Michael Bérubé - American Airspace

For a good time, call

Curiously, both the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscriber only) and Inside Higher Ed ran pieces about RateMyProfessors.com last week. You know, like Pixar releasing A Bug’s Life and DreamWorks releasing Antz in the same month. These things happen. It’s all a lattice of coincidence, you know.

In a lively essay titled “Let’s Sue,” graduate student Eric Strand tells of his reaction to being labelled “strange and awkward” on RateMyProfessors by one of his former students. Having moved through the stages of anger, anger, anger, and being royally pissed off, he is now ready for resolution, by means of a class action lawsuit, “Professors, adjuncts, and graduate students of America vs. RateMyProfessors.com.”

Along the way, he writes,

RateMyProfessors is viewed seriously or semi-seriously by important people and institutions. Our campus newspaper occasionally dismisses the site’s importance but says that students should consult it when selecting courses. . . . Most stunningly, some instructors I know have been told that their ratings are read in order to track their performance.

And in IHE, the inimitable Terry Caesar writes,

From a reader’s point of view, who cares if these comments are accurate? They’re fun to read. From a colleague’s point of view, who cares if just about any comments are just? They’re irresistible to read, like gossip. RATE opens up the whole evaluative process insofar as teaching is concerned. Suddenly students get to say what they really think, not just to themselves but to a potential audience of thousands. Rather like guests on certain afternoon television talk shows, individuals feel inspired to be more recklessly candid.

This is an odd thing to say, since students “get to say what they really think” on ordinary course evaluations as well: we professors don’t get to see those evaluations until well after the semester has ended and all the grades are turned in, and those evaluations, at least at Penn State and Illinois, are not purely quantitative. They give students far more space for commentary than RateMyProfessors does, and those written evaluations are read by our department heads (and, of course, by us). At Illinois, the written evaluations took up one side of the page, the quantitative # 2 pencil bubble-filling the other; at Penn State, the written evaluations are on a separate sheet of their own. I read all of mine carefully, especially the ones that make constructive suggestions about how to improve the course (something you certainly won’t find on RateMyProfessors). But it’s an even odder thing to say when you realize, as Caesar notes with astonishment ten paragraphs later, “in fact, students at RATE don’t even have to be students!”

Do tell! You’d think people would take the site a bit less seriously, right?

Ah, wrong. For hardened culture warrior David French, over at the National Review’s Phi Beta Cons, even Caesar’s essay is a “screed” and a “rant”: “One of the more amusing recurring elements of Scott Jaschik’s excellent Inside Higher Ed is the occasional professors’ screed against RateMyProfessors.com. The most recent version of this rant discusses the high correlation between easy grading and high scores on ‘Rate.’” And French concludes that “in the aggregate, all of these seemingly random evaluations actually add up to something important.” It’s good to see people sticking up for intellectual standards and things.

And French isn’t alone. This past February, in the Chronicle, Rob Franciosi wrote an essay that, while complaining about “how invalid these RMP rankings are; how little they have to do with learning or real teaching effectiveness; how there’s no way to guarantee that the contributors are even students, let alone students who have taken your class,” nevertheless served up a confession and an admonition:

And, yes, I realize this RMP.com habit, like my compulsive e-mail checking, should be resisted; but I can’t seem to kick it. As with so much on the Internet, the RateMyProfessors site simply offers this distracted academic too many easy pleasures. . . .

It’s not surprising that students not only contribute to RateMyProfessors.com but also scrutinize the rankings before they register for classes. Several have told me they choose instructors at least partly based on what they read on the site.

People, people, people. Have you all been smoking Ye Olde Cracke Pipe?

A couple of years ago, I used to check RateMyProfessors.com—until I realized I was being cyberstalked by a Dinesh D’Souza obsessive. At first, my ratings on the site conformed pretty closely to the ratings I’ve received over twenty years of teaching. The first one was posted in November 2003, and while it didn’t say anything about the intellectual content of the class, it was pleasant enough to read:

He is so funny and makes the class go by with ease, very enjoyable.

The next two (rating the same class, English 232) were posted in March and April of 2004, and they were 5s with no written elaboration. The next one, for English 467, was the nicest yet:

He is one of the funniest, smartest teachers I’ve ever had. I wish the class could have been more forthcoming in discussions...he deserved better from us!

So I was cruising along, hmmm hmmm hmmm, no problems in the world.

And then my D’Souza fan showed up, and things started getting weird. (You can find a little synopsis of my writings on D’Souza right here. It includes the cheeky sentence, “no one has noted that Dinesh D’Souza is himself the most visible contradiction of the Right’s major premise in the academic culture wars—namely, that campus conservatives are persecuted by liberal faculty and intimidated into silence.") Here’s my next evaluation on RateMyProfessors. It is decidedly harsh:

He has written that a particular “conservative” academic’s success disproves singlehandedly that conservatives aren’t discriminated against. An average 14 year old can see at least 2 things that are absurd in this statement. Moron!

D’Souza isn’t an academic, but let’s not sweat the small stuff. Here’s the next entry:

Unbelievably juvenile sense of humor. See his website if you don’t believe me.

This one happens to be accurate, though it doesn’t say much about my teaching. It was accompanied by the lowest numerical score possible. Suddenly, along with my 4, 5, 5, and 5, I had myself a pair of ones. That threw off my average some.

And this kind of thing went on with some regularity over the next few months, both on RMP and on Amazon.com. It was the same stuff every time: I was juvenile, I was arrogant, I was illogical, I had dismissed a certain conservative writer. The last “evaluation” in this vein is dated May 2005:

Never has such arrogance mixed with such ignorance. He thinks he is intelligent, and few human beings I have ever met are less capable of thinking logically and rationally.

This was nearly identical to (a) an earlier posting on RMP and (b) a “review” of one of my books on Amazon, which the good people at Amazon eventually removed because it had nothing to do with the book under review. (Actually, the Amazon story is a bit more complicated, and I tell the full version here. Note, though, that back then I didn’t think the RMP stuff was important enough to mention.) So RMP deleted the earlier posting and kept the more recent one. In the meantime, I received a few tepid-to-negative reviews that weren’t quite in this vein, and might very well have come from actual students (I’ll get to that in a second). And later in 2005, I got a brief “great teacher” and a more detailed

I graduated from PSU in 03, I found Prof, Berube to be mos helpful and understanding. He makes the unfamiliar, familiar and reponds to all inquiries clearly and quickly. I wish there were more like him. I learned more in his class than in most others, I would take his class again in an instant.

So it looked as if my D’Souza guy had given up for now. I breathed a sigh of relief, and relaxed and learned to accept the occasional outburst of “moron!”

And then late last year another hostile review appeared, almost as libidinally invested as my D’Sousa fan:

What an arrogant jerk. Every class with him was painful as he tried to be funny/show off his knowledge. No doubt he’s smart, but the kind of smart where he enjoys lording it over everyone else. His lectures ramble. This class alone made me rethink my english ambitions, because I couldn’t stand the idea of a career around people like Berube.

Well, I thought, let it not be said that I have failed to do my part to ease the job crisis for Ph.D.s in English! But at first I wasn’t sure that this was a real student, because (a) I’ve gotten poor reviews in graduate seminars before, but nothing so visceral as this, and (b) I don’t lecture in seminars anyway. So I decided to re-check the my official evaluations I’d gotten for English 501 (fall 2004), because that wasn’t a seminar, and sure enough, in that class of 24 students there was one person who utterly despised me—not the course (this he merely considered a waste of time), but me. I was arrogant, I paraded my knowledge, and . . . though you won’t find this on RMP . . . I spent all of class time talking about my own work.

Goodness gracious, that was brutal! OK, some explanation is in order.

English 501 is the introduction to graduate study in English at Penn State. It’s a required course. It is sometimes referred to as “boot camp,” and in one especially unhappy year before my arrival, when Penn State admitted 35 students to the program instead of the usual 25, the rumor (groundless, but potent) went around that 501 was going to be the means by which the department winnowed out some of the new recruits. Look to your right, look to your left, this time next year one of your buddies will be dead. It wasn’t a happy time, I’m told.

The course was taught for a couple of years thereafter as a kind of Welcome to the Profession, here are some guest lecturers on medieval, early modern, eighteenth-century, Victorian, etc., here’s the library, here’s the rare book room, and so on. And then in early 2003, my department head noticed that I’d recently written an essay in which I argued that

training in contemporary literary theory should be one of the central purposes of graduate education in English. I want to emphasize the literary in that theory: I mean, more or less, the history of twentieth-century theories of literature and of textuality, beginning with the work of Viktor Shklovsky and his fellow Russian Formalists (including Mikhail Bakhtin’s and V. N. Volosinov’s replies thereto) and running through Marxism, psychoanalysis, New Criticism, structuralism, poststructuralism/deconstruction, feminism, reader-response, New Historicism, postcolonialism, and queer theory—in other words, from the origins of a discipline-founding theory of the literary (this discipline-founding aspect is what would distinguish Shklovsky from Samuel Taylor Coleridge or Matthew Arnold, or, for that matter, John Crowe Ransom or Northrop Frye from Sir Philip Sidney) to the moment of the breakdown of the very idea of the specifically literary text under the pressure of structuralism and poststructuralism. I believe more firmly with each passing year that this history of twentieth-century theories of textuality should be something like a lingua franca shared by advanced graduate students, not only because it gives them access to myriad ways of reading literary and social texts, but also because, if it’s taught in a sufficiently historically and institutionally grounded way, it gives entrants into the discipline a good general idea of the history of the discipline as we can plausibly claim to know it.

He promptly asked me to take over 501 the next fall. I hemmed and hawed (and rambled), knowing that 501 was easily our students’ Least Favorite Course Ever, and that it had killed many a professor doughtier than I. But I was eventually convinced that it was the right thing to do, particularly if I actually believed any of the things I’d written. So in the fall of 2003, I taught the course for the first time.

It didn’t go very well. The evaluations showed it, too. The course was rated a lowly 4.95 on Penn State’s seven-point scale ("but that’s good for 501,” I was reassured, not very reassuringly), and though I squeaked out a 5.95 on the instructor rating (my second-lowest score in my five years here), some of the written comments suggested that the course needed serious rethinking.

So I rethought. While I kept the intro-theory component—and, dear readers, eventually translated some of my class notes into the widely-deplored “Theory Tuesday” series that appeared on this blog last year around this time (in four installments, one, two, three, and four)—I re-introduced the guest lectures (medieval, early modern, etc.) and devoted a couple of classes to talking about practical matters like revising seminar papers for conference presentation and submitting essays to journals.

I promise you all that I spent exactly zero time talking about my own work. For I am not, in fact, responsible for most of twentieth-century literary theory, almost all of which was written by people other than myself. And I did not lord it over any of my students—or, I should say, I did not try to. Nor did I punish anyone or give out any bad grades, because, after all, the course was only an introduction to the field. As far as I’m concerned it shouldn’t be graded at all.

Actually, I fondly thought, I had done all right the second time around: the course evaluations for 2004 were markedly better than the previous year’s. The course got better, from 4.95 to 6, and I got better, from 5.95 to 6.59 (16 sevens, 4 sixes, 1 five, 1 four, 1 three, and I’m willing to bet that this last guy is the one who showed up on RMP). And this confirmed something Michael Levenson told me years ago, in the course of giving me some of the best dissertation-director advice I’ve ever heard: as I prepared to move my family to central Illinois, he told me that you very rarely get a course right the first time. It’s like the first pancake. Only when you’ve cooked the first pancake do you know what to do with the following pancakes. (I have, by the way, retroactively apologized to many of my fall 2003 students in 501 for burning them on one side.) Getting a nasty evaluation for the 2004 class, then, was rather ironic, in the Alanis Morissette sense of the term.

So that’s my RateMyProfessors experience over the years. A mixed bag of reviews from actual students, combined with three or four flames from a former cyberstalker and a big fat rotten tomato from a graduate student who found me unbearable. I now refer to the site as BathroomWalls.com, and consider it about as reliable as the information about professors you can find on those sites.

The truly weird thing about all this is that we actually have real course evaluations on file, and at Penn State and Illinois (if memory serves), these are mandatory for all professors. You want a taste of reality? I can give you a taste of reality. I received just under 750 evaluations at Illinois, and on that five-point scale, the breakdown was

5: 440
4: 223
3: 66
2: 16
1: 2

for a 4.45 average overall. At Penn State,

7: 95
6: 75
5: 22
4: 6
3: 6
2: 0
1: 0

for a 6.22, which, you’ll notice, is just a teensy bit off the 4.45/5 ratio (.888857 as opposed to .89). So we’re talking about some serious consistency here over seventeen years (I think my four years of evaluations in graduate school were a bit lower).

Not that I’m keeping track, mind you! But I did have to submit the record of my Illinois teaching evaluations for consideration when I was a candidate for this here job at Penn State, so I actually do have a file drawer full of them.

The written evaluations have been remarkably consistent as well: most students write positive things about what they learned or what they enjoyed most, though I’m not in the first tier of professors, where the truly amazing and world-transforming teachers reside, with their dazzling strings of 4.9s and 6.85s (one of whom happens to live in this very house, though she is mysterious and elusive). Every year, a couple of students find me not to their taste, and a couple more students complain that I talk too fast. De gustibus non disputandum est, of course, but the claim that I talk fast is just so much arrant nonsense.

Anyway, if you’re a college professor, or on your way to becoming one, the next time someone you know takes ~~RateMyProfessors~~ BathroomWalls.com seriously, please send them this post. And if you’re not a college professor—hey, if you’re not a college student!—remember, you can write practically anything you like on RMP, about me or anyone else.

Posted by on 08/03 at 12:35 PM

What with being a returning student, I’ve been in college in the ratemyprofessors era, and found it quite useful. Here’s the thing: it is transparently obvious looking at the site that most of the people who contribute are thick-headed dullards mostly interested in skating as best they can, and/or easily molded young minds who are suckers for anybody with an explicit point of view to share. If you’re a math professor, for instance, with the gall to assign homework, your rating will inevitably be in the toilet. What makes the site valuable is that one out of every 10 or so commenters will actually impart some useful information, something you could get by talking to students who have taken the class. Especially at large public schools, those students aren’t that easy to find offline. The only time the overall ratings come into play are if somebody is universally loathed or universally loved, and even then, they don’t come that much into play.

Posted by Sifu Tweety on 08/03 at 02:32 PM
"The only time[s] the overall ratings come into play are [when] somebody is universally loathed or universally loved”

get it right! he’s an ENGLISH PROFESSOR!

Posted by Sifu Tweety on 08/03 at 02:34 PM
Minus five points for you, Sifu Tweety. And yes, this will be on the final.

Posted by on 08/03 at 02:42 PM
Yes, BathroomWalls.com is a ridiculous site, one that only receives serious merit from the Phi Beta Cons and D’oh, but it has two benefits for teachers. One, it’s like walking down the hallway and hearing students complain about basic standards--"dude, I can only miss like two weeks of classes.” Two, getting a chili pepper (meaning you’re “hot") gives you goosebumps. Admit it.

Posted by Crazy Little Thing on 08/03 at 02:44 PM
But what I want to know is this: How many students have bestowed a hot pepper of Hawtness on you?

Posted by Onager on 08/03 at 02:49 PM
Yup, it’s the hotness pepper iconography that keeps me coming back. No, no one in my many years of teaching has ever posted about me on BathroomWalls.com, but still. I look at the peppery goodness and wonder, do they really think so-and-so is hot? What’s she got that I don’t?

I’m going to go buy a new pair of shoes now, thankyouverymuch.

Posted by Tyler Curtain on 08/03 at 02:52 PM
I miss Theory Tuesdays.

Posted by on 08/03 at 02:54 PM
I was probably in that earlier 501 class (seriously). We didn’t get “the speech,” but did find “the memo” which urged one of the three profs to “note those who were given assistantships” (probably should not have been written up and placed in a mailbox bank that was regularly, um...accidentally accessible to grad students). Not a happy time for any of us.

Captcha word: “history,” as in “ancient history” (I still love all three profs that team taught that course).

I regularly give myself snarky and contradictory ratings on RateMyBathroomStall.com. My teaching is “delightfully crisp and fruity, yet tannic.”

Posted by DocMara on 08/03 at 02:57 PM
What, did the Cracke Pipe make its way in here too? I have zero peppers, of course. Though I did once get a very campy evaluation that advised me to avoid white turtlenecks because they washed out my facial features. Also because they were too Dick Cavett.

Posted by on 08/03 at 02:59 PM
We didn’t get “the speech,” but did find “the memo” which urged one of the three profs to “note those who were given assistantships” (probably should not have been written up and placed in a mailbox bank that was regularly, um...accidentally accessible to grad students).

Wow! I never heard that part. Good thing we have this here ~~gossip sheet~~ blog comments section, huh, Doc Mara?

I regularly give myself snarky and contradictory ratings on RateMyBathroomStall.com. My teaching is “delightfully crisp and fruity, yet tannic.”

ROTFL, as the kids say. I’m afraid I’m going to have to steal that . . . but not right this minute. That would be way too obvious.

Posted by on 08/03 at 03:03 PM
The comments can be quite funny. Like this one I got recently: “Too smart to be teaching [a] basic [course]”

Or this one, also from my RMP comments: “He had a good sense of humor and was obviously very intelligent but that wasn’t enough to keep me from skipping his lectre.”

Or this one that I was alerted to on MySpace, and which may be my favorite backhanded compliment ever: “If you’re sitting in the back row, he’s kinda dreamy”

Hours of entertainment.

Posted by on 08/03 at 03:15 PM
Student evaluations, yeesh. I started to say something about them on the “Embrace your urge” post below until I realized that I was writing several paragraphs of rant—I guess it hit a nerve. The point, then, was something about how I wish students would see a distinction between not agreeing with the very premise of a course (that here is some stuff worth studying for 16 weeks) and not agreeing with a particular POV in the context of discussion. Because while I encourage them in many ways to not agree in sense 2, I am very discouraging of expressions of disagreement in sense 1—you are paying for the course, I say, so try to get something out of it. Oh, wait, I didn’t want to rant.

In relation to Rate My Bathroom Walls, I think what I want to say is that the whole atmosphere and premise and structure of the site erases the distinction between the different ways of not liking a course. I do, however, give them a little credit (no pun . . .) for separating “easiness” from the more substantive “clarity” and “helpfulness.”

Posted by on 08/03 at 03:17 PM
When you add your wine reviews at YeOldeCrackePipe.com, be sure to give yourself a pepper for good measure. Particularly if you’re a peppery red wine.

Posted by Orange on 08/03 at 03:19 PM
I don’t show up on RMP, as I am unrateable.

Now to un-defend the more traditional evals for a second, I got the following written comment on my Calc I course last term:

“spends too much time talking about concepts and not enough on the FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES OF CALCULUS I!!”

Remarkably, this student gave me a 5 (which translates to extra-bestest, as opposed to the ‘stunk’ that a 1 conveys.)

“way too smart” earned a 4.

“best teacher I’ve ever had. I’m serious!” got me only a 2; so either one isn’t being serious for serious, or the bar is pretty godamn low.

The comments don’t seem to matter when the department evaluates my lowly grad-student teaching. However, the numbers sure do: if at the end of four years, I have a higher average numerical score than any of my coevals, I get one thousand five hundred dollars. I’m serious!

Posted by on 08/03 at 03:24 PM
Hi Michael,

I’m a former PSU English grad student (deserted before you got there; sorry I missed you!). I bet you teach a GREAT English 501. I took 501 in 1989 when it was a different animal. Maybe it felt a little like boot camp at the time, but in retrospect, it was sort of sweet and cute.

As for rumors of suspicious motives, purloined memos, etc.: as I remember, this sort of thing cropped up every few years. (Yes, I stuck around too long.) Not so surprising given the economic realities of grad school and the chosen profession, and the anxieties provoked thereby, wouldn’t you say?

Regards,
Ex S-236

Posted by on 08/03 at 03:33 PM
Well, there is a certain pleasure in seeing what undergrads have had to say about various eminent scholars. My friend and I spent a couple of delicious hours doing just this. ("Whoa! Fredric Jameson got a pepper?")

Btw, Michael, I’ve been checking in here for almost two years now but have never posted. Also, I did my MA in English at Illinois during 2004-05. Ships passing in the night, man...we could’ve started a great band!

Thanks for the ‘web’ ‘log’.

Posted by on 08/03 at 03:35 PM
...the widely-deplored “Theory Tuesday” series that appeared on this blog last year around this time...

Can it be that the late, lamented “Theory Tuesday” was in fact widely deplored? I recall only the Monday evening excitement, the Tuesday morning anticipation, and on lunch break - the pleasure and the pain. But after all these empty months, I find myself just going through the motions. They call it stormy Monday, but....

Luolin can’t be the only other fan. Check in, people! It’s not fair that Penn State students get all the theory - we want ours! On Tuesday!

Posted by on 08/03 at 03:39 PM
Well, the next Theory Tuesday, as I recall, was supposed to be about Raymond Williams’ “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory.” You’re up for this?

Posted by on 08/03 at 03:45 PM
Well, the next Theory Tuesday, as I recall, was supposed to be about Raymond Williams’ “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory.” You’re up for this?

I certainly am. But then, I’m an intellectual historian, so if people have thought it, I’m potentially interested in it…

(Captcha: “forces”...would those be “primary productive forces,” perhaps?)

Posted by on 08/03 at 03:57 PM
I have zero peppers, of course.

Why “of course”? I understand that your Middle English is gorgeous. Wink, wink.

I always hated TA evaluations, since no matter how frequently the undergraduates laughed at my effervescent wit, I never achieved better than mediocre ratings. The second-worst category of comment would blame me for how poorly the professors taught the lecture session. The worst category, as is usual, would criticize my poor English-speaking skills. This seemed to be a default comment for physics recitation sessions, where non-native English speakers were somewhat overrepresented. To someone born in Iowa, however, this criticism both wounded and infuriated. (To those who nod knowingly and think, “Well, of course: Iowa,” I would add that the college was itself located there.) The experience helped sour me on the notion of becoming a professor; no reputable institution seemed to allow instructors to use cricket bats on their students. I can only shudder to imagine a world where not-even-remotely serious online commentary could have a bearing on one’s career. (I don’t have to imagine a world where serious online commentary could have a bearing on one’s career, as the Juan Cole / Yale case has demonstrated.) Those shudders occur even before taking into account that this is the very world of which David Horowitz dreams so moistly.

Posted by on 08/03 at 04:00 PM
OK, I have to say, it demonstrates a serious commitment to literary criticism that y’all analyze the subtext of the RANDOMLY GENERATED CAPTCHA WORD.

Awesome, truly. With a hot pepper.

Posted by Sifu Tweety on 08/03 at 04:00 PM
You know, I’m reading for comps, Michael, so if you could hit Kant on Tuesday, then Benjamin and Adorno the week after, that would be nice. We can work out the rest of the schedule in the comments section of Kant.

If you do this, I’ll give you a chili pepper on Bathroom Walls.

--And speaking of Bathroom Walls, I once had written about me in the men’s room nearest the shared office, “Crazy Little Thinge is a gay communist.” Yes, the critic misspelled my last name.

Posted by Crazy Little Thing on 08/03 at 04:00 PM
I was with you for the question of deconstruction; I was right behind you for the importance of defamiliarization; I shouted encouragement from the rear during the explanation of structuralism; and Marxist structuralism - well, that was a real character-builder, and I just caught up.

In short, I can take anything you dish out, sir!

Posted by on 08/03 at 04:08 PM
mds, I think your English is very good!

Posted by Blar on 08/03 at 04:28 PM
I’m teaching theory(in sociology) on Mondays and Thursdays at the College of Staten Island. Michael, I’ll hit you up with updates and tell you how it goes, if you are at all interested(probably not, but you do have a soft spot for the City I know). Though our theory canons oft-times diverge and we(in American sociology), with a handful of exceptions, can’t really do theory nowadays( I know, sociologists for the most part cannot keep up within debates in contemporary theory), I bet it’d be amusing at the least for you to see how a 22-year old, first-year grad student, who fashions himself as a theorist,(me)teaches Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Freud in the shamed cousin locked up in the attic of New York City proper: Staten Island.

Posted by Sam Han on 08/03 at 04:38 PM
Add me to the fans of Theory Tuesdays.

OK, so they convinced me that what English professors study isn’t what I’m interested in--but I’m a knowledge geek, and I liked learning how you all think about written things (trying to avoid both text and literature in my statement, since they seem to be debatable terms).

I like the idea of RMP--I graduated before it started though. Sure, teaching evaluations are better--but prospective students can’t read teaching evaluations, and knowing which professors to avoid is, IMO, a survival skill. (The worst are the “I hate this class that the administration makes me teach and I’ll ensure you hate it too” people, closely followed by the “you aren’t professors and I am, so I shall seek to demonstrate your ignorance” crowd.)

Posted by on 08/03 at 04:43 PM
I’m all for the return of Theory Tuesdays...but then again, I would be. I’m assuming people not in the biz were the ones widely deploring it.

captcha: filled, in honor of all the content this comment isn’t with

Posted by Scott Eric Kaufman on 08/03 at 05:12 PM
I was weaned forever when I got a comment that said I was “not that hot,” clearly in reference to my lone pepper. Now, indeed, I know that I am “not that hot” (and surely not to men who are 20 years younger than I am), but I was annoyed (and all-too-quickly rushed back to junior high). Bracketing for a moment all the research that has demonstrated the lookist bias of most humans, what my comparative hotness has to do with my skills in teaching Melville struck me as so entirely useless--and humiliating--that I gave it all up cold-turkey. Now, when the urge strikes, l recall this bad moment and look instead at Roz Chast’s cartoon of “The Vain But Realistic Queen” “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who, if she lost ten pounds and had her eyes and her neck done, and had the right haircut, could, in her age group, be the fairest one of all?”

And here’s a lurker’s vote for more Theory Tuesdays, please!

Posted by on 08/03 at 05:32 PM
I vote for the wholesale replacement of Theory Tuesdays with Anagramming Anydays. Come on, who’s with me?

Posted by Orange on 08/03 at 05:33 PM
"Theory Tuesday V kicks off with a discussion of hegemony and incorporation; the residual, the dominant, and the emergent; and the opposition between the view of the work of art as object and the view of the work of art as practice.”

Bring. It. On.

Which is to say, please consider yourself interpellated.

Posted by on 08/03 at 05:44 PM
Theory Tuesday Gooood!!! </karloff>

I see that my dear nephew, who’s teaching some intro and expository writing classes as a grad student at a state university near you, has recieved almost universal hotness acclaim on ratemyprofessorsdotduh for… wearing a bow tie.

Word to the wise.

Posted by on 08/03 at 06:08 PM
Yeah, I crave the Raymond Williams post too.

Posted by on 08/03 at 06:16 PM
I loved theory tuesdays. Theory Thursdays would be nice too.

A favorite comment on me (and better than the one that called me a “nerdy narcissist"), which isn’t on RMP but something similar: Good grades on re-writes are easy: insert and elaborate all the ideas he suggests. He’s also exceptionally understanding about giving out extensions. The class itself can seem like a chore unless you manage to get really into it. In the meantime, Karl’s a fine teacher.

Try to parse that “meantime”! And the easiness of just inserting and elaborating my comments (I tend towards a page and a half of comments on 5-6 page papers) just cracks me up everytime I read it. In the meantime: 1) my grading makes sense; 2) I’m kind; 3) it’s a boring class if you don’t pay attention. Not bad!

Now, as to the whinging over RMP so common at IHE and the Chronicle--how many articles on this have they done?--please! It has more than whiff of the Astors or Vanderbilts complaining about the help getting uppity. We go on about students all the time. Why shouldn’t they? The problem of course is that RMP is in public, but that’s small potatoes vs. the fact that we do, after all, have actual power over them. If they ignore the content of our courses or our wit in favor of our grading, well, it makes sense, given that we are important gatekeepers to professions and because our grading can seem (because it often is) arbitrary to them. Grading can be, in purely material terms, all that matters. Let’s praise them for sloughing off false consciousness!

Captcha: ‘wall,’ as in ‘no dark sarcasm in the classroom.’

Posted by on 08/03 at 06:22 PM
Grading can be, in purely material terms, all that matters. Let’s praise them for sloughing off false consciousness!

Dang, you sound like one of them radical “critical radical” pedagogy theorists, Karl. Just you wait til I write that Williams post, the first sentence of which Phil (# 30) has already (generously) provided! Then we’ll see what’s what with this “false consciousness” of which you speak so dismissively.

Sure, teaching evaluations are better—but prospective students can’t read teaching evaluations, and knowing which professors to avoid is, IMO, a survival skill.

True enough, Sam. That’s why, at Illinois, I always checked the box that allowed my evaluations to include five or six questions that would be reproduced in the student handbook. It would be nice if every school had something similar, because (really) all I’m asking is that the public “review” of professors be conducted by people who were actually students in those professors’ classes. And if some of them throw big rotten tomatoes, so be it.

Posted by Michael on 08/03 at 06:33 PM
Please, please, please!!!! Bring back Theory Tuesdays.

Posted by on 08/03 at 07:01 PM
Yes! More theory Tuesdays! I will now begin the compulsive dance of checking the ‘web’ ‘log’ every few hours to see if a theory post is up.

However, about RMP… Sloughing off false consciousness sounds great, but certainly most of our students manifest far more pernicious forms of “false consciousness” than minor deference to their professors, especially professors who make them aware of such concept in the first place.

What kind of consciousness prompts students to make comments like this one?

“I don’t know who on earth gave her the hot ratings but believe me… If she looked like Carmen Electra the class STILL wouldn’t be worth it.”

And there are a number of similar discussions on RMP about whether I am hot. Of course it is true that this is simply a reaction to my relative power in the classroom situation. But I don’t think it’s a matter of the students finally getting up the gumption to challenge their oppressor. In my case, being a small, swarthy woman, I think they are reacting more to what they perceive as a challenge to their privilege.

Doing some casual voyeurism on my own campus, I found that female professors who were successful in research mostly got abysmal comments and scores on RMP. I know that the Chronicle has already covered this stuff, but I wanted to mention it because I think there should be a distinction between liberation from ideology and the return of the repressed.

Posted by on 08/03 at 07:16 PM
Yikes! English 501 flashbacks from Fall 1990. . . Joukovsky and Charlie Mann talking to each other for three hours! My friends and I (all total newbies to the program) created a deferred-action drinking game based on how many times NJ said “my friend Peacock” (a la Thomas Love Peacock). A nightmare of non-instruction in the 3 hour block, but the work itself--the edition, the bibliographic description, and especially the literary puzzler!--was challenging and instructive. Still! Major Flashbacks!!!!

Posted by on 08/03 at 08:00 PM
I always checked the box that allowed my evaluations to include five or six questions that would be reproduced in the student handbook. It would be nice if every school had something similar, because (really) all I’m asking is that the public “review” of professors be conducted by people who were actually students in those professors’ classes.

Yeah, I agree with “I Be Male Cherub.” I even think it would be fair for public universities to post all student evaluations of all instructors online, though I can’t say it’s something I’d look forward to the way I look forward to, say, the end of the 30-minute fat-blasting program on the exercycle. But it might even be worth agitating for as a legitimate alternative to RMP. Maybe US News and World Report would kindly oblige by taking on the role of aggregator. ("No, no, our pleasure.")

Posted by on 08/03 at 08:12 PM
People post evaluations of professors on the web? Freely, without coercion? Good God, why? I hate filling out those damn things. Not having actually visited the site, I’m guessing they post for the snark value. Maybe I’m a bleeding heart, but I always give all my professors the highest scores possible. They all have quirks, but they’ve all been competent and helpful.

I understand from a pedagogical perspective why professors like constructive criticism, but if I really have criticism that’s constructive, and I often don’t, can’t it come in another format like perhaps a visit during office hours or an email? I also understand the format is necessary because it enables the administration to evaluate professors without attending the classes, which could be time consuming at our Large State U’s.

When we grad students at my Large State U want to find out a professor’s peculiarities or quirks, we talk to each other. We certainly don’t take the silly evaluations seriously.

Posted by on 08/03 at 08:15 PM
Yes to theory Tuesdays. And Thursdays. And the stuff on Jamie. And the academic/culture/freedom wars.

Oh, hell Michael, just write what you like.

Anyhow, at school in Iowa I teach at (think university, Iowa, no “State"), we used to have a policy where foreign-born TAs had a special part of their evaluations devoted to their English competence. I would stand up on the first day of class and say, “I’m a foreign TA. I’m Canadian. You’ll probably understand a quarter of what I say. Write what you like on my evaluation, but English is my native tongue.” Some laughed. Some looked stunned.

My favorite written comment was from a wrestler, “If has to be a f%@king faggot, why does he have to adverstise it with the f#@king earring.” The best part was that the other wrestler in the class wrote exactly the same thing--causing my teaching advisor to fall out laughing.

Posted by on 08/03 at 08:17 PM
All the witty comments I might have made have been taken already, so I’ll just observe that at the top of the most recent of Michael’s mathclassishard.com ratings is the statement:

“I didn’t care much for the Pynchon”

I would suggest that we’ve a clear-cut accessibility issue here, as prospective students who rely on screen readers to access RMP.com will very likely be put off by the threat of inappropriate behavior.

You might have grounds here for the first-ever ADA libel suit, Michael! Do remember my lonely tip jar when you get that large cash settlement.

Captcha: “covered,” as in “I expect my blog hosting expenses will be.”

Posted by Chris Clarke on 08/03 at 08:17 PM
Pace Karl, my favorite review on RMP is the one in which the student betrays the real reason for his distress as he attempts to slam me:

Scott was rude and overly critical in office hours and in class. He was not willing to let others express their opinions. He joked and teased as much as he tuaght.

“Child!” I wanted to reply, “would that you revised as much as you whined!” Alas, I lack the gumption necessary to review myself in secret.

captcha: nearly, as in “I nearly didn’t lack the gumption...”

Posted by Scott Eric Kaufman on 08/03 at 08:19 PM
Anyhow, at school in Iowa I teach at (think university, Iowa, no “State"),

Oh, now it’s on. Go Cyclones! Wait, I hated my time there, didn’t I? Never mind.

we used to have a policy where foreign-born TAs had a special part of their evaluations devoted to their English competence.

We had no such section, but perhaps that would have been a good idea; I’m betting they would still volunteer it, however. I swear that one of the bookstores sold an “Unable to understand TA’s English” stamp.

I would stand up on the first day of class and say, “I’m a foreign TA. I’m Canadian. You’ll probably understand a quarter of what I say. Write what you like on my evaluation, but English is my native tongue.”

Heck and tarnation, I wish I had thought of that. With “Iowan” appropriately substituted, of course. Perhaps now I would be a fat and sleek theoretical physics professor. Then again, I’m in ditch digging because I enjoy bein’ me own boss.

Captcha: spring, as in “Nitpicking puts a ______ in my step.”

Posted by on 08/03 at 08:44 PM
One of my best friends is married to a professor of large undergraduate courses at one of the best public universities in the South. One day we spent a couple of hours online rating him repeatedly at Rate-My-Professor under multiple pseudonyms, and we said he was chilipepper hot hot hot! Recently he was promoted to Dean. You connect the dots.

Posted by Ann Bartow on 08/03 at 09:08 PM
Dots? Dots? I see no dots!

I just can’t believe Fredric Jameson got a pepper. What’s he got that I ain’t got? Aside from that whole Lukacs-does-postmodernism thing, I mean. (But thanks for commenting, John!)

I’ll just observe that at the top of the most recent of Michael’s mathclassishard.com ratings is the statement:

“I didn’t care much for the Pynchon”

I would suggest that we’ve a clear-cut accessibility issue here, as prospective students who rely on screen readers to access RMP.com will very likely be put off by the threat of inappropriate behavior. You might have grounds here for the first-ever ADA libel suit, Michael! Do remember my lonely tip jar when you get that large cash settlement.

Oh, jeez, I completely forgot about that one. What settlement? The ADA/ accessibility suit will be trumped by the sexual harrassment suit. And here I’ll be on my little blog, protesting that I hardly ever pinch anyone. All right, there was that one incident at the Esquire. But I think we’ve covered that sufficiently, haven’t we?

And I suppose now I’ll just have to scrounge around and try to find the energy for a couple more Theory Tuesdays. They take just about the whole day to write, though—even longer than it takes to write a ranting screed about PinchMyProfessors.com.

Posted by Michael on 08/03 at 09:38 PM
"widely deplored Theory Tuesdays”?What do you mean???!!They were wonderful!

Posted by on 08/03 at 09:43 PM
If only Professor Bérubé
Would choose, and then stay with, one vice!
No, I didn’t much care for the Pynchon--
Though the flogging and bondage were nice.

Posted by on 08/03 at 10:17 PM
Michael wrote: “I have zero peppers, of course.”

Not any more!

Posted by on 08/04 at 12:12 AM
Just for that I’m going to go to FlogMyProfessors and give Jameson another chili pepper of his own.

Posted by Michael on 08/04 at 12:42 AM
Hawtness measurement scale:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoville_units

Posted by on 08/04 at 12:55 AM
The other fun quirk of RMP, of course, is that the professors don’t have to be any more real than the students. Hegel received some very interesting comments during his brief tenure at our History department, for example, and I believe Jean-Jacques Rousseau still has his chili pepper: “I want to have his sixteen children—and give them up for adoption...”

Meanwhile, chalk up another vote for Theory Tuesdays. One question, though: why all this discussion about whether or not it’s a choice to write it or not? Doesn’t this feature spontaneously emerge from the structures of the inter-pipes?

Captcha: “french,” as in… nah, that’d be too obvious.

Posted by on 08/04 at 01:02 AM
Three quick fly-by remarks:

1) Oh good lord, I can’t believe you’ve linked that silly fan-girl post of mine again. And now I know why you showed up in the comments of my most recent, now stale, post of last week.

2) I think your former Penn State grad student (not *yours*, exactly, since he was an early modernist, but clearly you knew him), Gregory Colon Semenza, borrowed the pancake metaphor because I’ve been reading his _Graduate Study for the 21st Century_ (in my guise as new DGS) and I remember *just* reading that metaphor somewhere. So, it’s being passed down the academic generations. (And, btw, that book *rocks*.)

3) Eep! Ack! *I’m* teaching our own version of English 501 this semester. (I’m taking the “Welcome to the Profession” route, plus some thorough work on how to enter the scholarly conversation and how to do effective research in the criticism, because we have a separate theory class, thank god.) Sigh. There go my evaluations.

Posted by Dr. Virago on 08/04 at 09:22 AM
The ADA accessibility suit

As I recall, this Class Action suit was launched when a a group of students discovered via RMP that they had all mutually “suffered” from being required to read “all this hard sort-of-like-Russia stuff”. Suggested remedy was to get William Goldman to write a Good Parts Version that kept the sex and action but dispensed with the “bullshit”.

Hello my name is Van Veen you f...ed my “cousin”, prepare to die.

Posted by on 08/04 at 09:43 AM
The whole bathroomwalls.com site is sort of an interesting cultural phenomenon. I had never heard of if before a couple of days ago. It looks amusing, but I don’t know that I would ascribe any weight to what’s there, seems that there are a lot of pissed-off/pissed-on people who post. Well, that’s the interTubes for ya!

It is interesting that when I went to Gigantic State U in the ‘70s, we had no evaluations for professors at all. Feedback from lowly undergrads was neither required nor desired. Years and a one grad degree later, I can see the relevance and wish it had been so during my days as an undergrad. But then as now, I probably would not have been any less of a bomb-thrower, it’s my nature, so who knows if anyone would have listened?

All that being said, thanks for your insight on bathroomwalls.com. Worth reading, and especially from your POV.

Posted by Jo Fish on 08/04 at 11:07 AM
OK, now that I’ve read all the comments…

Right after this I’m going to give you a chili pepper, Michael. Talking fast is HAWT.

I have two peppers. One is from my boyfriend (and one of his is from me) but the other is from an unknown entity, perhaps an actual student. And yes, it stupidly made my day. But I only have 6 reviews because I don’t think our students really use BathroomWalls.com much. I wonder if there’s a correlation between the kind of schools where students feel strong senses of entitlement and the frequency of their postings on BathroomWalls.

My favorite student eval comment of all time (from an actual university form) is this one:

“Dr. Virago ROCKS MY WORLD. I want to have her children and teach them Middle English!”

I’m pretty sure it was from a gay male student, which makes it even funnier.

Posted by Dr. Virago on 08/04 at 12:52 PM
Actually, Dr. V., it was the other way around. I was going through the blogroll a couple of days ago and thought I’d stop by and say hello. That reminded me that you tried to tell people that I speak quickly, even though my studied, lugubrious demeanor has often been compared to Joe Lieberman’s.

Greg Semenza and I spoke at some length after I read the draft of his book (and before I wrote that intro). I had only a handful of suggestions for him; the book was already rockin’. I don’t remember if I mentioned the pancake theory then, but it’s possible. And good luck with the 501! I so wish Greg’s book had come out three years ago. If/when I teach 501 again it’ll be my guide.

Posted by Michael on 08/04 at 01:19 PM
I, too, love Theory Tuesdays. I’m pretty sure some of my RMP entries are written by my spouse.

Posted by on 08/04 at 02:48 PM
Gossip? Never. It was corroborated on it.must.be.true.com.

Favorite 501 memory: Joukovsky mentioning “the vatman and the coocher.”

I have a creative commons license for that bathroomscrawl.com “tannic” comment. You have to say three “Our Lessigs” if you don’t give me credit.

Oh, and the “Kat” part of “TomKat” had a “first pancake” line in Pieces of April.

Posted by DocMara on 08/04 at 03:10 PM
Good lord! Let it be known that my ‘false consciousness’ thing was: a) limited to grades; b) sort of a joke. Sort of. Thank goodness I’m one of those 1 in 10 people who avoid the interpellative call, so if you want to know what’s really going on, come to me.

The whole ‘male students resent women who exercise their authority without disguising it in cuteness’ thing is a whole nothing kettle of fish.

And Scott E. Kaufman: great comments. I love the one about you showing up to class bruised from being hit by a car. I’m going to try that this Fall, although I’ll of course fake the accident. I did once get a nosebleed in the middle of a lecture. I wasn’t a cokehead; it was just really really dry that Fall. And when I kept trying to play it off--you know, wiping the blood off my face, but casually--one student finally raised his hand to let me know that I wasn’t fooling anyone. Thank the ftm that incident didn’t appear in my evaluations.

Posted by on 08/04 at 04:17 PM
Dang.

For “nothing kettle of fish” read “nother kettle.”

captcha: rate. Go figure.

Posted by on 08/04 at 04:19 PM
I only have three evals on RMP (from two jobs!) and my average is a blue face with no smile. I’m a mean, mean adjunct because I make my students remember titles, names, and dates for my survey class. (I know, I know, poor kids, they all think art history will be easy!)

The best quote “She needs a big time reality check.” bwahahaha! But I have to admit my lone chili pepper was a nice surprise.

Now I wish I knew everyone’s real name so I could add chili peppers…

Posted by on 08/04 at 11:54 PM
Any grad student who would object to being called strange and awkward is necessarily displaying a tremendous lack of self-awareness.

Posted by Field Marshall Stack on 08/06 at 05:28 PM
We can tell the students and the teachers here!

As a former student, I wish I’d known about RMP when I was taking classes. Unfortunately, a reality about collegate life is that good researchers are not necessarily good lecturers. This speaks as much to the necessity of separating education and research as it does to the quality of schools in the United States.

That said, if I was going to pay for a class, it behooved me to find a teacher that wasn’t a waste of time. Very little in college is worse than spending hours of your life in a class whose professor speaks in broken english, the assigned books have nothing to do with the course, and papers are graded by the extent that one agrees with the professor. Luckily, I suspected this and modified my behavior accordingly. There is also the class in which the professor always came in drunk.

Regardless of the grades in these classes, just like your reviews are compromised by a few bad apples, students too are subjected to such problems. Why, then, would anybody be surprised that someone would provide a service in which students could warn fellow students of bad experiences?

Posted by Eric B. on 08/07 at 09:42 PM
though no one will read this, since i was in the city for the weekend and couldn’t comment, i’ll proceed anyway.

a couple of things i noticed with this post and the comments: 1) there are more iowans reading this blog than i thought there would be (but then, there are more iowans than i think there ought to be), and everyone knows that there is really only one state-funded university in iowa, and that’s the university of iowa. because ames is lame.

more importantly, however, 2) WAIT! i was IN that fall ‘04 501! someone hated you? hmmm… now i’m just going down the list of the cohort and trying to figure out who it was. this is something that i consistently do with student ratings, be they RMP (i have a pretty good idea who gave me the chili) or SRTE. well, it wasn’t me, at any rate. i probably wouldn’t have taken another seminar with you if i had hated you. and, for everyone else, it’s true - i can’t remember a single instance of self-aggrandizement in re: published books/articles.

Posted by Arkadin on 08/08 at 03:57 PM
I’m a prof at a small college, and I check the site occasionally to see what potential students might read. At the end of May, I received three virulently negative comments on the same day, fairly libelous and contrary to my college course evaluations--with written comments--from 29 students. So I checked out the site more. How does one have authorization to post? Turns out one doesn’t give an e-mail address or verification of being a student on that campus or elsewhere. So profs are easy targets for those who have never taken courses with them and may never have been a student at their college. It’s quite the travesty. Coincidentally, I was part of a review in late May that resulted in the firing of an adjunct, after several student complaints about behaviors suspiciously similar to those in the three fresh posts on me. Curious, isn’t it? And no, I hadn’t checked her ratemyprof ratings. But to even allow the site to remain up is scandalous. You never know who is writing, and it can be less than amusing gossip. Were I to be looking for a job, this could have a negative impact (although would I want to move to a place that trusts ratemyprofs.com?).

Posted by on 07/09 at 08:19 AM

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