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Another bad idea
The consensus seems to be that UCLAProfs.com is a misguided project that does no favors for those concerned about the teaching practices of politically doctrinaire professors--and rightly so. It is a misguided project, and it damages its own ostensible cause. But there seems to be far less consensus surrounding another damaging and self-destructive academic website that has made headlines lately: Rate Your Students. Rate Your Students is an anonymously-run blog devoted to publishing the complaints and gripes of anonymous college teachers everywhere. Designed to be a counterpart to the notoriously unreliable, unregulated, and often gratuitously cruel Rate My Professors, Rate My Students gives professors a chance to bite back with comparable hostility.
Some choice excerpts from professors around the country:
"If all of the kids who hated college would get out, it would empty the buildings pretty quick. But what a great life would remain for those who stayed. People would be interested. Students would talk. Teachers could teach. ... Instead, I presume that I'll get the same kind group in Spring semester. Dolts. Stupidheads. ... Disrespectful punks."
"He's never prepared for class, and he mostly shows up so he can run his mouth into the sweet ear of that sorority candy who sits next to him. ... I'd like to smack his smug face."
"You aren't my co-teacher! You don't have to nod your painfully huge head every time I say something, and then jump in with an inane aside every time someone in class dares to speak."
"Avoid this student if you can. She spends more on eyeliner than she does on textbooks. She wears more face powder than a 60-year-old stripper. She believes she's destined for greatness. She's destined to work at a laundromat."
Not every posting is like these, but many are. It's a damning indictment of academe on the part of a remarkably blinkered segment of the professoriate.
Taken as a group, college students are hardly paragons of interpersonal or educational etiquette, and their failures in this regard are real and, at times, egregious. But college professors are not likely to resolve the problem by sinking to the level of the petty insults they feel they have themselves received. Those professors who participate in the site are fooling themselves if they think they will all go undetected indefinitely--and they should be aware that professors who have griped online about their students have been fired for their trouble. So, too, have professors who have used the internet to engage in certain kinds of inappropriate praise.
The media has been having a ball with Rate My Students, but that's because even the most temperate journalists tend to have an unerring eye for scandal. And that is what Rate My Students is. What, precisely, is the scandal? Most basically, it is the spectacle of college professors giving substance to the gathering public impression that college professors have a striking tendency to behave in unprofessional and even appalling ways. That is the contention of Andrew Jones' UCLAProfs.com. That is also the contention of David Horowitz's Academic Bill of Rights, Students for Academic Freedom, and Luann Wright's NoIndoctrination.org. Each of these projects focusses specifically on the claim that college professors routinely abuse the privileges of academic freedom in order to behave in unacceptably ideological ways in the classroom--but what they are ultimately claiming is that college teachers cannot be trusted to behave professionally. If college teachers do not appreciate the arguments made by Jones, Horowitz, Wright, and others, then they ought to think twice before participating in a project that may look like a harmless opportunity to vent steam, but is in actuality helping to make the case that they and their colleagues may not deserve the sorts of pedagogical autonomy that academic freedom ostensibly grants them.
Debate rages at InsideHigherEd.com.
Posted by acta online at January 29, 2006 10:24 AM
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Comments
Hi. We love your site. You do a great job covering a lot of issues that interest us as well.
But we are discouraged that your review of our blog is so terribly slanted toward one extreme portion of what the blog covers.
So be it. Our readers continue to impress us, though, with thoughtful discussion about the college experience.
And nobody's getting fired over anything we're doing. All comments about students are wildly vague and anonymized oftentimes by name, region, type of school, and details of the posts that come in from people all over the country. They are intended to represent archetypal bad student behavior that is making life in the classroom harder and harder.
We love college. We want it to work better. And to do that, we must make people aware that the modern student is coming to us less and less prepared to actually do something serious and worthwhile.
Best wishes,
RYS
Posted by: RYS at June 28, 2006 09:56 PM