"Jones told Reuters that he is out to “restore an atmosphere of respectful political discourse on campus” and says his efforts are aimed at academics who proselytize students from either side of the ideological spectrum, conservative or liberal.
“We are concerned solely with indoctrination, one-sided presentation of ideological controversies and unprofessional classroom behavior,” Jones said on his Web site."
Uh huh. Having looked at his website I don’t find that very credible but take it for what it’s worth.
Three of the 20 advisors for his group (including a former Republican congressman) have left over this.
Personally I think that the guy is full of crap and he’s not particularly interested in fair/rational discourse, just in getting some attention. Something about him reminds me of the college club that, when the AIDS quilt visited a campus near mine, held a “Gerbil Memorial” to provide a “counterpoint”.
Oh, and I have some relevant personal experience with this. When I was a TA in grad school, I asked the professor if I could be reviewed by the students the same as professors are. The survey had a bunch of “rate this on a scale of 1 to 5” questions and some free-form “what can I do better” questions. About 100-150 students per semester.
I tallied it all up, posted the numerical averages and all of the comments (good, bad or ugly) for everyone to see.
So I don’t have a problem with honest critique and feedback and public posting of same, but the way this guy is going about it just smacks of “Find me some dirt on professors who don’t have the same politics as I do so that I can identify them as menaces to society”.
Then when the poop starts to hit the fan he clarifies that he is also interested in outing conservative professors who are extreme left-wind radicals (rolleyes).
The ratings can vary wildly depending on how the students did in the class or depending on their perceptions–i.e., “He hates his job and me too” might be said of a professor, while another student says of that same professor, “He’s tough and challenging.” Which one is “right?” How would you know ahead of time?
A portion of the ratings given on that site are done by professors–sometimes about themselves and sometimes about each other, as a goof. So I imagine that skews things even further.
If our “professional thinkers” were all white men (which they once were), would that speak ill of women and minorities? I find the veneration of the professoriat as “our professional thinkers” to be frankly laughable, akin to asserting that all the keenest political minds belong to politicians, or the best legal minds to judges.
Been awhile since I read The Republic, but as I recall, the whole purpose of the Academy was to provide suggestions for the improvement of Greek culture and politics; he never countenanced the idea of the Academy questioning the value of the culture is sprang from.
In any event, even if you’re 100% right, I’m willing to disagree with Plato.
That’s my problem with ratemyprofessor. I hear other students complain about having to write in an English Composition course, complain that they don’t like poetry and think its stupid, and others who balk at the rules of professors and then get upset when he actually applies them. For example I have one professor who says that he will deduct points from your test score every time you leave class while there’s a lecture. He doesn’t care if you’ve got an emergency phone call or you’ve got to use the bathroom he just thinks it’s rude to leave in the middle of a lecture. Given that his class only lasts 50 minutes I don’t think that’s such an unreasonable rule but others disagree. It’s hard enough to trust the opinion of others who I interact with let alone someone I don’t know on the net.
Be more clear, exactly what are you trying to say? I don’t exactly consider myself to lean all that far to the right when it comes to my political opinions though it’s true that few people have ever accused me of having a bleeding heart.
In which case I want to pit our entire Management School because to a person they all assume capitalist freemarket economics is a good thing and never present alternative viewpoints.
I am not Cervaise, nor do I play him on TV, but I read it like this: whatever your politics are, you’re clearly not a radical leftist. Thus if your professors were trying to indoctrinate you into liberal dogma, they failed.
My own experience as a college student is that everyone’s mind is pretty well made up by this point. As a Dope reader I have a pretty definite edge over my fellow students when it comes to knowing facts and citing them, but I’ve never seen facts change anyone’s mind. Since facts are a better basis for an argument than ranting, I doubt that the much-feared liberal indoctrination is actually having an effect; everyone is still obeying or reacting against their parents’ politics, as far as I can tell. Then again I’m a computer science student, so there isn’t much political bias either way in my classes. The whole issue is a bit abstract for me.
The one strongly biased professor I had was a student of middle eastern culture and politics who found the president’s handling of the Iraq war deeply frustrating. We escaped hearing about the more turgid periods of muslim history by winding him up with leading questions about the war…good clean fun. He definitely spoke out against the war in Iraq and he definitely bashed Bush, but he only did it in regard to subjects he’d studied (no comments on the Supreme Court , frex). If we can agree that he wasn’t doing anything wrong, how extreme do politics in the classroom have to be before they’re inappropriate? I think it’s dangerous to try and draw a line anywhere, and that extreme idealogues who aren’t also great teachers will be removed by the normal processes.
I studied politics and had teachers of every ilk. I expected thinking people to have biases and opinions and I wanted to hear them. If people are too feeble-minded to make up their own minds they have no business being in college.
And if I’m in an engineering class the professor’s politics have no business there. I resent them much as I do when apolitical threads here are used for Bush-bashing.
It requires students to parse data, yes. The signal to noise ratio may vary highly between different professors and schools. There could be heaps of cruft, in the form of stupid, unhelpful comments. Is this more or less helpful than having to choose professors blind, without the benefit of other students’ past experience.
Even if reviews are mixed, a student with critical reading and thinking skills can still discern a common thread from this. If a student hates a writing teacher because that person hates writing, this won’t much affect somebody who /wants/ to take a writing class. They’ll look at reviews they consider to be more on point, more sober, and more thorough.
I advocate tracking professors in any way students see fit. The college process is extremely frustrating because you have these brands, colleges, relying on their reputation for high-mindedness in the past who, in the last 10 years, have turned acceptance and even graduation into a series of insane games where they do the utmost to keep students from knowing the rules. Now colleges are going to incredible lengths to keep parents out of the process. While at times it is merited, I feel they have by and large overstepped their role, sold short on their old-fashioned obligation to create intellectually well-rounded people and the best thing students can do is try to form a little accountability.
Professors going on ratemyprofessor.com are completely lame. That’s like voting for yourself on amihotornot. Or plagiarising a political cartoon…
Ignore them then and consider it good practice for the real world where people will foist their opinions on you at every juncture. Honestly - is your mind so malleable it can be warped by opinions you don’t share and your grasp of your subject so thin that the odd rant in class spells the difference between success or failure?
I don’t give a flying F what the opinion of lecturers are, regardless of subject, and I care the same about whether they express them in a class at some point. I’m an adult and can make up my own mind and I’m clever enough for a few minutes lost teaching time not to affect my grades in any way shape or form.
AndI repeat. If any of this affects a student they are too stupid and too feeble-minded to be in college in the first place and certainly don’t deserve any sort of qualification at the end of it.
It’s just a bunch of right-wing McCarthyite whining by people who need to GTFU.
It has nothing to do with my mind’s malleability. A professor is in a position of power, and I believe if s/he is enough of a zealot to inject their personal politics (right ot left) inappropriately, they may also let them color their fairness.
To me it is no different than grade school teachers foisting intelligent design, judges posting commandments, or presidents invoking god. It does not belong.
The thread has digressed right now to whether or not professors proslytize their students, or whether or not they should do so. The first post is not about this, per se, but is about whether a highly partial third party should serve as a watchdog organization, and do so by engaging the illegal practice of buying lecture notes and recordings from students.
I object very much to the watchdog idea. Universities can handle student concerns about instructors that go off track, or use grades to coerce students into parroting certain political beliefs, on a case-by-case basis. Having any other group intimidate professors or illegally obtain course materials to foment a personal vendetta is a threat to academic freedom.
Whether or not professors should prosyltize is a different question. I think we could all agree that there are lines that could be crossed in both directions, with raving lunatic professors berating students on the one hand (I had such a professor from the right side of the spectrum. He called me a pinko even though I was a proud 80s Reaganite), and professors being punished for rather passing and innocuous comments on the other (giving rise to the kinds of horror stories we heard at the height of political correctness). I think it’s safe to say that we all fall mostly in the middle somewhere, acknowledging the potential excess that could happen either way. I think it’s also safe to say that almost all professors fall somewhere in the middle as well, neither communicating NONE of their off topic interests or passions and maintaining a completely apolitical stance on issues (which is barely possible in some subjects), nor acting as a caricature of self-righteous egghead, showering students in spittle and demanding students take up arms against the government.
Erring on the side of caution means letting universities handle the occasional lout while protecting the vast majority of professors from intimidation or undue dismissal. It also keeps the lawyers out of it, which is a good thing.
Also, when students complain about me or about another professor sticking his opinions into a class, my response is to say, “If you’re right–and let’s suppose you are, for a second, though you’re probably misunderstanding what was going on in the classroom–it’s a freaking course. Thirteen weeks. Getting exposed to a ranting lunatic for thirteen weeks is part of your life’s experience, and learning how to deal with ranting lunatics who have control over a part of your life isn’t bad preparation for life, and I’ve never met a ranting lunatic in thirty years of being on a college faculty. Deal with it. You’ll be a better person for it.”
I tend to agree that it’s no big deal, and most students learn to appreciate those professors for their comic value (I did). And while I think RPs are few, I bet every campus has (and has always had) one or two characters.
Inasmuch as a U does need to be somewhat accountable to “customers,” they always have some process for students who complain. I imagine few students care enough to go through that process, but the process is there. There’s no need for anyone to create another process, and one that isn’t run democratically or even legally.
America, for all its problems, have an awful lot of people on both side doing their best to create problems where there aren’t any.
