Course Evaluations:

History, when Knights were Bold

Back when we walked to school uphill both ways in
the snow and had Saturday classes, evaluations went
directly to the teacher and were summarized and used
in the annual Dean's Conference which was framed as
self-help assessment...

"how are things going?
ill?
well?
what are your plans?
what can we do to help?
what are
your thoughts on things-in-general"

...kind of a deal. Assess& Be assessed.

Dean Godard said "my job is to be sharpening the pencils"--
his image for providing administrative support.

Jerry was the dean who insisted we abolish tenure: said he'd
never recommend any one for permanent employment; and
we--all young turkeys then...

[no middle-range faculty: just us younguns and
a batch of elders--"presbyters": retired volunteers
from big universities as well as Casey's college...

(Irving Churchill, English professor & ancient
dean who kept telling how it was in the
good-old-days at Coe)]

...went along with it enthusiastically except for one History
Teacher guy named Carmichael who would stand-up &
deliver a full lecture his class even if no one showed, stood
up in Faculty Meeting and told us all This Idea Sucks!

[first I'd heard that word used
aloud in polite official academic company.

(Carmichael named his daughter Veronica
Reagan Carmichael and later in his life was
kidnapped and stuffed in the trunk of a car
for awhile.)]

At any rate still & all: evaluations were an "instrument'' (we
didn't call them instruments yet) for feed back from students
to improve our work and it wasn't till our Buddhist dean,
Spence McWilliams arrived that it was converted it all into
DATA for our renewable tenure system and he had each item
averaged and the whole reduced to raw scores & Grade Point
indicator so you could measure your self against your colleagues
and tell if you're doing ok or not: upper quadrant or not.
Provocation for collaborative genius, creativity and
inventiveness.

McWilliams did sitting meditation every day and went to silent
retreats, but was as up-tight & tidy an administrator as we'd had--
wanted to get it RIGHT, damnit. .

That's when fac-teaching evaluations plus all
the other professional stuff (the yearly evaluation
report form? That's McWilliams contribution)
became high-overhead complicated: all that
assessmental figuring and computing: to get
the scores out. Professional.

Sometimes we wouldn't get our grades back till into
the next semester when they were--for all practical
pedagogical purposes--useless.

I asked Spence once:
"Spence: how bout if
you were assessed by
the faculty 4 times a year:
would that make you a
better Dean--more
imaginative? Would you
like that better?"

"No , of course not!"

He insisted and I could
detect no irony.

xxxooo, Presbyter