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Professor Robert E. Tindall's thoughtful letter to the Arizona Daily Wildcat ("Student evaluations of faculty should be considered," Oct. 17) argues that: "The student evaluation of teaching should receive significant weight in the evaluation of teaching. " As one who has been regularly evaluated buy his students for the past 25 years, I agree that "their judgments are [to be] respected and trusted." So it would seem to follow that their opinions should count for something in the overall evaluation of an i nstructor.
At the same time, however, I am not surprised that some members of the faculty have resisted this apparently logical step, since Professor Tindall characterizes the students whose judgment is to be "respected and trusted" as "paying customers." If "extern al customers and stakeholders are the accepted judges of organizational performance," he argues, then "customer input" must be a significant measure of corporate effectiveness.
To argue in this way reduces the judgment of students to an expression of customer satisfaction: Was the service prompt? friendly? Was the food tasty? Since I do not believe that education is something we eat, and since the process of education is often n ecessarily dissatisfying, I cannot accept the consumer metaphor.
Given his professional interest in management, it is natural that Professor Tindall should accept the currently fashionable model of higher education as a corporate enterprise. My own professional experience, however, as a student of language, convinces m e that the metaphor in question is a poisonous fruit.
According to the consumer model, the modern "omniversity" is a species of business, whose personnel - faculty and administrators - are accountable to its various clients (students) and shareholders. The clients may be variously conceived as consumers of a product (education), or products (graduates) manufactured by the industry, or simply as customers (patients?) for the service provided. Those whom we call administrators are in fact management; and from their perspective, what we call faculty become labo r - or servants.
The master-servant analogy is naturally unattractive to most self-respecting faculty. From our point of view, indeed, it is quite deadly. Authority, as the English poet John Milton observed, is the very life of teaching.
But the ones who suffer most from the malign influence of the corporate metaphor are students. Ascustomers/consumers/products, they are deprived of any authentic relation to the process of their own education. As mere functions of the system, they can ha ve no real authority - which is also the very life of learning. Lacking such authority, students become patients, suffering the more or less benign ministrations of their servile instructors, rather than the agents of their own intellectual growth.
On the whole, therefore, the idea that public institutions of higher learning are merely or essentially big business, needs to be stoutly resisted as a corrosive that eats away the heart of the academic enterprise. The business of academia is not business but education - teaching and learning.
Ideally, as teachers and students, we are all, in varying ways and with different kinds and degrees of authority, engaged in the communal enterprise of learning from each other. It behooves us, therefore, to search for better metaphors to articulate what we mean by education, not merely as an institutional byproduct, but as a life-giving and sharing process.
Toward that end, I offer a suggestion borrowed from Sir Philip Sidney, that education is essentially a process of liberation: "This purifying of wit, this enriching of memory, enabling of judgment, and enlarging of conce[ption], which commonly we call lea rning." Since the practical significance of this definition will not be obvious to everyone, I should like to conclude with an application to the question at hand.
Students evaluating their teachers are, in the first place, enabling their judgment by thinking critically, growing in self-knowledge. To the extent that they do so constructively, they are purifying their understandings, clearing their minds of prejudice and preconception.
Students engaged in such activities are in fact enlarging their imaginations by participating creatively in their own education. In this way they become, to borrow from Milton again, "authors to themselves in all, both what they judge and what they choose ." That is what I mean by education, and that is why I believe that student evaluations of teaching are significant.
John C. Ulreich is a professor of English at the University of Arizona.
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