At 11:40 AM 9/1/99 -0700, Jim Devine wrote: >>All merit systems, whether based on peer review, administrative >>review, student review, or some combination have one ultimate >>effect: they increase the power of management. Can you imagine >>what student reviews of a progressive professor would have looked >>like in the early 1950s? > >it's important to remember that student reviews of faculty were a >progressive demand by students at Berkeley in the 1960s. And I think that >there are some in my department who need to have some severe evaluation >because they've been treading water for decades. (That is they teach >poorly, do no research, serve on no committees, but get good course evals >'cause they're easy on students.) > >I think the key question is _who_ management is. I think universities >should be worker cooperatives, in which case the management would be the >faculty as a whole. But student evals would still be needed, to prevent >excessively protective in-group mentality. (There's a book review in the >current BUSINESS WEEK of a book about how the medical profession winked at >a serial killer among their ranks, because he was "one of them.") > >any thoughts? > evaluations are important, but not in the form of anonymous spamming or popularity contest. I'd rather see evaluations by students who graduated (thus have no ax to grind) and supply a narrative on how the curriculum contributed to their career, identify courses that were particularly useful as well as those that were not so useful, explain why etc. - and no anonymity. This way, alumni associations would at last play a useful role in the academe by conducting these evaluations. as to faculty management - goddess forbid - profs are often not only pompous asses, but prima facie capitalists, exploiting the intellectual labor of grad students and ra's under the intellectual property laws i.e. by attaching their name to what academic proletariat produced. wojtek
