HUMAN EVENTS ONLINE :: Weak Grades for Ward Churchill by Christopher Flickinger

"Student evaluations" are one of the minor banes of a university professor's existence. They are the only opportunity that students have to express freely their approbation--or reprobation--of their professor, the department, and the school, and to do it anonymously and as a group rather than in an identifable voice against whom the professor could easily retaliate. Good schools understand this and sometimes use the student evaluations to decide whether to turn the professor loose on another class in another year. I have personally witnessed the same course change instructors three times in as many years, because the original instructor got unfavorable evaluations, and his successor blew the students away with the excellence of his presentation. And as a teacher myself (albeit a part-time one), I can readily understand that. Teaching is a performance art, and not many institutions bother to train a teacher in that art. In short, being a teacher is about a lot more than being an expert in the subject matter. A teacher must also be a mentor, an end-of-the-process administrator, and a representative of his department and school.

And evidently Ward Churchill has let his grades slide in these critical areas: accessibility (a cardinal requirement in any teacher), fairness in grading, relative excellence as an instructor, and the relative excellence of the course he teaches. This last is more important than you might think, because any teacher is responsible for how he presents his material, even if that material is fixed from above--and in this case, Ward Churchill is completely responsible for selecting that material, either as an instructor teaching an elective or--worse yet--as his own department chairman! (Actually, he was a chairman; he had to step down from that role last year.)

And, as usual, he blames other people for his troubles, in this case reporters--this although he has received zero coverage for anything for at least half a year!

I suspect that what's really happening is that students are now feeling bold enough to use the student evaluation as an instrument of accountability, and no longer as a suck-up tool.