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Wednesday, June 07, 2006
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Illuminating Editorial… …over at the Harvard Crimson. It tells you a lot about the divide between students and professors. There’s the well-known divide over Larry Summers: Undergrads liked him a lot, found him “the most undergraduate-friendly Harvard president in recent history,” and remain pissed with the faculty for having ousted him. Then there’s the curriculum. Far from having any interest in a regenerated “core,” students (I’m basing this only on the Crimson editorial, so don’t know how representative it is) simply look forward to the faculty getting its act together and making Harvard’s curriculum look like everyone else’s, with a bunch of distribution requirements and electives aplenty: Professors and students alike have long recognized that the Core suffers from an arbitrary pedagogical philosophy and a needlessly restrictive set of courses, and the CGE has rightly advised FAS to repair these flaws by broadening and liberalizing distribution requirements while developing an innovative catalog of interdisciplinary courses. And then there’s faculty evaluation: Amazingly, professors are not required to distribute CUE surveys to their students, nor are they required to allow the results of those surveys to be published in the following year’s CUE Guide. Even more amazingly, the FAS failed to modify this policy when the issue was discussed at a Faculty meeting this spring. The comments of some professors at that meeting demonstrate the gaping disconnect that exists between the Faculty and the student body. Kenan Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield ’53 offered a comment that was as notable for its arrogance as it was for its disregard for undergraduate education: “Course evaluations introduce the rule of the less wise over the more wise, of students over professors.” UD’s thing on course evaluations is well known to regular readers -- Americans, at least in organizational settings, rarely do things in rational, modest ways. They tend to pump good ideas up into bigger and bigger and bigger things, until they explode into nothingness. So with the evaluation of professors’ teaching, which could be done in a reasonable tidy way by providing public online forms for students at the end of the semester -- one’s own local Rate My Professors. This way, the procedure would take up no class time, and would be voluntary for the student, who could edit her evaluation later if she thought of other stuff to say, etc. Instead, faculty are constrained to take twenty minutes or more of precious end-of-semester class time, which should be about reviewing for final exams and summing up the course, and hand out what may be a most insipid set of questions and directions. (UD’s fond of one evaluation form she saw that said “YOUR PROFESSOR’S SALARY IS DIRECTLY CONNECTED TO YOUR EVALUATION. PLEASE BE THOUGHTFUL.”) Professors are often instructed to announce to the class something like “I won’t see these until after grades are in, so don’t worry about my being vindictive.” This is degrading to everyone. And Mansfield’s right. I wouldn’t use the loaded word “wise,” but I would say, as other commentators have noted, that the national fad for every-course, totally-required, ten, twenty, thirty, forty question (many of them emotional: How did this professor make you feel? Did she make you feel cared about as a person?) professor evaluation, the Big Thing it’s all become in the context of education as consumerism, is now an official disaster. Rampaging course evaluation has contributed more than its share to grade inflation and dumbing down, as professors run from the possibility of professional retribution because of students who don’t like Bs. It’s not arrogant to say that professors know more than students. It’s true. Professors who say “My students know just as much as, or more than, I do. In fact, the way I teach is, I just sit back and listen to them talk,” should be recognized for the cynics they are. Professors who like to describe their classes as a purely horizontal conversation, as it were, are almost as bad. If you don’t think faculty have something to teach students, don’t start a university. None of this means that faculty should ever be arrogant; it means that a basic ethical imperative for faculty is to take seriously the transmission of knowledge. Further, because students are younger and less mature than most faculty, their comments on course evaluation forms need to be taken with a grain of salt. Yet because higher education is a buyer’s market, these comments can do serious damage to professors, and the professors’ knowledge of this corrupts the classroom. Mansfield’s remark suggests just the opposite of a “disregard for undergraduate education.” As with his well-known railing against grade inflation, he is demonstrating a principled commitment to the essential character of the legitimate academic setting: The serious transmission - through lecture and discussion - of valuable knowledge by a well-educated person who has high standards for her students’ performance. ********************** Update: "It's probably safe to say that more than two-thirds of college teaching is now done by people who are routinely punished for maintaining standards." Cosmic convergence between UD and Thomas H. Benton, regular columnist for the Chronicle of Higher Education, today. UD takes issue with some of what Benton has to say in his opinion piece. She's not at all sure, for instance, that College students seem more immature than ever before, and, as a consequence, more likely to bring disgrace upon themselves and their institutions. Tom Wolfe was not exaggerating in I Am Charlotte Simmons. You just have to watch the news to know how serious the problem of character has become at American universities. Maybe it's time to restore in loco parentis? I believe most parents would support that, even if it meant granting more authority and protection to the faculty members who would have to fill that role. I mean, she's not at all sure students are less mature than they used to be; and she's most certainly opposed to that loco parento thing... But Benton notes the same connection between consumer culture and dumbing down that I'm talking about. |