The New Academic Survival Skills

This is on PostSecret this week. Notice the "It works !" visible on the lower right. I do not work at a place like this (we do not have "Teacher/ Professor of the Year" awards, either, thanks be to god/dess). I did work at a place like the one employing the Secrets sender, and they are ugly, and it seems to me, the ever-increasing norm. The first question my colleagues and I were asked if we turned in a plagiarist or cheater was what we might have done to bring about the situation ("let's see how you wrote that essay question/test"), and people got a lot of mileage out of disparaging colleagues by saying things like I've never had a problem in my classes; I just let them know it's a question of respect; what does it say about us if we are treating our students suspiciously all the time ? And even though it was a small place, there were frats and other arcane organizations whose student members would simply blackball the class (without knowing the meaning of that word) so that the poor (always junior) prof's class wouldn't make, or, would sign up en masse for a class, behave normally throughout and do well, and then write horrendous student evaluations in vengeance for a brother slighted (i.e. caught) in a previous semester. And, dear reader: it worked ! The dean and the entire administration were fixated on student evaluations and numbers, and would turn to the poor guy who had found a few cases of plagiarism, pointing out that Prof. Cowering Dog (publically known as ---tenured--- Prof. Wonderful) was strict, but that the students liked him, and he "never had an issue with that." At the advent of TurnItIn.com, much hang-wringing and soul-searching abounded at faculty meetings, where near teary-eyed profs (the dean and admin enjoyed inner struggle as a spectacle) made little speeches in little voices denouncing the "lack of trust" that this would bring about. Or, infamously, the guy, who upon being told by the dean that he'd received tenure (they also liked ceremony: you had to go in person and wait for him to tell you yea or nay), jumped up from his chair, shook hands heartily with Dean Creep, and proclaimed, "No more Mister Nice Guy !" To which, no surprise, Dean Creep responded, "That's right." You heard me. That's right. Price of doing business, keep 'em coming and keep 'em happy. To pass out pizza during the filling out of evaluation forms (the only forms and type of evaluation that mattered for tenure) was not uncommon, but standard. Students would hint at their orders in advance, but always act politely surprised. One department chair apologized to a coach because a faculty member in his department had caught the plagiarism of two star athletes, deprivig him of their services for one (yes) game. I was young; I thought I was just at a Swamp SLAC, and that these monsters would never raise their heads out of larger lagoons. I was young.

You probably remember the brouhaha (ire, in my mind) raised by the New York Times article, "Judgement Day," supposedly about "polarizing" professors, student evaluations etc. The object of the slaughter story, Annemarie Bean, received little support even on popular sites such as Confessions of A Community College Dean, where, except for one or two like-minded souls, those responding to the post wrote things like "there must be more to it [her non-renewal]," and, except for one writer, who must be my cyber-soulmate (Are you out there ? Have you found me ?), no one pointed out that only the women who were in danger of losing, or who had lost, their jobs, were named. Consider this cozy little bit recounted in the original (NYT) article:

In his polemic “Why the University Should Abolish Faculty Course Evaluations,” published in a faculty newsletter in 2004, Clark Glymour, a philosopher at Carnegie Mellon University, argues that giving good grades can even make up for a professor’s lack of charm and wit. When Glymour was department chairman in the 1980s, a “newly hired assistant professor consistently received the lowest faculty course evaluations in the department, and I was concerned for his career,” Glymour writes. “I knew the man and his outstanding scholarly work well, and I could guess the problems. He was not charming or funny or good-looking, and he had a deep and formal view of philosophical topics.” Traditional and serious, lacking the levity students appreciate, the professor refused to seek help with his teaching, but he assured Glymour that his student evaluations would nevertheless improve significantly. “The next semester he had the highest overall course evaluations in the department, and naturally I asked him how he did it — had he changed how he taught or what he taught? ‘Not at all,’ he said, ‘before the evaluations were given out, almost all of the students knew they were going to get A’s. I see no reason to sacrifice my career to the cause of grade deflation.’ ”

Let's be clear: Glymour [chuckle, chuckle, poke ribs] is condoning this boys' club bit, all for the career, you know. My guess is that women do this less openly. Though our pizza bills were no secret, there were none of those "Atta Boy !" moments in the dean's office. These are the things that make me very CIA. Discuss.