(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.
In any case, it's stupid idea. It's a zero-tolerance approach that rejects the idea of rehabilitation, and places the responsibility only on the professor. If a teacher is so bad, then the administration is doing a poor job by letting the teacher still teach. Why can't students fire the dean, or the college president, for doing a poor job? There's no reason to have a horrible professor teach a course, even if tenured. College professors also get very little training in how to teach; why aren't these evaluations used to give more professional teacher training?
It would suck to be a teacher at a small college. There's about a 3x higher chance of being fired from the University of Northern Iowa as from Iowa State. And of course this gives more incentive to hire adjunct professors to teach, and leave research and other non-teaching positions for the regular staff.
And finally, if the ostracism were based in illegal discrimination - perhaps students who think a female teacher who is "too bossy" or dislike a Muslim teacher for being "too foreign" - then the school will be liable for the anti-discrimination lawsuit.
Anyway, while I think even more can be done to deal with professors that are bad at teaching, this idea here reminds me of some of the management strategies that involved dumping X number of employees with the worst reviews on some regular basis, and I thought that didn't go over well. Also, in my experience, a lot of students can't distinguish bad teaching from difficult subjects that require effort to learn, and occasionally have problems with things outside the professor's control (certain department decisions affecting curriculum). A process like this seems like it would be really biased toward large, required courses, with certain topics being potentially dangerous.
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.
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.