By Halcyon Orvendal
I am writing this editorial today with the goal of changing an institutional policy at Lewis & Clark. I am not the person who can make this change, so all I can do is describe the policy — and its very real effects — and hope that someone else has the courage, or capacity, to act.
I remain hopeful that a change can happen, and this change could have a meaningful and positive impact on the lives of hundreds of teachers, at this institution, for decades to come.
The policy is: anonymous end-of-semester evaluations from students.
I cannot think of another context in which anonymous performance reviews are allowed to have such a significant — and lasting — impact on the life of an individual, in the context of their professional life.
The first thing I want to say is: most of my evaluations are positive — 98% of them. Many of them extremely so. They say excellent things about me as a person and a teacher. But that does not change the fact that I have received — and over seventeen years in the classroom, I have taught over 1,600 students — many negative, anonymous reviews. And they have stung and wounded me. In fact, they haunt me to this day.
I will share some of them with you here:
“I was bored this semester. I felt like I was being taught down to.”
“Pauls is highly disorganized.”
“I wanted to get to the point and rarely felt like we did anything applicable.”
“Pauls is a weird guy.”
“A bad professor who made an awkward semester worse.”
“I guess he was fine. Kind of snobby about ‘literature’ though.”
“He acts as though he’s giving us this wide berth to do whatever we want, but really nobody knows what’s actually being asked of them in the most basic sense and it’s paralyzing rather than liberating.”
“Class discussions were painfully tedious. Small groups tended to be better because we all knew how trite it all was and didn’t feel the need to pretend. A total waste of time.”
“I think he really needs to work on some things: especially just being calm and non-passive-aggressive in class.”
“Just not a good professor.”
“He gave us the same assignments week after week and didn’t remember that we had already done it.”
What was the result of receiving these comments?
A crushing sense of failure. Even though they represent the tiny minority of student opinions in my classes.
I am not the only one. I know of one colleague who gets a bottle of wine, uncorks it and pours herself a glass — the only way she can get through reading the forms. When another colleague found out I was writing this piece, she said: “I live in fear of opening those files every May and January.”
Reading these anonymous reviews each semester, I have often felt like a professional failure and, by extension, a personal failure. They have made me want to leave the profession of teaching. The negative comments are clearly written with the intention of wounding me — and they, in fact, succeed.
I cannot help but believe that if the students who wrote these things had to sign their names to them, then perhaps they would feel accountable, in the same way that I feel deeply accountable for my curriculum — and strive, constantly, to refine and develop it.
If I knew that the students who wrote these comments were, in fact, students who skipped numerous classes, or were poor writers, or who did not participate in class discussions — or who were clearly struggling with hostility toward their peers, or toward me, or with some other form of readily-observable mental illness — I would have a clearer sense of what was going on.
The anonymity of student feedback prevents me from understanding its context. And context matters. Because who writes the comment adds an important dimension to the comment itself. If the whole point of gathering this feedback is to make me a better teacher, then understanding who has had an issue helps me understand what the issue really is.
And furthermore — if a college education is not about gaining the courage to stand behind what you say, think, and believe — what is it really for?
Before you think, immediately, about privilege and fragility — as we have been trained to do in situations where someone who seemingly has power complains about the criticisms that they receive as a result of that power — please suspend your judgment for just a moment.
Instead of thinking about how I should feel — or how I could learn to feel — think about how I do feel, reading these words on the page. Travel with me into that emotion. I am a person, hopeful that I have done a good job — earnest. I care deeply about my students and their experience. I have worked as hard as I possibly can during the semester — and before it — to design courses that help students understand either fiction writing or nonfiction writing, and become better writers in these disciplines.
Then, I open my course evaluations at the end of the semester, and I read those words.
Why?
Is there not a better way?
The argument that students do not want professors to punish them — in the future — by giving them worse grades as payback for bad evaluations strikes me as unconvincing. We are not vindictive. As for getting a recommendation for a job or graduate school from a professor who you dislike — I do not even know where to begin untangling that situation.
The administration clearly thinks there is a problem. It convened a panel of professors in 2022 to engage in a multi-year revision process for the student evaluation form. But, sadly, the new form is very much like the old form — and everything is still anonymous.
What is going on here? Why are we doing this to our faculty — especially our untenured faculty? Why are we not taking steps to ensure that their job is as kind, and humane, as possible? Teaching, like learning, is really difficult. Can we take better care of each other?
About the Author
Pauls, this is a brave opinion and necessary debate. Thank you! I grew up in a system without any kind of evaluations. It was terrible! So, I like them, and I like them to be anonymous–I do believe in the existence of the atavic impulse of revenge. What I dislike is the open box. In a world where we are all invited to “leave your comments” and are used to liking and disliking without needed rational and educated criteria, an open box is a dangerous tool in the hands of anonymity. I believe this is the reason why much hate and fake news exist in the world as well. Let’s remove the comments and collect only anonymous stats. Best to all.