Rate My Professor.com
I have just received an e-mail from my Chair telling me that I need to read the comments on Rate My Professor.com and to adjust my teaching accordingly. His/her e-mail was sent within the context of my informing him/her that I planned to go to the union if he/she continued to use ratemyprofessor.com as a legal, reliable and reasonable tool in evaluating faculty and managing the department when in my view it is none of these. I would like to hear from other faculty members about this.
I teach in California. I have taught for 26 years in a state university. This month, $600 dollars is being taken out of my paycheck under the "furlough" plan. I teach philosophy. It it very difficult to teach the work of Bertrand Russell and others who have written about logic and to be micromanaged in the irrational world of academe in California. Fortunately, the two administrators with whom I am dealing (as I teach in two departments with a joint appointment) have both fallen into a legal trap of sorts; they have put in writing, in the form of e-mails, comments and demands having to do with furlough days and how to fill classrooms with students. In one case, a Chair wrote his/her own view of how to choose the furloughs days. Fortunately, someone versed in the rights guaranteed by the CFA contract informed him/her that he/she was acting against his current understanding of the contract. In my case, my chili-pepper obsessed Chair does not see the absurdity of his/her position. This is unnerving, because it means that a department with a budget of $4-5 million a year is in the hands, to some degree, of someone who equates the anonymous posters on ratemyprofessor.com with the standard student evaluation process. Both systems of evaluaton are problematic, but only one of them is used by the administration at my university. As I am a full professor, it is difficult for the Chair to "control" my classroom; I assume that stooping to ratemyprofessor.com is a way to demoralize and alienate me and others like me. I am a second-generation anarchist and a pacifist, and I assume that the Chair who is doing this may be "channelling" post-9/11 Greenscare tactics, but it may be something else. Whatever the reasons for this Chair's behavior, the behavior itself is disturbing, sexist, demoralizing and illogical. As we all know, the best students in the humanities are not the students writing about how "hot" a professor is or how easy a professor is.
This Chair does not wish me to "talk" about this situation, so I thought that I would blog about it instead with an off-campus community. I am aware that it will recycle in cyberspace until sucked into the Singularity.
The background of this situation is that early in the summer, the Chair took away a class he/she had assigned me a year, begged me to "help out" by teaching a large-enrollment class, promised to fill it and said that I would have a TA. One week before the first day of the semester, he/she explained that because of comments on ratemyprofessor, my class had not filled, and I would not get a TA. He/she also mentioned that perhaps he/she had opened too many sections of this GE course.
I will be teaching the class with the support of students. Two students who are not in the class have volunteered to help out, Facebook is bringing in students and a team of seven students who are enrolled have stepped up to take leadership roles. Thanks to social networking software, I have gotten many students to add the course. Having been banned by the administration for five years due to my politics from teaching large-enrollment, I will now be teaching a large number of students, basic literary theory, Kafka, Deleuze, etc.
Is anyone else being subjected to ratemyprofessor micromanagment?
Since 2000, I have been investigated by a team of faculty without union representation once and I have had fifty charges (all dropped) brought against me (2006). During the first meeting of the second investigation, I had no union representation.
If nothing else, I hope that my story encourages the reading of the book Academic Repression, published by AK Press. Despite all of this, I will continue to meet weekly with local activists and anarchists in an off-campus study group and I will be teaching Deleuze in two departments.
I teach in California. I have taught for 26 years in a state university. This month, $600 dollars is being taken out of my paycheck under the "furlough" plan. I teach philosophy. It it very difficult to teach the work of Bertrand Russell and others who have written about logic and to be micromanaged in the irrational world of academe in California. Fortunately, the two administrators with whom I am dealing (as I teach in two departments with a joint appointment) have both fallen into a legal trap of sorts; they have put in writing, in the form of e-mails, comments and demands having to do with furlough days and how to fill classrooms with students. In one case, a Chair wrote his/her own view of how to choose the furloughs days. Fortunately, someone versed in the rights guaranteed by the CFA contract informed him/her that he/she was acting against his current understanding of the contract. In my case, my chili-pepper obsessed Chair does not see the absurdity of his/her position. This is unnerving, because it means that a department with a budget of $4-5 million a year is in the hands, to some degree, of someone who equates the anonymous posters on ratemyprofessor.com with the standard student evaluation process. Both systems of evaluaton are problematic, but only one of them is used by the administration at my university. As I am a full professor, it is difficult for the Chair to "control" my classroom; I assume that stooping to ratemyprofessor.com is a way to demoralize and alienate me and others like me. I am a second-generation anarchist and a pacifist, and I assume that the Chair who is doing this may be "channelling" post-9/11 Greenscare tactics, but it may be something else. Whatever the reasons for this Chair's behavior, the behavior itself is disturbing, sexist, demoralizing and illogical. As we all know, the best students in the humanities are not the students writing about how "hot" a professor is or how easy a professor is.
This Chair does not wish me to "talk" about this situation, so I thought that I would blog about it instead with an off-campus community. I am aware that it will recycle in cyberspace until sucked into the Singularity.
The background of this situation is that early in the summer, the Chair took away a class he/she had assigned me a year, begged me to "help out" by teaching a large-enrollment class, promised to fill it and said that I would have a TA. One week before the first day of the semester, he/she explained that because of comments on ratemyprofessor, my class had not filled, and I would not get a TA. He/she also mentioned that perhaps he/she had opened too many sections of this GE course.
I will be teaching the class with the support of students. Two students who are not in the class have volunteered to help out, Facebook is bringing in students and a team of seven students who are enrolled have stepped up to take leadership roles. Thanks to social networking software, I have gotten many students to add the course. Having been banned by the administration for five years due to my politics from teaching large-enrollment, I will now be teaching a large number of students, basic literary theory, Kafka, Deleuze, etc.
Is anyone else being subjected to ratemyprofessor micromanagment?
Since 2000, I have been investigated by a team of faculty without union representation once and I have had fifty charges (all dropped) brought against me (2006). During the first meeting of the second investigation, I had no union representation.
If nothing else, I hope that my story encourages the reading of the book Academic Repression, published by AK Press. Despite all of this, I will continue to meet weekly with local activists and anarchists in an off-campus study group and I will be teaching Deleuze in two departments.
posted by Emily at
1:20 PM
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