Academia’s “American Idol”
TVO's Best Lecturer series brings reality TV to a classroom near you
I’ve had a lot of opportunities to observe faculty in their natural habit, often in governance meetings and in private conversations outside the classroom. It really changes your perspective on professors when you get a sense of their more private professional lives, which is one of the reasons I encourage all students to participate in their university structures whenever there’s a chance to do so. You may not always be impressed with what you witness, but it’s bound to be illuminating. I still participate in governance as an alum, and I’m still regularly surprised.
For me, most recently, it was the public endorsement of TVO’s Best Lecturer competition. If you aren’t familiar with it by all means, check out the link. It’s a worthwhile event, and I’m quite pleased to see TVO supporting public intellectualism. But when you get right down to it, it’s just another reality TV show with audience voting. The reality may be good intellectual content, but the pattern still holds. It’s a popularity contest. Among university circles, it’s sometimes referred to as “Academic Idol” or similar. It’s fun, and if it entertains (and educates!) people that’s great, but wouldn’t you think that university professors are above the need for professional validation via public voting? Not hardly, let me tell you.
The first time this competition was held I can remember hearing professors snicker behind their hands at the idea. Oh, I’m sure some still do that, but at the time it was considered gauche for anyone to even admit it was interesting. Then it was held again. That year U of T had a particularly strong showing in the final 10 and suddenly I started hearing about it at governance meetings. Now we’re on the third go ‘round, and at the last meeting of the Academic Committee of Scarborough Council, we were actually urged to go vote when our representatives are up! We’ve got two professors in the running, and they are the only two from U of T generally. So, local pride, you know?
What’s especially hilarious is that I’m hearing some of this from the same professors who regularly pan the efficacy of student evaluations. They don’t want to admit that undergraduates in the classroom might have valid opinions about the quality of education, but they are willing to endorse the significance of an Academic Idol competition? Oh, naturally it’s all still very casual. Just in good fun. But it merits public attention at governance meetings. It’ll make it into the promotional literature around campus too, right beside the bone cell experiment another professor has just put into space. No one would suggest these are equivalent professional accomplishments, but they do tend to get mentioned quite frequently in the same venues.
What does all of this mean? To me it only means that professors are just as capable of being silly and inconsistent as the next human being. They still crave approval. They still compete in the most inane ways, and then do that familiar song and dance routine about how they don’t really take it seriously. Are these mixed signals here? You bet they are. Something of this nature can’t be both professionally irrelevant and deserving of significant attention at the same time. Now, it’s dead true that winning Academic Idol will never secure tenure for anyone, or serve as a significant element in a department review process. But it’s sure as hell good for bragging rights in the faculty lounge. And anyone with a bit of common sense knows that bragging rights and social standing, of any sort, have a way of spilling over into other areas. Academia isn’t immune to that.
Seriously, check out the link. Tune in and vote for Ontario’s Next Top Professor. If nothing else, it’s amusing to remember they’re doing it primarily because they want to win for all the same reasons as Canada’s Next Top Model. Some instincts are universal.
I never put too much faith in student evaluations. The administration says the evaluations have an effect on a professor’s career but I think it is minimal. Many professors teach only because it is part of their research contract.
Another thing I don’t like (at least at McMaster University where I’m from) is that ratings are not made public UNLESS the professor agrees to it. The professor actually has to opt in to have the results published. I find this ridiculous and completely backwards. The results should be made public from the start and the professors should have to opt out.
As far as this contest goes, just like you said, it’s all about bragging rights. It’s all marketing.
I would be more interested in seeing Discovery add to its “Canada’s Worst…” series. “Canada’s Worst Lecturer” is a show I would definitely watch.
Thanks for the comment Danny. You know, you might actually be surprised at how much attention student evaluations do receive. You do have to remember that their primary purpose isn’t to be published for student consumption in an Anti-Calendar or similar. I mean, I share your frustration, I published three editions of the Anti-Calendar on my own campus. But they are used primarily for internal departmental review. And they are felt there, though it’s sometimes hard to know how much.
It’s definitely a mistake to overstate how much attention evaluations receive (and maybe they should receive more) but if you really want a sense of that, try reading Rate Your Students sometime. That blog is definitely a trip unto itself, but the instructors who post there are frequently very annoyed at how much impact student evaluations can have on their careers. They couldn’t be that pissed off, could they, if the evaluations didn’t matter? =)
At UBC, ratings are not made public unless a professor agrees to release the information. I’m fairly sure that’s standard across Canada due to some privacy law, but please enlighten me if I’m incorrect on this fact.
UBC actually hasn’t even published or made public the results of teaching evaluations for about the past 13 years and it’s only now that they’ve decided to start publishing them again. This is great, but it still doesn’t avoid the problem that the worst professors are the ones most likely to not release their results. We’ve had the idea at the AMS (student union at UBC) to publish the names of the professors who refuse to release their results.
With regards to how evaluations are actually used – I think that is really anybody’s guess. From the professors that I’ve talked to, teaching evaluations are not regarded very heavily, emphasis is instead placed on research accomplishments. Keep in mind that UBC is a research institution, so the focus might be different then other universities.
Hi Blake
Watch your in-box for a more detailed e-mail regarding my own experiences with publishing our campus Anti-Calendar. I’m not sure if you’ll find my observations helpful, but they didn’t seem to belong here.
It’s true that the research priority often undermines or entirely circumvents any discussion of teaching excellence, but it definitely isn’t just at UBC and the other large institutions. Almost every university of any size in Canada has either aspirations or pretensions of being a research hub. That’s one of my significant criticisms of the status quo. Our unwillingness and inability to differentiate between different institutional missions means that it’s incredibly hard to produce focus in any area. Not to say we need to decide that one institution is going to better at the expense of the others, but it should be possible to settle on “different” without establishing a hierarchy among those various roles.
For what it’s worth, my own experiences have anyways been that evaluations do matter. I know most students feel like they don’t matter and I don’t expect my claim to change their minds. But it’s like feedback of any sort. To expect your comments to produce some immediate result that you can see before your eyes is just naive. These things take time, and there are many other opinions at play aside from just yours. But the evaluations are read and do matter. Seems as though people find this a much more interesting topic than TVO’s Best Lecturer competition. I’ll have to write about this some more, pretty soon.
Jeff, would you happen to have a copy of your Anti-Calendar? I would be interested in seeing what it’s like. How did you go about gathering the data for it?
http://www.scsu.ca/anticalendar/
Hi Danny. Sorry for the delay in reply. I’ll be in touch off this comments page. It’s been a while now, but I may be able to help at least somewhat.
My prof won!! Oh sugar!!