Will A Professor Please Stand Up?

At Tuesday’s meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), the Committee on Graduate Education’s (CGE) legislation to mandate evaluations of all Teaching Fellows (TFs) passed without a whisper of holding the Faculty to the same standard. While the Faculty’s desire to focus the meeting on curricular reform is understandable, it is utterly dismaying that a quick, easy consensus could not be reached on asking professors to be held accountable in the same way TFs will be.

Under this new legislation, classes led by professors who abstain from the annual CUE Guide will likely present students with an unusual evaluation: Students, presumably, will receive a shortened CUE questionnaire, asking for comments on their TF but specifically omitting questions regarding their professor.

As Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Theda Skocpol mentioned when she introduced the CGE’s legislation, the Faculty reached a near consensus last May in support of a comprehensive reform that would have required evaluations for all professors and all TFs. At that meeting, however, a few professors derailed the legislation’s momentum in a quasi-filibuster that caused the bill to be indefinitely tabled.

As the need for progress on the preliminary report of the Task Force on General Education becomes increasingly urgent, professors’ resistance to another prolonged debate over the issue of evaluations is understandable. But at the least, some professor should have opened the legislation to question to see if the critics of mandatory evaluations would ruin another faculty meeting with their renegade feelings.

Now, with CGE’s legislation passed and a new general education as the focus of next semester’s meetings, it is unlikely that professors will be required to be evaluated any time soon. Although this fact affects only a small number of courses—60 professors opted out of the CUE Guide last spring—the exemption remains a large blot on any claim that Harvard is trying to improve students’ academic experiences.

On both philosophical and practical levels, professors’ ability to opt out of the CUE guide is offensive to students, who essentially are deemed unworthy of making judgments—even ones that lack any repercussions—on their vaunted professors. Students might not have doctorates yet, but so long as they are being given the responsibility for choosing their courses, they deserve reasonable information upon which to base those decisions. It is a shame that not a single professor stood up in support of mandatory evaluations for all professors.