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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

As We Prepare for UD's...

...remarks in the Chronicle of Higher Education tomorrow about Rate My Professors, here's a short piece from the Georgetown University student newspaper about faculty and student attitudes about the thing.



One faculty comment got my attention:

Maureen Corrigan, an adjunct professor of English with [a rather middling]... rating ... said she has never visited the Web site.

“I doubt that Hannah Arendt or Gertrude Stein would have scored high on the congeniality meter,” she said, referring to the German political scholar and American writer.




This brief comment has all the elements of one popular professorial response to phenomena like RMP: Snobbery, self-preening, willful blindness, and false assumptions.

*** Unlike in-house evaluations, which often do want students to go to town on congeniality questions, RMP asks students to focus on the clarity of the professor, the difficulty of the course, and other serious matters. Student comments by and large reflect this approach -- they tend to say little about whether they found a professor congenial, and much about the competence of a professor's style of teaching.

*** Corrigan would know this if she glanced at RMP, but she is above that sort of thing.

*** Not that RMP solicits this sort of information, but Gertrude Stein would no doubt be a hoot in the classroom, since she had a wicked sense of humor and quite the delivery. As for congeniality: Stein was a spectacular hostess who ran the most sought-after salon in Paris. I'm not sure what Corrigan is thinking about here.

Though Arendt would have complained bitterly about not being able to smoke in the classroom, everything I've read about her as a writer, scholar, and teacher suggests that she had a passion and focus that many students would have found not merely congenial, but exciting.

*** As to Corrigan's implicit comparison of herself to people like Arendt and Stein: The main thing students note about Corrigan is that she's easy. Indeed, her overall "Ease" rating is way high. Arendt and Stein were not pushovers.