(Photo: Kevin Dooley)
During the Fifth Century B.C., Athenians engaged in the usual practice of ostracism. Once a year, they took a popular vote. The person with the most votes was banished from the city. Ideally, this would remove the most hated person in the city.
2,500 years later, State Senator Mark Chelgren of Iowa has a proposal that’s strikingly similar. He thinks that some professors at state universities are incompetent. But because of tenure regulations, they get to keep their jobs for life. Chelgren has introduced a bill into the state legislature that would reduce these bad teachers by empowering students to fire a single professor every year.
The process begins with the end-of-semester student evaluations. The Chronicle of Higher Education explains:
The names of the five professors with the lowest ratings above the minimum threshold would be published online. Students would then vote on those professors’ future employment — and the professor with the fewest votes would be fired, regardless of tenure status or contract terms.
I'd like to see something like: a blind vote by students, the bottom 1% of professors have to attend mandatory teaching training and audit a course from a better-ranked professor.
Say prof ABC is a cordial teacher in a college. She is fair and grades to the students' abilities and does not shirk in giving Fs to bad students. A small clique or fraternity boys can influence the class or school to vote her out if she threatens to flunk one of their members.
I have seen it firsthand. A college teacher I had was a cool philosophy prof, but he was a vocal atheist, and the religious students pressured the student government to remove him from all undergraduate classes. He ended up teaching analytic philosophy to grad students.
Another problem would be teachers working to appease students. I would imagine no teacher would grade a student lower than a B for fear of getting voted down by vindictive students. This proposal would have the opposite effect. It incentivizes lazy students to keep on being lazy, as they have a big stick to punish teachers who have the temerity to give them a D for not attending a single class.
No, this proposal is just ludicrous. There must be some other way to fire/fix bad professors with tenure. Maybe they should be given less classes to teach, perhaps a single graduate-level elective class on his/her specialization. Then just make them earn their keep by getting research grants.