures I ever heard, Paul Tillich’s two year course, “The Self-Interpretation of Man in the West,” had little relation to the reading list. What reading list, even a four course one, could! I am still working on it; it has a steady core, of things that must be read and reread, but also many others bidding to be included. Nor do good teachers aim to make their lectures easy. Look at Heidegger’s lectures What Calls Thinking (Was Heist Denken). Or read the reports of the students of Wittgenstein. Or the conversations of Whitehead. And study the things good students, now good teachers, celebrate in their most beloved teachers. Good students do prefer bracing Mozart to inoffensive Muzak or, as important, come to do so through good classes. They do not object when the teacher uses a word they didn’t know before or mentions in passing a good book they had not already heard of.[9] The better students will look that word up and read that book later. And the very best will seek out such things on their own. If dolphins are judged good students not when they repeat what they’ve been trained to do, but when they introduce new twists and turns, why shouldn’t humans be?
Likewise, good teachers deviate from the syllabus. In pursuit of the truth and hoping for a transformation in the soul of his students, Socrates often failed “to follow the syllabus closely.” When old Cephalus sensed such a failure he left class, but the others that night in Piraeus were student enough to stay. Was Socrates “realistic” in what he required of Adeimantus and Glaukon? Hardly. He mentioned three waves, and only when they asked, did he talk about them. He led those students on a merry intellectual chase, visited the fabled cave, saw the fabulous sun itself, and finally in Book X bedded their sleepy souls down on the “idea” of a bed. All this was good for them, they would never forget that night of talk, even when they forgot the details of it (which Socrates, let us note, recalls word for word, for the Republic is narrated by him). And in the 2,300 years since then, multitudes of strong souls, reading the Republic, in classes and out, have agreed.[10]
A really good seminar will be an adventure, an inquiry in which one thing leads to another not foreseen till then; because such a seminar has a goal, it will be a series of events, open to discovery, and require the syllabus to change in motion, adding a reading, or slowing over one that has grown rich. Intellectual inquiry begins with desire; intellectual desire is expressed in questions; a course that is governed by inquiry will either be with the inquirer talking, the teacher lecturing (for example any of Heidegger’s courses), or if it is a seminar, in which the inquiry is shared by all, then the teacher will be but the first questioner, but in all these instances of inquiry, there will be no syllabus at the beginning that must be kept to, only a goal, a plan perhaps, and a seeking. When a mountain has never been climbed before, there is only the goal and the desire, and between them no known way. Desire must find it and how much more difficult when the mountain itself is unknown.
The questions typical of student evaluations teach the student to value mediocrity in teaching, or worse, and even to resent good teachers who, to keep to high purposes, will use unusual words, ask difficult questions, spring surprises, and digress from the syllabus, or seem to. Thus they incline the student, when he learns little, to blame the teacher, rather than himself. No one can learn for another person, all learning is one’s own, even when it is somehow the result of one’s teacher, to whom one should eventually be grateful. The relation of learning and teaching is something of a mystery, though a mundane one, occurring every day. How should one describe it? As designing and building, thus the cooperation of architect, builder, and owner? Or as planting, weeding, and harvesting? Or perhaps better, as sparking, kindling, setting on fire? Or better still, midwifing, for it recognizes two agents equally, though different? When it occurs, when learning is the result of teaching, it is a lock that needed and found two keys. The student desired it, persevered, and the teacher helped. The keys are not the same, for learning can occur without teaching; all utterly new learning, with discoveries of new truths, as by Plato and Galileo, occurred without a teacher; and contrariwise there can be wonderful teaching and no learning whatsoever, for free will exists. There can also be learning despite poor teaching. As one of our teachers at Harvard, Bill Alfred, once advised “you don’t know if you really love a subject until you’ve had a course in it from a really awful teacher.”
The third level question, about the teacher’s knowledge, must be assumed to be entirely beyond any student in a class. If the student is good enough to judge the knowledge of the teacher, the student hardly needs to take the course and could be teaching it to others instead. There are such remarkable students; they are a joy; but really, they are no longer students. Sometime during his nineteen years in his Academy, Plato must have recognized Aristotle as one. When Isaac Barrow recognized Isaac Newton was that good, he saw to it that Newton be appointed to his own chair. The assumption that each and every student of today is that good, hence a fit judge of any and every teacher’s knowledge, is absurd. With shoes, the wearer is right about whether the shoes fit, unless she’s the kind of princess who feels peas forty mattresses below. Or is an Imelda Marcos never to be contented with any of 500 pair a year. Learning, however, is not like slipping on a pair of sandals, and teaching is not like shoe making. It is as Pascal says, whereas a lame man knows he limps, a lame mind does not know it limps, indeed says that it is we who limp.[11] Yet these forms invite the limpers to judge the runners, non-readers the readers, the inarticulate the articulate, and non-writers writers. Naturally, this does not encourage the former to become more like the latter.
In truth, the very asking of such questions teaches students things that do not make them better students. It suggests that these mediocre questions are the important questions, that the student already knows what teaching and learning are, and that any and all students are qualified to judge it. This is flattery. Sincere or insincere, it is not true, and it will not improve the student, who needs to know exactly where he or she stands in order to take a single step forward.
Good teachers keep their ears to the ground and listen unobtrucively for suggestions from their best students, but they never ask them, for even for the very advanced, it would reduce the “pathos of distance” so fruitful to all students and especially the best. Fundamentally, official questionnaires asking students to judge their teachers wholly misconceive the relation of student and teacher; they take it to be a contract, as between equals, instead of a covenant, between unequals, namely student and teacher. To illustrate: suppose there are ten short papers in a course; what about the student who gets the first 9 perfect and does not take the 10th because by his count he already has a 90, does he deserve an honor grade? No, of course not, for honor grades, certainly an A, belong only to honorable students who have done truly top work. And only the student who wouldn’t miss that 10th paper, because he thinks he might learn something from it, and then deserve a 100, is worthy of honor. Nobility does not calculate.
It is easy to see that evaluations record something; it is popularity, likeableness, agreeableness. We can imagine glowing praises of a teacher, but would that really prove he was teaching well. Entertainers get laughs, hucksters get sales, and by bringing gifts the worst can get elected. And, on the contrary, would screaming denunciations prove a teacher taught badly? Some times that might prove the teacher taught well, but the students learned very badly. Teaching and learning are not symmetrical.
In Caldwell, Idaho I met a history teacher who had received some low scores. Two students had actually ‘evaluated’ him a zero. One commented, “He should be fired. I am so sick of having my Catholicism criticized.” The other commented, “He should be fired. It really irks me the way he pushes his medieval religion at me.” I believe these two comments are pretty good evidence of good teaching, and thus a rare case of mere opinion substantiating a truth, but of course, you have to read the comments, and evaluate the scores, two zeroes, in the light of the comments to appreciate that. According to the scores which the administration values most, as a teacher Prof. Howard Berger was a zero twice over, whereas according to any worthy fellow teacher, he was an exemplary teacher because he opposed both stubborn unexamined prejudice and stubborn unexamined predilection. This is, to my mind the most notable proof that Prof. Berger really is an outstanding teacher, and proof the people who have invented “evaluations” know nothing about teaching and nothing about learning. Certainly they’ve learned nothing from the failure of their scoring to identify and honor a fine teacher.
How far evaluations misunderstand teaching and learning can be appreciated by reading one on Socrates. Under the heading Personal Qualifications, we read: “Ugly. Not a good dresser. Not sure of himself, always asking questions.” Under the heading Organization, we read: “No seating chart, no regular times, no schedule of topics or readings. In class, he starts on one topic, leaves it for another, just follows students’ whims. Classes run on beyond meal times. Takes unannounced field trips. And he never tells us what will be on the exams.” Under Teacher-student Relations, we read: “Hard to get a hold of. No regular office hours. Places students in embarrassing situations by asking questions. You never know what he wants. He criticized our music. He likes some students better than others. He wouldn’t let us eat in class. Then he promised us a feed, but instead just kept us up late. He promised us a spectacular field trip, with a night horse race, but it was just the same old yacking.” Under Preparation, we find: “Obviously does not prepare, will start any where, even asks some student to start things. When a student asks a question, he just finds some way to ask it back.” How might the course be improved: “Get rid of Socrates. Find someone who knows something and knows how to teach. Give us lectures.” Under Knowledge of Subject Matter, we read: “Actually admits he knows nothing. Sometimes he seems to, maybe he’s published a lot; one thing for sure, he can’t teach. I don’t know why the Philosophy Department hired him.” And finally, the summary question: How effective was your teacher? “I learned nothing from Socrates. I knew more before I started. Most students fell asleep, or left. Some who stayed, he played favorites with. Socrates is arrogant. He thinks he’s better than the gods. If there were a vote, I think he would lose.”[12] Of course, there were a majority of such students in Athens the day Socrates was condemned. Fortunately for our civilization, for humanity itself, there was also at least one great student to write about it. Since student evaluations make no distinctions between students, between Plato and the many, they might have voted with the majority in Athens that day and every day in American Academe they are still encouraged to do so.[13] And one could easily add an evaluation of Christ in the same vein, with the disappointed Judas, promised the Messiah, betraying Him to the administration of Pharisees and Romans.
IV. At the heart of evaluations is a confusion of opinion and knowledge that teaches students to be indifferent to knowledge. The “lowest common denominator” prose in which these forms are written, their pre-formed answers, the inarticulate responses they are satisfied with, all like snow white out the differences of intellect, of heart, of soul among the students. Where the differences in quality among students make no difference, every student is taught that quality itself makes no difference. In addition, since there are no checks, or penalties, for inaccurate statements, no student is taught to be scrupulous. Before the jury in an American court files out to judge the accused, the Judge instructs them, in the law and in their duty. Before students judge their teachers, they receive no such instructions; the forms teach that none are needed. Their easy-mark, easy-scan mode signals “give us only opinions.” And what they teach is “opinion is knowledge.”
Fortunately, elsewhere in college the student may be taught that opinion is not knowledge. The student of chemistry will be taught that the periodic table is a simple, intelligible account of largely invisible elements, which wonderfully explains an enormous variety of visible, but heterogeneous features of nature. The student of history may learn that a great past event, WWII, our Civil War, the spread of Christianity, is even harder to say the exact, satisfying truth about than a traffic accident that living witnesses testify about in a court. And what of all the things that could have been otherwise: if Alexander had lived to conquer Europe; if Napoleon had taken Russia; if young Socrates had perished; if young Christ has not been crucified; and if Shakespeare had died at the same age as his son Hamnet? And in the course of writing a thesis, on Hamlet, the student of literature may come to conclusions that differ very much from her first explanation of the painful mystery of the man and the play.
Will students feel the contrast between these experiences of knowledge and the opinionated indifference to knowledge inculcated by evaluations? It is safe to say that no teacher who trained reason upon the forms, so as to bring out that contrast, would have much of a chance of succeeding. Merely by allowing the forms, the teacher loses half or more of the authority to teach. Suggestions about the intellectual nullity of the forms might be resented by some students, reported to the administration, and placed in the teacher’s file. Thus is the worldly interest, or the academic ambition, of the teacher set against both his intellectual integrity and his teacherly care.
Or the teacher’s desire to continue teaching at all! Reports of the ever-present threat to continuing in a position now abound. Apparently getting lower than a 4.7 from the aggregate of anonymous students puts you in jeopardy; veteran teachers report adjusting things next[14] term, by lowering standards, easier all around, shorter readings, and papers that ask what you feel. What a shame to a once proud profession, encouraging worthy teachers to teach less worthily. And there are public discussions among teachers about exactly how lower standards to achieve that 4.7, by giving the evaluation out after an easy assignment, by waiting to see that the most habitually complaining student is absent, by giving it out close to the bell (thus encouraging students to hit the fives and get to the next class, by not leaving the room (thus shutting up the worse student from sounding off to the others), and by bringing brownies. Yes, brownies.
This is scandalous, and yet triplely so when the temptation to corrupt yourself as a teacher is exerted most upon the young beginning teachers, the few who get a tenure track, and even more on the legion of ‘temps’ where once there were young teachers with horizons of more than a term. These are the serfs of the new academe, in which a generation of faculty whose mentors provided them steady paths to a teaching life have not provided such paths to the young, and have also lost the governance of the colleges and universities, to swamps of administrators, who if they ever taught when they left the classroom, they weren’t weeping and neither were the students.
By teaching students things that make them less studious, student evaluations in turn ‘teach’ the teachers to be less teacherly.[15] They teach teachers to satisfy, to entertain, to flatter, even to stroke, students as much as teach them. Knowledge may count for something somewhere, but in the evaluations it counts for nothing. There only the composite opinion of the majority of the students speaks. Always to avoid their wrath, always to court their favor, and sometimes to cajole them into a little learning — that is teaching now.
All that Tocqueville feared in democratic despotism, that the Federalist warns against as majority tyranny, that teachers as opposed as Machiavelli and Thomas agree to call calumny, that the ancient poets called Rumor, and that mobs in all ages have acted upon violently, teachers in American Academe are quietly subjected to through evaluations.
One of the ugliest scenes I have ever witnessed on a campus was an orientation for new faculty. (As a visiting professor, I was invited along with the probationers.) Outside, it was early fall, all nature brilliant, all humanity glad to be alive, and all students filled with innocent desires as yet unsullied by struggle to achieve them. Inside, in the front of the room were three untenured teachers; facing them were all the new probationers; and in the corners, watching everyone, were the deans, who had chosen the speakers, the topics, and the theme. The first young teacher spoke about how available you must be to students, how often they stop for extra help, call you at home at all hours, and that you must not expect to think about your research during the year. (During her talk, it came out that she was still trying to finish her thesis.) The second probationer spoke about how important student evaluations are, how you can learn from them, and how good they really are. (I cannot remember whether he gave any examples or whether they were so rudimentary that I was ashamed for him.) The third young teacher spoke about how important fourth year reviews are. (It came out that he was approaching his.) The message of this triptych was clear: throughout the course, students test the attentiveness, the appreciativeness, the obligingness, the acquiescence of the teacher; at the end of the course, students evaluate the teachers on these ‘virtues’; and later the watchful deans decide who stays. Little brother is watching you. Little sister will whisper about you. And big brother is all ears.
All morning nothing was said about education, about teaching, or about learning. No older teacher gave an account of how she teaches. No veteran told stories about his three most unforgettable students, or the three he’d most like to forget. No one painted a portrait of a great teacher.
That it was probationers themselves who had been asked to deliver these dispiriting messages, on topics they might have the most anxiety about, was both sad and alarming. Maximum hoc regni bonum est, / Quod facta domini cogitur populus sui / Quam ferre tam laudare. Gary Larson would show it as three veteran Herefords explaining to a herd of newcomers just up the trail from South Texas how happy they were to be in Chicago, and over the gate of the corral you could read “Arbeit Macht Frei.”
At lunch, after this orientation, a veteran teacher gave a frank history of the college, how he had seen a growth in money, a growth in prestige, and a decline in conversation. Was this a protest or a confession? It was hard to tell. It certainly fit with the morning and with the history of many a college. What did the young teachers listening think? They asked no questions, at least not then. And unfortunately they were too young to know anything different from the morning’s lessons.
To discover you have a mind changes your life. That makes you a student. To watch that happening is wonderful. Enjoying that can make you a teacher. To encourage it gives a satisfaction unlike any other. Do it, and you are a teacher. Few teachers discover the peculiar happiness of teaching late in life. Time is fate. What you do not discover in the first years of teaching, you are very unlikely to discover later. And what you do not know, you cannot hold to in adversity. For such a heroic story, read John Williams’ Stoner.
Good teachers think about the long view. They think about truth, about their lifetime pursuit of it, and about what the student will be later after college. Hence they are willing to disappoint a student, today, this term, this year, for the sake of later, and they are duty bound to displease whenever it would be dishonest to do otherwise, which seldom benefits the student, even in the short run, as the dishonest claim.
There was once a young teacher who told his students there were five concentration camps in Texas. An older teacher undertook to teach him not to tell falsehoods. In public he challenged him to name the five camps. It is safe to say the younger man was not pleased, not then, and not when he lost his position. Years later, however, the young teacher wrote the older teacher to thank him. It had changed his life.[16] That’s the long view, the teacher’s view, and one of the long rewards. A teacher is deeply pleased by such thanks, does what would deserve it, and does not wait for it.
V. Might a better evaluation form be devised? I can easily believe that some forms are worse than others. And I do believe a better one than any I have seen[17] could be written, but not that such a better would be good for students, teachers, or colleges. Even an evaluation written in prose, with ample space for prose in return, with intelligent questions — arising from an elevated understanding of teaching and learning, and striving to lift students to that level, by challenging them and encouraging them to examine themselves — would still teach students that they are fit to judge teachers, suggest that teachers should satisfy students, and tempt students to calumny (about which more later when I speak about Don Rags).
What kind of disposition does any student evaluation inculcate in the soul of the student? Will it elevate or corrupt the young?
I cannot think that the habit of “evaluating” your teacher encourages a young person to long for truth, to aspire to achievement, to emulate heroes, to act justly, or to do good. To have your opinions trusted utterly, to deliver them anonymously, to have no check on their truth, and no responsibility for their effect on the lives of others, is not good for a young person’s moral character. To have your opinions taken for knowledge, be accepted without question, inquiry, or conversation is not an experience that encourages self-knowledge. To be treated as superior to your teacher will encourage a student to expect the teacher to learn from him, not he from the teacher. Such a student will be likely to regard truth in the same way: to resent its constancy, to resist its judgment, sometimes to envy its superiority, sometimes to assert his superiority to it, and yet withal to claim truth as an easy inheritance he need not labor to acquire.
Such a ‘student’ will tend to deem education something that can be delivered, like a purchase at a shop. He or she may go on to hold it something owed, like a present on a birthday, something you say “thank you” for, but which you really think people would be stinkers not to provide. She or he may even go on to think of it as merchandise to shoplift in town, knowing the college will always intervene before anything becomes public.[18] Such human beings do not make good learners. They do not have the requisite desire, concentration, diligence, and perseverence in adversity. Their desires are pale, their wills weak, and their breath short. To suffer for learning will be impossible for them. They will, then, fail to learn much, or to learn it well. Nevertheless, the human condition being what it is, they will not be able to escape from the consequences of their poor learning; life will make it evident.
It is easy to pass from this stage to the next: to thinking that one’s failures are due not primarily to one’s own lack of virtue, but to one’s teachers. “If I don’t learn, it must be the teacher, the course, the major, the department, the college, that is at fault.” Such students will become experts at judging teaching. They will always know why they didn’t learn. They will go from knowing why this teacher failed them, to why the next one did, and so on. It has been well predicted, of such students, “Later in life they will know just what the failings are in their employers that caused their work to be undervalued, or the failing in their spouse that caused the marriage to end.”[19] To be sure, it is always good to have a good teacher, but little learning would take place in life if it depended on good teachers. Good teachers are not abundant.
And great teachers are rare. They are not as easygoing as others. They teach not only subjects, especially hard subjects, ones they know are important and love, but they teach people how to learn, which in the end means how to learn without them, when they are not there. Their assignments are not just difficult, but surprising, and sometimes even noble, for only such assignments encourage students to discover new things. Such teachers know that the great discoveries, the ones humanity resists at the time and sometimes cannot thank the discoverers enough for later, were hard not only for the many to accept, but hard for those discoverers to make in the first place. Semmelweis was vilified, persecuted, and hounded down after his discovery of antiseptics; that was hard to take, but before that, just for him to think his way through to the discovery was hard. The opinions of his future persecutors were those he had first to overcome in himself. Such men as Semmelweis do not spend their time in school being sore at their teachers. Of the nature they later try to fathom, they do not complain, “Nature is not a good teacher. She doesn’t tell us what is going to be on the exam. She does not hold preparation sessions, won’t look over my papers before I turn them in, and won’t let us bring the texts to the exam. She’s not a good teacher.” “Nature loves to hide,” said Heraclitus, and so does a great teacher.
The right disposition for the great student is right for us all, because it is more important for us to learn any thing worth learning than that we be taught well. If we insist on it, we will not learn. While we are: complaining, faultfinding, caviling, carping, censuring, or denouncing, and all the while being peevish, petulant, testy, splenetic, cynical, or sore, we seldom learn anything. “Quickly though we note faults in others, it is seldom with a view to correcting our own.”[20]
I understand there was civil suit against a college a few years back. A student claimed fraud and damages because by the time of graduation he had obtained none of the lux, or veritas, or virtus, that the shield of the college promised. Thankfully, while dismissing the suit, the judge pointed out that getting those things depends on effort, that the college could only help, and that the student was free to leave at any time. That learning is a commodity that can be bought for cash is the kind of misunderstanding student evaluations encourage. No genuine student has such expectations. A student is someone who likes to learn, who appreciates most the teachers from whom he has learned something, and especially those who have helped him learn that he can learn on his own. Finally a student is someone who may even enjoy to learn on his own more than anything else. Probably he will only do so because he has come to realize, whether there is teaching or not, whether it is good or bad, the only learning there really is is on one’s own.
VI. While student evaluations cloud the intellect of the student, they also corrupt the character. (And while they corrupt, they also cloud, for moral and intellectual virtue are connected.)
All such evaluations are anonymous. Either students need not sign their names, or if they do, they are assured of confidentiality. There is then no personal responsibility for errors. More important, there are no personal consequences for negligent, false, or even malicious misrepresentations. There is then no “student responsibility” in student evaluations. It is as if the student were being assured, “We trust you. We do not ask for evidence, or reasons, or authority. We do not ask about your experience or your character. We do not ask your name. We just trust you. Your opinions are precious. In you we trust.” Most human beings trust very few other human beings that much. The wise do not trust themselves that much. Probably God only is worthy of it. Yet colleges in America have decided that students —each student, any student, all students— are worthy of such trust. The ignorance in that “trust” is as colossal as the lack of moral responsibility.
Such trust fits the enormous amount of student cheating[21] and the equally enormous official indifference to it.[22] Where once, before 1968, it took just a couple of steps for faculty to see a cheater punished, it now takes so many steps, and so many hours, that faculty weary of the task, and meanwhile it takes only a couple of steps for a student to put any teacher in hot water, merely because he or she is “uncomfortable,” and the student harassing the teacher may well be protected by anonymity. Young persons deemed more worthy of trust than adults are not likely to become adults.
The line between negligence about calumny and subornation of it through the legitimizing evaluations is very thin. Even when they do not fear being found out, most human beings, even ones who do not conduct themselves very well, feel a little uneasy talking about other persons behind their backs. It feels sneaky at the time, it gives only a temporary relief, and you may feel guilty later. They themselves may have been abused this way once and recall the shame or indignation, one and then the other, it caused them. They may be restrained by such memories to not do unto others what they did not like being done to them. Also, whatever their illusions and passions, students do suspect they are inferior to their teachers. They must feel then, however dimly, that there is something unnatural about badmouthing them.
To have student evaluations of teachers, all these inhibitions must be overcome. The mere fact of these forms, the fact that the college has instituted them, that they are uniform, that they are printed, that they look official, that they are guarded, that they take class time, and above all that the faculty acquiesce to them, all this does much to overcome such inhibitions. “Legitimacy” is a potent thing, for evil as for good.
At many colleges, the support given evaluations goes beyond mere approval. It is not merely ‘okay’ to evaluate your teachers, but ‘good citizenship,’ ‘public spirited,’ ‘responsible.’ At least one college goes further, by making it the duty of the student to fill out such evaluations, a duty whose failure to perform is punishable, for no student may register for the next term without turning in the evaluation. This shows both how great are the inhibitions that have to be overcome and how far colleges are willing to go.
A lot of innocent evil results. That is, otherwise morally ordinary students are led by the legitimization of such evaluations to think that it’s okay to offer anonymous criticism of persons behind their backs to third parties, with consequences, to the victims, none to the perpetrators. Many students will feel, “Well, I’m just giving my opinions. It’s really what I think. What can be wrong with that?” What is wrong would become apparent very quickly if students were asked whether their grade should be the average grade other students, judging anonymously, gave them. Such a question is so elementary, it makes one wonder how innocent human nature in students is. If you would not, upon reflection, want to be treated as you are about to treat others, is it innocent to go ahead? “Innocence” here hangs upon “reflection,” and reflection is not what evaluations teach students. In any case, it is not good for persons mistaking opinion for knowledge, uttering opinions anonymously to third parties, with consequences following, to think what they are doing is innocent. That is exactly what legitimizing calumny by instituting student evaluations teaches students to think. Of course, persons who think they are innocent are less likely to be so.
It is easy to see what motives may sometimes work their pleasure through such evaluations. Under cover of anonymity, all sorts of complaints can be vented, grudges satisfied, envies assuaged, scores settled, and fears vented. I look younger than I am, so when I was a young teacher I was sometimes present at conversations where students discuss their teachers, not knowing I’m one, too. Standing at a copy machine in a college library, I once heard one student say to another, “You know that guy, Roth. Boy, am I going to get him on the evaluations. While he was out of the room, I checked his grade book. Do you know what he had down for me ….” True, in this case, the student must have known what he was doing was somehow unjust; “am I going to get him” implies that. Or does it? Perhaps if I had spoken up, he would have given some general justification, “All grades are unjust. This is a required course,” and so forth. Or perhaps a specific justification, “Roth graded me unjustly. So I’ll grade him justly for that in return. Vengeance may be wild, but it’s just a wild kind of justice.” The student was certainly indignant, and if he dismissed my objections with, “Well, I’m just giving my opinions. It’s really what I think. What can be wrong with that?” he would have had the innovation of evaluations on his side and the college that instituted them.
One would like to think such bad motives the exception and that most students are just “Saying what they think” however erroneous it be. However, the only important correlation that has ever been established between the students responding and their evaluation of the teachers is between expected grade and present evaluation; the lower the grade the students expected, the lower they rated the teacher.[23] Should this surprise us? If defendants in court were asked their opinion of the judge and jury before they heard the verdict, they would give similar results; the more the guilty thought their guilt evident to others, the less highly they would rate judge and jury. Judged lacking and suspecting it might be true, human nature tends, at least at first, to deny it, and if given the shield of anonymity, will also criticize the judge. Preemptive vengeance exists and student evaluations give it a free shot. And also retrospective vengeance, as I’ll mention later.
Thus, it must occasionally happen that an individual teacher suffers from the evil so easily practiced through evaluations. Given an atmosphere where students are more stroked than taught: where a host of advisors, counselors, resource-persons, and mini-deans coach, cosset, coddle and pet students; where for example the college pays upperclassmen to “brainstorm, order, revise, and polish your writing assignment with you”[24]; where more steps are required of a teacher to charge a student with plagiarism than a student to convict a teacher of anything; where professors don’t take attendance, require little writing, and give the same exams every year; where new teachers are pressured to change grades by chairpersons; and so forth, there must sometimes appear a teacher concerned for the good of the student.
Should such a teacher express this concern in teaching, it is easy to predict what guardians of the college’s ‘honor’ would do: their compassion for surprised students, their credulity towards all complaints, their encouragement of discontent, their solicitation of protest, their countenance of disrespect, their subornation of rebellion, the whispers amplified with each re-whisper, the lynching of the teacher’s reputation in the evaluations, and then the aftermath: the acquiescence of the better professors, lest they jeopardize their reputation, or their raise, for a cause already lost; the removal of the teacher; the ousting of any independent student reporter; the ensuing campaign of disinformation, harassment, and threat; the impotence of the better students; the passivity of the faculty; the changing of student grades; and later rumors of gifts after graduation.
The point is not so much how unjust these things would be to the teacher, or how bad they might be; to endure humiliation, ridicule, slander, to be tried by rumor, to find unsigned notes on your door, your car messed up, to enter a room where everyone is glaring hatred at you, or to see people cross the street as you approach, scowl as if you had just been caught poisoning the water supply, or smile knowingly at you, as if your fly were permanently unbuttoned (as a friend of the victim described it)[25]—these can be very beneficial experiences; every thinker will have anticipated them, every patriot of academic integrity can expect them, and perhaps every human might ultimately benefit from them. The persons such experiences are unquestionably bad for are students. To badmouth a teacher, to be encouraged by others to continue, and to do it, to ridicule, to revile, and to enjoy a sense of comradeship in doing so, does not promote the spirit of study.
Sometimes such a thing must happen, and one would like to believe there are many such genuine teachers,[26] but the greatest harm this opportunity for evil has visited upon American Academe is general, frequent, and pervasive. To avoid a poor composite score, many a teacher, especially many a young probationer, will be tempted to lower standards. Fearing preemptive vengeance, many will consider beating students to the punch, with preemptive surrender. Most who do will do so gradually, so as not to ‘stick out’ among others, some so as not to ‘stick out’ to yourself, your conscience. What will a teacher who has surrendered feel afterwards? The best will feel pangs of self-accusation and may, like Conrad’s Lord Jim, look for a situation in which not to surrender next time. Others, with layers of excuses never quite covering their guilt, will live on, no more than half good to any student. Those insensitive of surrender, who never surrendered anything in the first place, will feel nothing, see nothing, teach nothing, all as before. Have any teachers in American Academe surrendered since evaluations were introduced? Few confess it, I acknowledge. Still, one of the things academics often say about the last decades and other academics never contradict is that there has been enormous grade inflation. I rest my case. Students have suffered enormously from that inflation, the majority by being deceived, and the best by studying in an atmosphere where their best was not asked for. As one said, “It’s hard to find your soul, when so many around you are busy selling theirs.”[27] ** On the American campus today, there is an unstated contract between teachers and students: “I won’t teach much, so you needn’t study much; here’s you’re A-minus, and please reward me on the evaluations.”
Of course, there are good students. They will be reluctant to participate in student evaluations. The very best will simply not want to subtract time from their studies. The better they are, the more they will not regard themselves as qualified to judge their teachers and the more they will feel bound to their teachers by emulation, affection, and gratitude. In addition, the spirited and honorable among the students will disdain such evaluations as sneaky. If they had an objection, complaint, or suggestion, they would express it directly, in class or right after. The conscientious among the better sort would also not want to participate in such evaluations, but for a slightly different reason. Their principle would not allow them to write anything about another person anonymously. If they had a complaint or suggestion, they would make it to their teacher, in person, at some time when it might do the most good. They will refrain from calumny because, were they the teacher, they would not want to be so calumniated.
However, all these good students, the contemplative uninterested, the spirited disdainer, and the conscientious objector to calumny, may be checked by a consideration of the good, which it is also a duty to support. Good students can easily see, as easily as poor ones, that where such evaluations are instituted, they have some effect. Consequently, if they think their teacher is good, they are faced with an ethical dilemma. To refuse to participate in calumny is right, and yet to not participate will subtract the support their approval would contribute to the tabulations that decide, or affect, the fate of their teacher. Reputation is rumor, opinion is a nothing, and popularity not worth a stick—no good person will seek them—yet perhaps no good person should ignore them. There’s the rub; here doing right, may add to evil, and doing wrong, may do some good. We cannot lament the fact that young people meet with such moral choices; they exist in life, yet it cannot be a matter of pride that colleges deliberately put students in such situations, especially the best ones. It is the kind of thing a certain kind of tyrant enjoys doing. It is meant to try, not the body, but the soul.
And the evil arising from evaluations may sometimes exceed the usual. I am told that a student once realized that a pet of the department chair with a vengeance against the teacher was organizing student’s in her class to “get him on the evaluations”. Naturally, she warned the teacher, and the plot was foiled. Good if it had ended there, but considering what happened next, perhaps she would not do right again. For then, at a party she was followed to the bathroom by the conspirator and his roommate and raped. Is it true? I believe so, because I believe the friend who told me. But you, dear reader, are even further from the event and may not know my friend.[28] So just ask yourself, knowing human nature, in young persons, whether it hasn’t happened that “evaluations” were used to “get” a teacher, and if foiled and the conspirator exposed, he, or she might abuse whoever exposed them.
VII. Like most people, students talk a lot about others. It is very important that they learn to talk not only responsibly, so that they would not mind others speaking of themselves as they do of others, thus critically, with intelligence, and benevolently, seeking the good for all, especially the good of learning.
“Speak with your teacher first” used to be the rule on campus. With this maxim ruling, most complaints evaporate of their own effervescence, for the good reason that all human beings have a hard time complaining as fully, heatedly, and unjustly to the person they are complaining about as they do to others. Perhaps more important, whatever might be rational in a complaint will, thus stripped of static, be more likely to gain rational attention, and thus more likely to lead to improvement. The old procedure was for the student to speak first to the teacher, if not satisfied to speak again to him, if still not satisfied to speak to another teacher, or to a dean, gradually increasing the circle conversing. Instead evaluations teach students to “speak to your teacher last.” “Evade your teacher, don’t speak to him, speak to others about him, and save up your complaints for evaluations,” is their enticement. This does not secure improvements, is not designed to, and does not encourage learning.
Nevertheless, the existence of such forms does teach students something. The anonymity with which the student is allowed to ‘answer’ the questions assumes that teachers are very likely to be unjust to students. It assumes that all teachers are guilty before any one of them has been proven to be. This is prejudice in action. By being a class vilification of all teachers, it is also a backbiting of each. And, in a way, a front-biting, since the student knows the teacher will probably be shown the results. This is slander in action, just as much as scrawls on bathroom walls.
The conditions under which students are asked to fill out evaluations make all this plain. Commonly, the teacher is required to pass the forms out and to leave the room, for his presence might have ‘a chilling effect’ upon students. Commonly, after the forms are done, not the teacher, but a designated student is asked to bring the forms to an administration building, lest the teacher cheat. Commonly, the teacher only receives a copy of the results after he or she has turned in grades, lest the teacher grade unjustly. A certified copy is kept by the administration. After all, the teacher might commit forgery or destroy evidence. All parts of this common practice are known to all parties. The suspicion of teachers is spread wide.
What all this teaches students is that teachers are untrustworthy. The college does not trust them, the administration does not trust them, and even their fellow teachers do not trust them. Indeed, the teachers as a group do not trust themselves, for it is not a fellow teacher who administers the evaluations, gathers them, and carries them to the administrators; a student does. Moreover, the teacher himself, by acquiescing to evaluations, by showing up to distribute them, leaving, letting students gather them, and so forth, shows he affirms these suspicions, both the general suspicion of all teachers and, thus, the particular suspicion of himself or herself as well.
Yet on most campuses, there is one group that is highly trusted, trusted as individuals and as a group, in situations where there is temptation, much to be gained, much lost, both individually and as a group. Of course, I am speaking of students where an “Honor Code” entrusts them with judging such things as cheating, plagiarism, and so forth. Such codes trust students far more than student evaluations trust teachers. What the innovation of student evaluations meant was that American Academe decided to trust not only the intellectual judgment of students more than that of the faculty but their moral character as well. In the sixties, it was said, “Trust no one over thirty.” The innovation of student evaluations says, “Trust no teacher at all.” And every time an evaluation is given to a student, it teaches, “Do not trust your own College’s teachers, and especially your own teachers, the ones whose classes you are taking.” Of course, students do trust their teachers. They come to know them by studying under them. And in an elective system, they express their trust every time they elect a second course with them. Nevertheless, the evaluations and the acquiescence of their own teachers to them remind every student, however trusting and however grateful, that someone does not trust their teachers. The common good of all students and teachers is compromised by such mistrust.
What is remarkable is who taught students to mistrust their teachers—the colleges themselves; and more astonishing is who authorized the colleges to do so. They could not have instituted evaluations, without the faculty itself first agreeing “There is us, there is them, and they are better.” To the degree that anonymous student evaluations are substituted for faculty judgments of the teaching of fellow faculty, the faculty is confessing its incompetence in matters of teaching and learning. The rapidity with which faculties adopted evaluations in the late sixties was an astounding self-judgment. It is the kind of judgment about which one can really, though reluctantly, say, “Well if you say so, I guess it must be true.”
Wise observers in academe in the 60s warned that the colleges and their faculty were coming to neglect the students; more and more of the core curriculum was being sacrificed to the majors offered by the departments; and the departments were more and more shaping the major as a entry to graduate studies; indeed, teaching was counting less and less and research counting more and more in promotion and tenure, and classes were growing larger. However, in this turbulent time, there were also criticisms of these changes, in Jacques Barzun’s American University (1968) for example,[29] and even proposals, such as Tussman’s at Berkeley and John Senior at Kansas to redress these grievous erosions. Since students responded enthusiasticly to these selective programs adopting evaluations was naively advocated as likely to support a comprehensive redress of Academe, as if there would ever be a majority of students asking for more work, higher standards, and more demanding teachers; over the years only a small minority of students have ever approached me in their last year asking for a list of more,[30] and only once has a student finish the major work of the term by October 1st.[31]
None of the three opinions that made evaluations seem ‘self-evident’ in 1968 amount to much. Some feelings were far more important. In the late 60s many academics came to share the views of alienated and disobedient youth, actually courted their applause, feared their displeasure, and didn’t want to be left behind by progressive fellow faculty. Ignored was the good of the students, compromised was the pursuit of knowledge, and sacrificed was the dignity of the profession of teacher.[32]
VIII. The faculties that voted in evaluations without much discussion had lost touch with the experiences of their worthy forbearers, in many cases their own teachers; not only were they not teaching any where as much or as well as they had been taught, but they were not taking care of the younger teachers, as their teachers had taken care of them, and among the experiences they lost touch with were the ways those teachers had both encouraged and judged them. The old ways through which senior faculty judged the teaching of probationers, reading their writings, for publication but also for class, visiting their classes, keeping their ears open when their own better students spoke, and through these ways, getting to know the probationers, perhaps teaching together, being willing to serve as mentors to them, all of these subordinated judging young teachers to encouraging the best in them. These ways, with judging embedded in the wider purpose of furthering teaching, had been so superior to evaluations that no one had ever thought of introducing them till 1968.
Like all arrangements that depend on human beings, the old ways were sometimes fallible; even those of us who graduated “before the Deluge of 1968” can remember sufferings misjudgments, witnessing conduct unbecoming a good teacher, and thanking a fine teacher our college did not honor; after all, even in better days, the young Lionel Trilling had to be forced on the Columbia English department by President Butler; but the old ways did not corrupt students, and in recognizing the superiority of teacher to student, they supported the corporate authority of the faculty. These ways had been handed down from times with more teachers of reputation, when teaching was more honored by colleges, when teachers did so much more of it, and when, judged by the achievements of their graduates, colleges were far more successful in teaching. These were institutions primarily devoted to teaching and learning. Read Jacques Barzun’s Teacher in America of 1945 and you will see.
The old ways I have mentioned above would be good, but now they will not suffice to restore robust learning and teaching. Those good ways belonged to an institution in which learning was already central; the major resources of the institution supported it; and the other things were ordered to it. The proportion of those on the payroll who were in a classroom teaching was so much greater, administrators came from the faculty and returned to it, and the faculty really did govern the institution. When the new president of Columbia, General Eisenhower, said he was glad to meet the employees, the head of the faculty replied, excuse me Mr. President but we are the faculty. So, while it would remove a great hindrance to good teaching and learning to abolish anonymous student evaluations, leaving the old ways to revive, something more institutional, more formal, and requiring more teaching of the faculty, is desirable.
Accordingly, the best way to restore good teaching and the learning it encourages would be to institute Don Rags. The good results that are mistakenly claimed for evaluations, such as seeing that the best teachers are promoted, is much more likely to be achieved by Don Rags, the evil not at all, and since their main purpose is to guide the whole progress of the student in college their adoption will support better teaching and learning mightily. Since the name “Don Rags” is unfamiliar, let me describe them as they have long existed at a few colleges. They make somewhat formal and eventful two kinds of conversations that do go on at good colleges, or used to; in addition to commenting on students submitted work, teachers do still occasionally discuss the progress of a student with the student, and sometimes, though rarely, mention it to other teachers, and students do occasionally talk to teachers about their progress. Now in Don Rags these all happen together, face to face, in a group, and it is an event.
There in the term’s schedule is a vacation from the usual class meetings. In its place is a gathering of all your teachers in all of your courses. They are there to talk amongst themselves not just about your performance in each course but about your general progress in studies, about your attitude, your strengths, your virtues, both intellectual and even moral since lack of the moral virtues weakens the intellectual, and about your gifts and your aspirations. Thus the scope of the discussion you the student are listening to is greater than this paper, this exam, or even this course. And it is all an event, which augments its impact, for students afterwards ask each other “How did it go, what did they say?” And without asking “Was it true” allow you to answer that question by asking, “What did you say at the end?”
At St. John’s, I understand, there is the pretense during the long first part of Don Rag meetings, that the student, the student sitting right there, is not there, but “behind the arras,” and yet both parties know the student sitting right there is listening to the tutors talk about his work and progress, and is meant to; only at the end is the student expected to respond to the judgments and guidance in the conversation of his tutors about him, permitted if he so wishes to thank, to acknowledge, to confess, to excuse, to explain and also permitted, if he chooses, to criticize his tutors. And what better time for the tutor’s fellow tutors to be present, and perhaps the Dean. (And having kept his “ear to the ground” the Dean might later have a chat with the wayward tutor who never hands back papers,[33] or with a new tutor who could use some guidance, either restraining or stirring.) If to know what is going on in studies, right now this term, how each and every student is doing, and to know and judge the qualities of the tutors, be the Dean’s duty, it is hard to think of time better spent, enormous as the total of the time would be.[34]
There is another, secondary purpose of Don Rags, during the Freshman year, when more Don Rags are scheduled; it is to get the big talkers to talk less and listen a lot more, and to encourage the small talkers, especially those who don’t yet appreciate the worth of their own thoughts, to talk more, and for all those who are struggling hard but confused to learn that expressing well some perplexity, may clarify something deep for everyone. The difference between a seminar fall of freshman year and late in the spring is remarkable. And by junior year, if the tutors weren’t there, the seminar would happen without them.
Yes, much in the life of the mind is solitary, but much can not only be shared, but advanced and even augmented by sharing. All teachers who still go to class hoping to learn something know that, and tend to provide classes in which students come to appreciate it. It is not accidental that the only college in America whose alumnae gather, in twenty cities around America, monthly to discuss a book is St. Johns. Finally, it is significant that given the option, in later years, to simply report on their own progress, a considerable number of St. Johns’ juniors and seniors elect to hear from the tutors how they are progressing, in other words have Don Rags instead, the very thing they as freshman may have dreaded most. In Dante’s Purgatory, you are nearing release when you find yourself enjoying what at first you endured bitterly as a punishment.
The respect of the students for the teachers implicit in the custom of Don Rags is eminently fitted to the desire of ignorance for knowledge, of folly for wisdom, of shabbiness for beauty, and smallness for greatness. It seems fitting, not accidental, that at all the colleges with Don Rags, ruling over student and teacher alike, is a curriculum comprised of the lofty works, achievements, discoveries, and inquiries of the greatest human souls. Nevertheless, other colleges with less of such a curriculum would surely benefit from maintaining that the judgments of the learned benefit students and teachers more than the opinions of the unlearned.[35] (That they also benefit family, country, and civilization, I will maintain shortly.)
******Let me sum up a few things now. Think of Socrates. Think of how he’d fare in anonymous evaluations. And think of his fate. Think of how any of the great teachers, great achievers, great souls, in the long history of humanity might fare. Think of your own best teachers. Think of what you thought of them when you were a student and then twenty years later, when maybe you’d done some teaching, or brought up some youngsters. Think only of them and not of what evaluations value in a teacher.
Now think of that teacher with zeros from two students, but each offended in an absolutely opposite way. Think of what evaluations teach teachers to value; what they tempt them to do to obtain a 4.7 and stay employed. And think of what evaluations teach students to value, whether it makes them better students, and then consider whether Academe is better or worse since evaluations were introduced around 1968. Do students study more, achieve more, and become more? Do they deserve their high grades? Are they really five or six times better, comparing the percent with As now and before 1968, than the students before?
Think, think, think, and then, if you are a teacher, swear never to consult evaluations in how and what and why you teach. Never.
And then give some thought to finding others critical of evaluaitons. Don’t stop there, persuade other teachers. (Use this essay, and if you like, say “while I don’t agree with everything he says, some of it is too extreme, still take a look”—I don’t mind helping my friends, known and unknown, and in ages yet to come, by making their views seem moderate by comparison.)
Caldwell
*****Might an evaluation sometime help senior faculty? In Caldwell Idaho I met a teacher whom two students had ‘graded’ identically low. One commented, “He should be fired. I am so sick of having my Catholicism criticized.” The other commented, “He should be fired. It really irks me the way he pushes medieval religion at you.” I believe these evaluations are pretty good evidence of good teaching, and thus a rare case of mere opinion substantiating a truth, but of course, you have to read the comments and ignore the two low scores to appreciate that. According to the mind of the “Evaluation” he was as a teacher a zero twice over.***
IX. It is time to reflect on the political meaning of evaluations. They are at once the consequence of a long philosophic revolution, the instrument within academe that revolutionized it, and what may well revolutionize America.
Clearly, it is impossible to separate the moral and the intellectual effects of the innovation of student evaluations. In their conception, in their administration, in what they teach students, and how they affect teachers, knavery and folly make a pair.
Typically, such evaluations culminate in a comprehensive question, the composite score of which does the most to determine the teacher’s fate. At many a college, the question reads: “How effective was your teacher?” Yet “effective” is not a synonym for good. Iago was certainly an “effective” teacher. And to have asked in 1940, “Who is the most effective man in Europe?” would have been to command the answer “Heil Hitler.” The identification of “effectiveness” with goodness is the tyrant’s apology, the Quisling’s excuse, and the weakling’s plea.
It is also the principle of the social sciences, whose ambition is to construct a “value-free” science of valuable things. It is no accident that evaluations have the same form as the multiple-choice tests favored by the social sciences and the polls they employ in so much of their research. The world view of these promising or pretended sciences is based on the alleged distinction between objective facts, easy to know, and subjective values, impossible to credit, but easy to register when regarded as expressions of opinion, satisfaction, or will. This distinction is a soft, academic formulation of the more fundamental and revolutionary distinction in Machiavelli, between truth and effectual truth, more truly between truth and power.
In the fifteenth chapter of the Prince, Machiavelli passes off a momentous substitution:
But since it is my intention to write a useful thing for him who understands, it seemed to me more profitable to go behind to the effectual truth of the thing, than to the imagination thereof.[36]
This substitution of “effectual” for “true” loosed upon the world many “Princes,” greased the skids that degraded first philosophy into mathematical physics (a science absorbed with efficient, at the expense of final and formal causes), and by cutting the philosophy out of political philosophy, engendered social science, ape of science and tool of princes. Yet Machiavelli was still a philosopher; he wrote “for him who understands.” Effectual truth is still a part of truth, and virtù still a cousin of virtue. To found social science Nietzsche’s experimental substitution of “values” for truth was required. Yet Nietzsche, too, was a philosopher, so he had to be gotten around. By seizing upon ‘values,’ but setting aside Nietzsche’s great longing and his suffering, Max Weber founded social science. However, Weber’s attempt to have a science of valuable things without asking “What is valuable?” was not an advance in human knowledge. It cannot promote self-knowledge. “What’s ought but ‘tis as valued?” (as Shakespeare’s Troilus objects to the question of justice) is the question asked by those who do not care for knowledge. Not to inquire, they are proud. Such humans cannot know themselves. Nietzsche knew what moral fission he set off with the word value. The word evaluation, whose center is “value,” is but one of the chain reactions.
Daily in American Academe the conviction gains ground that all Academe’s once valuable parts are best ordered by the fundamental denial that there is a standard of truth by which they can be reasonably judged. On the wings of this light conviction, administrators rise, teachers sink, and students drift. No longing of the soul can be stirred by it.[37] Day by day complacency replaces desire; flattery, truth; “evaluation,” judgment. The difference between these is profound. Evaluations are the judgments of those who deny that judgment is possible. Unlike genuine judgments, they cannot be questioned. When the administrators become the rulers of everything, or all the rulers become administrators, the new Academe will achieve it peculiar perfection. And they are on the way to it. At many places of higher education, only a third of those on the payroll are in a class or near it. And with the whip of “assessment” they are changing the way teachers think of what still goes on in their classrooms.
The intellectual abdication implicit in this creed is colossal. It is not, I think, excused by the abdicator’s indifference to intellect. Nor are its effects invisible. In American Academe more and more students, studying with more and more teachers, learn less and less. The cause is intellectual and moral; it was a choice. In American Academe the happy Positivist played whiffler to the puzzled Relativist, who in turn gave way to the frivolous and resolute Nihilist. Now the insipid Last Teacher is ruled by the Brave New Administrator. This teacher does not like his master, he is not happy, but he does not protest. He cannot; he has no intellectual ground to stand on, from which he might counterattack, no intellectual Alamo to make a noble resistance in, and no country of the mind to take refuge in.
The innovation of student evaluations of teachers has had a political-academic consequence. While degrading the class of teachers, threatening all the probationers, tempting them to corrupt themselves, and punishing the aspiring teacher, student evaluations do not bring power to students. The great political beneficiaries of these forms are the administrators. When the administrators at Queens College started to institute student evaluations, the faculty resisted with arguments, evidence, and reasons, all to no avail. However, as the innovation was about to begin, one prudent teacher spoke for the faculty, much as follows: “You are right. How could we have not seen what a good idea evaluations are? Yes, let us have them, in every course, in every term, by every student, of every teacher. What a good idea! Indeed, it is such a good idea, what reason have we to limit its scope? It should be university wide. Just as there are to be anonymous evaluations of teachers by students, so there should be anonymous evaluations of the administrators by the faculty. And likewise, of course, just as the continuance, the promotion, and the salary of the teachers will depend on the composite student evaluations, so the continuance, promotion, and salary of the administrators will depend upon the faculty evaluations. Surely no one can object to this. What a good idea.” The result of this speech was that not another word was heard from the administrators about student evaluations for many a year.
The political truth in this exchange is so evident that is it incredible, with the number of political scientists in American Academe, that no one noticed the revolution that evaluations constituted.[38] Academe is filled with professors who wonder how cultivated Germans could have acquiesced to Hitler and his ‘final solution’ for their fellow Germans who were Jewish. Admitting a difference between threats to life and threats to liberty, one might ask how the American professoriate could surrender its corporate liberty so easily. Did the old acquiescers not care about the young teachers? One may hope that when in some future time children ask their parents, “In those days how many teachers did you take in?” that there will have been many rescuers and few squealers — and, of course, plenty of teachers, ones worthy of persecution.[39]
In modern institutions, totalitarian or liberal, whoever has files on others without being “filed” by them rules. Thus, whoever has files on teachers will rule them; student evaluations provide a steady flow to such files; and official “Self-Studies” provide a regular flood, especially where the lower committee solicits anonymous criticism of fellow faculty, which the higher committee may then call truth, which in turn will justify the selective changes the administration has been premeditating. Thus, today in American Academe, the non-teachers rule the teachers.
It used to be that college presidents and deans could give a good speech on education, that they often taught courses, or if they did not, they were missed in the class room. Not any more. The typical administrator of today is not missed in the classroom, and does not miss it. If he began in a classroom, when he left he wasn’t weeping, and the students weren’t either. It should not surprise us then that these non-teachers rule through subornation of calumny, in those who most naturally might feel respect, or admiration, or gratitude towards their teachers. What is astonishing is that the teachers permit this interference with learning and acquiesce to this degrading despotism. On most campuses, a single vote of the faculty could sweep it away.
That seems easy. However, it would require an esprit de corps that has not existed in academe for more than a generation; salary and fringe desires, the foundation of a labor union, are not enough; only a shared experience of teaching and learning will do, and that disappeared with the fragmentation of the curriculum, through unlimited specialization and diversity, before the 1960s. Faculty conversations governed by the seeming deference “That’s your field” and the real claim “This is my field, no trespassing” profit no one. The number of reading groups on a campus, with teachers from different disciplines, is the best sign of the state of the faculty’s esprit de corps.
If that spirit does not return, if that vote does not occur, the American Academe that has been revolutionized by anonymous student evaluations of teachers may in turn revolutionize America.
When anonymous student evaluations of teachers are made the model of justice at large, all our old protections, established through a thousand years, will be swept away. Our Sixth Amendment, which allows no witness to testify against us without confronting us, in person, in the same room, will be “interpreted” away. No American court now allows a witness against the defendant to escape cross-examination, by the defendant or his representative, but since this certainly might have what Academe now calls “a chilling effect,” it will be righteously denounced and swiftly eliminated. Our courts require witnesses to swear, or affirm, the truth of their statements and suffer penalties for perjury. “But that puts witnesses at risk,” it will be observed, and we will lose this ancient guard of our liberty. Our courts restrict opinion from witnesses, are chary of inferences, and prefer first-hand testimony about facts. “Free speech” will be the cry against these restrictions. No American court admits hearsay evidence, except under special, unusual, and limited circumstances.[40] Again “What about free speech?” will be the cunning plea and “Isn’t it a free country?” the cunning complaint against these restricting. Standards for expert witnesses exist, such that no student, only a highly respected fellow teacher, would be deemed an expert on teaching in an American court.[41] “How arrogant” it will be exclaimed, “for any one to claim to know more than another,” and all the standards on expert testimony will vanish. Again, our courts insist on good manners, cooperation, and respect, and they cite offenders for “contempt of court.” “Out of date, fussy, uptight” will be the cry disparaging this practice. Judges now become judges through study of the law, training in procedure, and experience and they serve “on good behavior” and can, in most states and the whole federal system, only be removed by impeachment and trial. But why should that be? If they are to be so “tenured,” why not let defendants have a say in the matter. Let us have anonymous “evaluations” of judges.[42] Indeed, why not have all judges ‘evaluated’ by a cross-section of the citizenry that appears in the docket and removable by majorities after each trial?
*** In our time, the most notable institutions to pass laws encouraging and coercing calumny, including children against their parents, are the Soviet and Chinese Communist regimes. That these tyrannies are abhorrent, that all tyrannies from the Caesars of old to the latest Idi Amins, Pol Pots, and Ayatollas have employed secret informers, and that precisely the most ardent, benevolent, and gentle teachers of humanity, Socrates and Christ, were destroyed by calumny — these are among the considerations that ought to persuade the remaining teachers in American Academe to abolish anonymous evaluations and warn all free citizens of our American Republic to beware if they do not.
What is democracy but the possibility that you may one day stand alone on trial for your life and be judged by any twelve fellow citizens. And then your life, your liberty, your continued pursuit of happiness will depend on the broad knowledge, examined experience, and good judgment of your twelve judges. We see those qualities in the architect, played by Henry Fonda, in the play and then movie, Twelve Angry Men; his patient reasoning turns a careless majority for “guilty” and for death into a unanimous judgment that the poor young man is “not guilty” at least not beyond a reasonable doubt. One educated man makes the difference in that jury room, and sometimes one man, call him a statesman, makes the difference in the life of a country. Without Washington and the constellation of the founders, America would not exist, and without Lincoln it might not have remained united and become more perfect through the abolition of slavery. Always however, the leadership of a free country depends on the same qualities evident in the architect played by Henry Fonda in the electorate. Since our leaders are elected, the endurance of our republic of liberty depends on the number of such careful, compassionate, reasonable, articulate, and liberally educated citizens. Such persons are not cultivated by the Academe that has authorized, dignified, and empowered the anonymous opinions of the unlearned about their own teachers.
The current practices of Academe pose a question to the American people: Will Academe teach its new principles to America, or will America once again assert the rule of its principles everywhere in the Union? Will Academe spread the rule of calumny everywhere in America, or will America restore the rule of reason to Academe?[43]
Michael Platt
Friends of the Republic
Endnotes:
[1] This essay appeared in Perspectives on Political Science, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Winter, 1993), pp. 29-40, with the title “What Do Student Evaluations Teach?” Later it was printed, free of mistakes imposed by PPS, in The Montana Professor Vol. 5, No. 3 (Fall 1995), pp. 21-29. The new title fits the augmentations since.
[2] Beyond Good and Evil, no. 63: “Wer von Grund aus Lehrer ist, nimmt alle Dinge nur in bezug auf seine Schüler ernst ….”. However, the sentence goes on, with a twist.
[3] For the Nazi production of clichés, read Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich (1946) trans. Martin Brady; Athlone Press, 2006) and for the Soviet production of clichés consider the effort of Solzhenitsyn to purge them from his Red Wheel series.
[4] Indefatigable in his correction of clichés is Jacques Barzun, in all his writing, and often explicitly; worthy of attention are the writings of Frank Sullivan, especially his avuncular (fictional) Dr. Arbuthnot, cliché expert, and his dialogues with novice cliché lovers; enjoy for example his “Jay Talking” and “The Cliché Expert Testifies on Politics” in his collection, A Rock in Every Snowball (Little Brown, 1946); the latter calls for someone to update it; though some clichés never die, more are born each era.
[5] I owe the flagging of this put-down to Edgar Z. Friedenberg’s Coming of Age in America (New York, Vintage, 1967).
[6] I owe these questions to an evaluation introduced in English at the University of Dallas in 1984 by John Alvis, a new chairperson, of a new regime, of President Sasseen and Provost Paynter, which in its first year reduced the next freshman class by a quarter, and continuing for its 13 year tenure, ultimately replaced half of all faculty in all courses with temps.
[7] Citing this maxim, “good students like hard tests,” the founders of the University of Dallas, Louise and Donald Cowan, once explained why the Competitive Entrance Exam had once lured so many fine students to the college. They were very fine.
[8] At St. John’s I once heard a young tutor sound off against the curriculum, saying students learn more from their bull sessions in the dorms, and heard him set right by John Cornell ‘Yes but it is because they are discussing things in the curriculum, or if other things, then nevertheless informed by the curriculum.’
[9] All praise to Steve Brown, who as a Dartmouth freshman did go read by next week all I mentioned this week, and when he missed the camp position he sought, took my stop-gap offer “though I can only offer you room and board, would you like to build my third floor?” and, chowing down more than our family of four, he did so, and much more.
[10] How many teachers who call themselves “professors of philosophy” teach philosophicly? In any case, it is a pleasure to come across a philosophic teacher at Harvard, John R. Stilgoe, Professor of Landscape History; for how he teaches observation and adventure, read his Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places (Walker, NY: 1998).
[11] Pensées, no. 98 (Louis Lafuma numbering).
[12] My template and some details come from a sheet provided by Michael Richard (SUNY-Geneseo), author unknown.
[13] I got the idea for this imaginary “evaluation” of Socrates, from a publication of Northwestern University, in which Socrates Bach, and Dr. Johnson were “evaluated”.
[14] For a general news report, skim: https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1011-student-evaluations-feared-loathed-and-not-going-anywhere; for a serious reflection on his personal teaching experience, read http://www.mindingthecampus.org/2015/06/student-ratings-bait-profs-into-lowering-standards/#comment-153481; for a serious discussion, follow Philosophers Anonymous: http://philosophersanon.blogspot.com/2009/05/teaching-evaluations-ignore-them.html; for short, strong, arguments for the abolition of evaluations by an experience professor: http://www.hss.cmu.edu/philosophy/glymour/glymour-universityFCE2003.pdf; a critical review of the field of studies, mostly statistical, of evaluations: http://www.owl232.net/sef.htm; the recent edition of Barbara Gross Davis’s influential Tools for Learning (Jossey-Bass, 2009), unlike the first, does mention several studies critical of evaluations, but sweeps them aside with the assurance of consensus, which is belied by the things just cited above and by the work of Philip Stark, for example: https://www.scienceopen.com/m/document/vid/42e6aae5-246b-4900-8015-dc99b467b6e4
[15] Might a teacher learn something from an evaluation? Joseph Epstein does mention one thing years of evaluations taught him: one year a student wrote: “He jingles the change in his pocket.” See Epstein’s Introduction to Masters: Portraits of Great Teachers (New York: Basic Books, 1981), xiii.) Might one learn more? Perhaps, but I do not think it would be enough to offset the certain damage to all the students. Of course, teachers are always free to ask students what they think. They should also be free to learn from the results without having to turn them over to other parties, something Roger Masters at Dartmouth insisted on, that all such evaluations are the property of the teacher; unfortunately, whether this would protect the probationers from the pressure from administrators, “why wouldn’t you turn them over?” is doubtful.
[16] John Silber, Shooting Straight (New York: Harper, 1989), pp. 106-107.
[17] I am waiting for the one promised by a friend from Carleton College, now 25 years. A better evaluation questionnaire would elevate the student’s appreciation of what learning can be and include lots of questions encouraging the student to examine his studies, his habits, and his purposes in college.
[18] In a Vermont college town there was once a sign at a thrift shop “If you shop-lift, come here”; the owner explained, “I’m so sick of the college protecting these wealthy kids.”
[19] Ralph A. Raimi, “A Misdirected Lesson: Student Evaluations and Learning How to Learn,” Academic Questions, Summer 1989, p. 75; the article is a tour de raison.
[20] La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, no. 526, trans. Louis Kronenberger (New York: Random, 1959).
[21] For reports on the amount of student cheating, read: http://www.academicintegrity.org/icai/integrity-3.php and
http://www.plagiarism.org/resources/facts-and-stats/
[22] See John Silber, ibid. pp. 111-112, for the story of how Boston University pushed to shut the plagiarism mills down, succeeded in getting a law, out came tumbling the long lists of the students who had plagiarized, and yet Boston University found not one neighboring college at all interested, except Brandeis. Makes me wonder not how best and brightest those at my alma mater, Harvard are, but whether they are fit to rule us all, as they seem proud to, or how reliable the grads from MIT might be, where a fake 0-ring might blow something up. Of course, BU had a problem, the doctorate of Martin Luther King, but the day they removed his degree they could have given him an honorary one.
[23] Max O. Hocutt, “De-Grading Student Evaluations,” Academic Questions (Winter: 1987-88), pp. 55-64. For a social scientist’s defense of such evaluations see Chapter 30 of Wilbert J. McKeachie’s Teaching Tips, eighth ed., (Lexington: Heath, 1986). Considering what to do when a student disturbs class, the author never considers: commanding the student to stop, exhorting the student, or even asking.
[24] I quote from an advertisement of a Peer Writing Center at an expensive near-Ivy college in Vermont where a fifth-year senior taking an introductory class, having scored 29 points (out of 109 plus possible) on the hour exam, wanted to “do a paper instead” for “You see, I do better on papers; I’ve had a tutor these four years.” “Not for the paper for this class.” “What about the Peer Writing Center?” she replied, failed the paper, but was honest enough to do it on her own. The teacher hoped to pass her, on moral virtue, but she took a “drop” the night before the final, a violation of the rules, from the Chairperson, without consulting the teacher.
[25] I was going to thank him by name, but remembering how slander clings to E. M. Forster’s Dr. Aziz, even after he is cleared, I refrain.
[26] For an account of how Professor Peter Brobeil at SUNY-Geneseo discovered his students cheating, merely exhorted them not to, how the students were indignant, how a vice-president suborned them to calumniate Brobeil and fined Brobeil, how a judge ruled against this abuse, and yet meanwhile Brobeil had been fired, see the 16-17 April, 1986, Livingston Republican and the newsletter of the Geneseo Chapter of the UUP, Colleagues, Vol. VIII, No. 8, (5 December 1985).
[27] Quoted in William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite & the Way to a Meaningful Life (Free Press, 2014) p. **; of this observant “teacher” who stirs up students to lead, not teach them, see my review in Society (forthcoming Winter 2016).
[28] Martin Yaffe, Professor of Philosophy and Religion, North Texas; that he did not tell me until some time had passed (since I and a fine student, working on the campus police force, and later a Navy flier who had Osama in his sights but not our President on the telephone, would have pursued the matter) might add credibility to those far from the scene.
[29] Check out the second preface to Barzun’s The American University, written after the student riots and occupations of Columbia and elsewhere.
[30] I recall Algis Valiunas, senior year at Dartmouth, asking for a tutorial in “everything I’ve missed so far.”
[31] In the fall of 1989, in Statesmanship, Tat Sang So began Churchill’s WWII History, liked it, and finished by October 1st; and that same day Aristotle Tziampiris was half through; I have heard that at BYU one day freshman Oliver de Mille asked for the full list of work required, declared “I will complete this by October, and then I want you to give me more work.” And he did it. Shortly after graduation, he started George Wythe College in Cedar City, Utah.
[32] As a beginning teacher, at Dartmouth, I looked forward to the best of all worlds: reading the great, teaching the young, and conversing with older teachers. I soon found that hours spent with the first two were almost always richer than with the third. Far from supporting evaluations, however, when Dartmouth instituted “merit pay” I asked “what is merit and how do you determine it?” roused two hours of quivering lip rage in the Chairman two hours straight, and got visitations instituted (“600 per cent more to me the next term than the previous four years, but the Chair declaring “best discussion class I’ve ever been in” and perhaps as a consequence, his vote to exile me). For the Liberal Arts program I had proposed earlier, see “A Road to Travel By: A Liberal Arts Curriculum for Dartmouth,” Dartmouth Review, Vol. 10 (Issue 15) 14 Feb. 1990, pp. 8-9; for my experience, see in the same issue, “Two Roads Diverged in a Wood,” p. 7, and Charles Sykes, The Hollow Men, pp. 190-91. For the latest, augmented account, with some corruptions not mentioned previously, see “Two Roads Still Diverge in a Wood,” Dartmouth Review, Vol. 31, Issue 10, pp. 6-9 (2012).
[33] I spent the summer at St John’s in 1999, and still don’t have comments from one tutor, who judging from shifty eyes when I stroll there has some self-knowledge, though no virtue.
[34] Since at St. Johns, only simultaneous Don Rag could handle all the students, no Dean can attend all, but senior tutors can report persons needing further attention.
[35] Don Rags are not the kind of event one can visit at St. Johns, so I am lucky to have participated in ones at the International Theological Institute (Gaming, Austria) in 2001 and to have a full report of ones at St. Johns from a former grad student, now friend, and long-time tutor at St. Johns, Dr. Eric Salem.
[36] I quote Chapter XV of the Prince from the wet-suit close translation of Leo Paul De Alvarez (Cleveland: Waveland, 1989/1980), p. 93.
[37] See my thoughts à propos of Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, “Souls Without Longing,” Interpretation: Joursnal of Political Philosophy, XVIII, 3, (1991) pp. 415-465.
[38] It is puzzling that the students of the political scientist Leo Strauss, who criticized the scientific pretensions of Positivism, saw its relativistic consequences, and exposed its Machiavellian roots, took no note of evaluations. See his Natural Right and History (Chicago: U. of C. Press, 1953) and “An Epilogue” to Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1961). A notable vigilant exception is Harvey C. Mansfield.
[39] I adapt a fine remark of Robert Weissberg. Cf. The Rescuers eds. Gay Block and Malka Drucker (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1992).
[40] See “Article VIII: Hearsay”, under Rules of Evidence, Federal Civil Judicial Procedure and Rules (West Publishing, 1990), pp. 316-344; also McCormick on Evidence, second edition (1972), pp. 579-613.
[41] See “Article VII: Opinions and Expert Testimony” under Rules of Evidence, Federal Civil Judicial Procedure and Rules (West Publishing, 1990),pp. 346 ff.; also McCormick on Evidence, second edition (1972), pp. 579-613. I am thankful to my former student, a veteran of our Friday night reading group at Dartmouth, Mr. Robert King, of Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal, for guidance in the law (as well as good conversation).
[42] I am aware the election of judges is the practice in many States, though not the Federal Government, but even in these States, the anonymous electors are not those recently on trial in the judge’s court.
[43] Attention to the revolution “evaluations” have made in American Academe. Hence I welcome a recent piece by Stanley Fish: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/21/deep-in-the-heart-of-texas/?src=me&ref=general
Friends Of The Republic 