By Professor Doom
A few posts ago,
I discussed how “aptitude” tests weren’t giving equality of outcome, so they
were labeled RACIST and tossed, via a
supreme court ruling which directly led to the mess we have today in higher
education.
That was 50 years
ago…but not much has changed in tactics for the Progressives, as we’ll see in
today’s topic.
SETs, Student
Evaluations of Teaching, have long been a sticking point for faculty. The
failing students always trash you bitterly (as is their right), but the other
students usually don’t care much. Bottom line, SETs are good for identifying
raging fires in the classroom, but past that they’re pretty weak for
identifying if a teacher is any good.
Figuring out if a
teacher is any good is a tough business, and honestly the only way to do it is
put another teacher in the classroom and observe (as nerve-wracking as that is
for the observed). This would be very time-consuming, but effective and useful
work. We have loads and loads of administrators to do that now, but they’re not
teachers, so they take the lazy route and just use the SETs to determine who
the good teachers are. Clever teachers learn that the easy way to look good on
the SETs is to fail nobody—only the failing students ever put down nasty
reviews, after all.
SETs can easily represent
the make-or-break of a faculty member getting a permanent position, and many
campuses use them as the de-facto deciding factor all hiring/tenure positions,
even if on paper they’ll say something different.
While I
acknowledge their minimal usefulness, overall I’d be ok if they weren’t a
deciding factor in any big decisions. That said, this guy is nuts:
I find this
thinking infuriating on two levels.
First, much like
with that supreme court ruling, we see the same structure of foolish interpretation
of results—we don’t get equality of outcome, so things must change, even if
such changes can damn tens of millions to eternal debt slavery, at least that
was the end result of the supreme court ruling. Before we wholesale toss the
SETs, we really need to think things through here, and we would, but that
insanity rules our campuses.
Far more
infuriating? Whenever there’s a study that shows students prefer, say, a female
or person of color in an administrative position, instantly and irrevocably the
campus moves to make sure to hire the appropriate genitals/skin color to parade
in front of the students. Never is “sexism” or “racism” used to explain the
results of the study.
Here we have a
study saying students prefer white male faculty. Instead of admin tripping over
themselves to hire white male faculty, we have the cry of “sexism” or
“patriarchy” or whatever used to justify tossing the study.
But…the fact
remains. The study says students prefer white male faculty, and it’s
hardly the only study with such a result. I can respect ignoring the study
(since it’s all supposed to be about education, not making students happy), but
this wild mis-interpretation of the results of the study just to advance the
lunatic Progressive Agenda of equality of outcome for everyone (except white
males) is vilely offensive.
“Instructor race is also associated
with SET…” DeLay said in a follow-up tweet, referencing the study’s finding
that minority professors tend to receive, on average, “significantly lower”
scores than their white, male counterparts. He goes on to mention the study’s
claim that “age, charisma, and physical attractiveness” also factor into
evaluations. “
Seriously, charisma, likeability, is a factor in how well
students like the professor? The guy
is reaching quite a bit to reinforce his point. He never addresses why we can’t
take the study at face value, and accept, bare minimum, that students prefer
white male professors, much less—heresy!—address the possibility that white
male professors tend to be better at their jobs (a reasonable interpretation of
the results of the study, although I again say we shouldn’t read too much into
this).
A few comments
reinforce how tone-deaf the professor’s claims are:
Hmmm...woman professors score lower, while 60% of college
graduate are now female. I think the lesson here is two-fold: 1) Female
professors must objectively suck compared to male professors; and 2) we clearly
need to get more men into universities,
The solid majority of
students on campus are female…and still male professors are coming out on top.
A more natural question then is it really that females are this self-hating, or
do we really have superiority for a certain gender of professor? Instead of
asking a real question, we simply have shouts of “SEXIST!” Maybe pointy-headed
academics are asking too many obscure questions, but honest that’s what higher
ed is supposed to be, instead of shouting slurs and simply refuting studies
which don’t yield the desired results.
If the results were inverse, they would be using them as
justification to genocide white males.
Agreed; maybe not the genocide bit, but
ultimately it’s the error of omission that will eventually cause studies like
this to be tossed and ignored, while, yes, every study that shows even the most
minimal advantage going to a female or “protected minority” gets shoved to the
forefront and used to justify ever more destructive policies.
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