UConn Profs Say Faculty Reviews Should Remain Private Information

Faculty evaluations by students have become a major source of contention at the University of Connecticut (UConn), where professors are now beginning a legal battle with the Connecticut Freedom of Information Bureau (FOI).

This week, the UConn University Senate, a policy-making group composed mainly of faculty, reinstated the official faculty evaluation system that they had abolished earlier last month. After the decision, a group of professors represented by the American Association of University Professors filed a complaint filed a complaint with the FOI

A representative of the FOI said it is unclear what they hope to accomplish or what their next step will be.

At issue is whether the evaluations, which are currently confidential, should be made public for student use. In early October, the Senate had voted to to abolish the system of faculty evaluation by students because of an FOI decision last spring mandated the release of evaluations to the public.

After students organized a campaign to begin an independent evaluation system, the council this week reversed its earlier decision by a vote of 27-21. "We felt that this new system would surely be worse than the one we have now," said Mort Tenzer, a professor of economics at UConn.

Faculty members have said that they felt last spring's decisions to make student evaluations public was an invasion of privacy that could cause them embarrassment and interfere with their teaching.

"UConn students are asked at the end of each semester to fill out a form evaluating the performance of their professor. However, up until last year, no one had ever asked to see these results which were used in various administrative decisions," said Matthew Kink, a student who serves on the University Senate. A 1977 ruling of the FOI had stated that the evaluations were private documents.

When a reporter from the school paper was denied access to the evaluations last year, he filed a complaint with the FOI and gained the right to see the evaluations.

"The faculty failed to prove at that time that the public access would have detrimental effects on the university. It was decided that access was a legitimate public interest of public employees of a public university," said Victor Perpetua '73, a staff attorney at the FOI who is handling the battle.

When it was announced that the Senate had voted 29-25 to abolish the system this fall, Perpetua advised students to start their own evaluations. The student government and The Caily Campus began reviewing other colleges evaluation systems, including Harvard's CUE Guide, in an effort to form their own.

James Amspacher, editor-in-chief of The Daily Campus, said his organization still plans to go ahead with its own evaluation guide, "just to show that we can do it."