Dear Editor,

The system of student evaluations is obviously a useful institution
that needs to be preserved. It gives students power that they would not
otherwise have, and that goes some way toward counterbalancing the
institutional power professors and other instructors have over them. While most
professors and instructors aim at being as fair, balanced and objective as
possible in their grading and in their general attitude toward students, some
do not. Without student evaluations, students might be at the mercy of the
arbitrary behavior of these professors, as is sometimes the case in other
countries.

However, the institution of student evaluations also has
serious drawbacks that deserve more consideration than they are usually given.
These evaluations do not constitute or even claim to be rational, objective and
unbiased assessments based on truth and supported by facts, but are merely
subjective expressions of arbitrary personal preferences, whims or resentments.
In addition, their anonymity precludes any sense of accountability on the part
of the students filling them out. Since no other form of feedback is requested
from them, students are led to believe that the proper way to express one’s
judgment and exercise one’s power is through anonymous means that leave one
unaccountable and exclude the possibility of rational public debate open to
contradiction.

In other words, student evaluations amount to customer
satisfaction surveys, and their existence both expresses and contributes to
creating the prevailing situation in contemporary American universities where,
just like anywhere else, citizens have been turned into customers; providers of
knowledge or services into salespersons; things and humans into commodities;
and truth value into market value.

In the past I have heard some of my non-tenured colleagues
state (in private) that the aim of their teaching was not for students to learn
or understand anything but for students to be satisfied so that they would
write positive evaluations, thus ensuring the instructor’s continued
employment. While this degree of cynicism is not shared by most instructors,
the system of student evaluations forces all non-tenured instructors — and to
some extent even tenured professors — to view their students as customers,
their teaching as a commodity and themselves as salespersons.

I am not advocating the elimination of student evaluations.
This advocacy would be as ridiculous, because its implementation would be
detrimental. What I am suggesting is that a public debate be conducted on the
system of student evaluations. Ultimately, this system involves some of the
most crucial questions we have to face as members of an educational community:
What is the aim of teaching? What is the purpose of a public educational
institution in a market-driven world? What are the goals and reasons for being
part of the larger community to which we belong?

— Jean-Louis Morhange

Literature Professor