Proposal: Give College Students the Power to Fire Professors

(Photo: Kevin Dooley)

During the Fifth Century B.C., Athenians engaged in the usual practice of ostracism. Once a year, they took a popular vote. The person with the most votes was banished from the city. Ideally, this would remove the most hated person in the city.

2,500 years later, State Senator Mark Chelgren of Iowa has a proposal that’s strikingly similar. He thinks that some professors at state universities are incompetent. But because of tenure regulations, they get to keep their jobs for life. Chelgren has introduced a bill into the state legislature that would reduce these bad teachers by empowering students to fire a single professor every year.

The process begins with the end-of-semester student evaluations. The Chronicle of Higher Education explains:

The names of the five professors with the lowest ratings above the minimum threshold would be published online. Students would then vote on those professors’ future employment — and the professor with the fewest votes would be fired, regardless of tenure status or contract terms.

Should college students have the power to fire professors in this manner?




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The legislation is trying to deal with a real problem, but I think most people will agree this isn't the best way to handle it. Maybe the news story will inspire universities to think of more ways to handle the issue.
I'd like to see something like: a blind vote by students, the bottom 1% of professors have to attend mandatory teaching training and audit a course from a better-ranked professor.
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It can happen. Let's say there are ten bad profs in a small liberal arts college. If the first two or three bad profs are booted out, the remaining bad profs would either leave the college or dial down their "badness". This leaves half-decent and/or strict profs as targets. Even cordial profs can be booted out by bullies. It happens all the time, good teachers hounded out by soccer moms with agendas, delinquents who feign abuse, and political interest groups.

Say prof ABC is a cordial teacher in a college. She is fair and grades to the students' abilities and does not shirk in giving Fs to bad students. A small clique or fraternity boys can influence the class or school to vote her out if she threatens to flunk one of their members.

I have seen it firsthand. A college teacher I had was a cool philosophy prof, but he was a vocal atheist, and the religious students pressured the student government to remove him from all undergraduate classes. He ended up teaching analytic philosophy to grad students.
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I doubt that would happen. Only the most hated professor on campus need fear getting fired. A professor who maintains a reasonably cordial relationship with students would be completely safe.
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+1 @Andrew

Another problem would be teachers working to appease students. I would imagine no teacher would grade a student lower than a B for fear of getting voted down by vindictive students. This proposal would have the opposite effect. It incentivizes lazy students to keep on being lazy, as they have a big stick to punish teachers who have the temerity to give them a D for not attending a single class.

No, this proposal is just ludicrous. There must be some other way to fire/fix bad professors with tenure. Maybe they should be given less classes to teach, perhaps a single graduate-level elective class on his/her specialization. Then just make them earn their keep by getting research grants.
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It's a good idea to ALLOW students to fire particularly bad teachers, but the bar has to be pretty high, and it certainly shouldn't REQUIRE forcing out one teacher every year... First that will mean good teachers might get fired. Second, it will encourage bad teachers to just avoid being the very worst each year, nothing more.
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