Once a month I represent the classics department at a meeting of
the university’s Faculty Senate Council. This duty was handed over
to me six years ago by my department chairman, who described the
Council (charitably, in retrospect) as akin to “a junior high
civics club, but with less clout.”
After six years, I’m still not certain about the Council’s
purpose. With thirty-some members representing the university’s
various departments and schools, the Council appears to be advisory
in nature, at its best a kind of braking mechanism for
ill-considered administrative policy proposals. Mostly, though, the
Council is a gas-outlet for busybodies, a device to deflect the
energies of potential campus nuisances into the nebulous region of
“faculty governance” while the Administration goes unhampered about
the real business of running the school.
Now and then, the Council takes a break from budget reports and
joint declarations and salary complaints to hear concerns voiced by
students. Serious political concerns, that is — not the usual
spoilsport rants about inflated tuition, unlivable dorms, and
ghastly cafeteria food.
A student delegation (deftly palmed off on the Faculty Senate
Council by the Administration) recently came to our Council meeting
with concerns about gay and lesbian rights, American atrocities in
Afghanistan, U.S. designs on Iraq, and other stuff. But their main
concern was about the university’s “Free Speech Zone” — a section
of campus, prominently abutting the student union, to which public
protests are restricted; a kind of campus Hyde Park Corner, wherein
all manner of student cranks and malcontents may ascend to their
orange crates and hold forth without hassle from the campus police,
but also without annoyance to students and teachers of less
enlightened dispositions.
The Free Speech Zone, according to the student delegation to the
Faculty Senate Council, is bad — maybe even illegal, but they have
to do more research on the appropriate California civil statutes to
make certain — but for sure the Zone is bad. Concerned students
should have free access to the entire campus to exercise their
First Amendment rights, and stuff like that.
With a fading background of polite demurrals on the part of some
Council members (chiefly regarding the prospect of noisy halls and
classroom disruptions), I found myself drifting yet again into one
of my Faculty Senate Council reveries. These students, I thought,
look different from the shaggy sixties radicals of my own college
days. The designated student spokesperson was tall and thin, with
neatly trimmed blond hair and wire-rimmed glasses that would catch
the overhead fluorescent light whenever he looked up from his
notes: an image out of Orwell, I mused, or a casting director’s
idea of an SS lieutenant.
He was flanked by a girl (I think) sporting a purple necktie and
a turquoise-dyed mohawk. Among student radicals, the new look is
rigid and brittle: either in-your-face freakiness or icy primness.
Alas, with no military draft to galvanize a broader base, there is
little traditional shagginess amongst the disgruntled.
Yet the language and the general demeanor haven’t changed:
self-righteous clichés delivered with the perfect sangfroid
of privileged youth unencumbered by a sense of limits or a capacity
for shame. And while the Council members continued to compliment
the students on their principled stance and to offer constructive
criticism, I drifted further off, recollecting my own brief
experience as a protester.
IT HAPPENED 17 YEARS AGO, WHEN I was an earnest kid of 40 and only
ten years into my teaching career. In the last week of the fall
quarter, I had just left a classroom ten minutes early, allowing my
students time to complete the quarter-end ritual of filling out
Scantron evaluation cards, which a student volunteer would collect
and turn over to the department.
The cards contain a dozen formulaic statements about the
teacher’s performance (mainly on whether the teacher appears to
know what he/she is talking about and whether the teacher is nice
to his/her students), with number-two pencil bubble-in scores
ranging from 5 (terrific) down to 1 (rotten).
The practice of anonymous student evaluations began in the early
seventies under pressure from sixties campus radicals — the
old-fashioned shaggy kind, many of whom now run the colleges and
universities. By the time I started teaching, the practice was
firmly in place, a policy routine protected by bureaucratic habit.
For ten years I had given the practice scant thought, until that
fall quarter, when one of my students followed me out of the
classroom.
She was my best student that year, the star performer in a
fairly difficult Latin class of 15 students. When I cracked a lame
joke about her evaluations being faster even than her translations,
she shrugged and told me she doesn’t do evaluations. I asked why.
In less than a minute, she ticked away her objections to the
practice, politely declined to be manipulated by the school,
thanked me for a good course, and left me staring into the middle
distance.
It was neither the first nor the last time that a serious
student would set me straight on a topic I was muddled about. The
objections now seem obvious. First, the Scantron
statement-questions are implicitly accusatory, and therefore
leading; second, the cards are indiscriminate, giving the
conscientious student and the sullen slacker equal say about the
teacher’s performance; and third (my favorite), the anonymous
character of the evaluations violates the teacher’s Sixth Amendment
protection against false accusation.
With my consciousness thus inadvertently raised, I began taking
these objections to meetings of the English department, where I had
a joint appointment and where the students (unlike those in
classics) are of a dangerously varied quality. The responses
lurched from the cynical (“Your evaluations are among the highest
in the department, so what difference does it make to you?”) to the
stupid (“We evaluate the students — why shouldn’t they evaluate
us?”) to the craven (“We need to be challenged constantly by the
students to improve our performance”) to the oblique (“I always try
to be my best during the last week of class”). No one ever
responded directly to the objections. After a year or so, I gave
up.
Thus did I grow sad in my Faculty Senate Council reverie. My
first efforts at protest had been for naught; my moral witness had
pooped out. The only achievement of my heroic protestations was a
bit of crank status and new meaning for the old expression
“shoveling sand against the tide.” End of argument, end of protest.
The practice of anonymous student evaluations is time-honored among
the toniest institutions, eagerly sought after by faculty,
intermittently convenient to administrators, fully endorsed by
accrediting agencies.
Yes — and another shaggy bouquet handed down with love from the
radicals of the sixties, I thought darkly, waking from my reverie
as the student delegation trooped out of the Faculty Senate Council
meeting, with scattered applause from the Council members.
