Cover Story

Student Evaluations. What Do They Mean and What Can You Do to Improve Them?

by Chris Cumo

The University of Washington in Seattle was the first American university in the early 1920s to let students evaluate their professors, writes Peter Seldin, distinguished professor of management at Pace University, in "When Students Rate Professors." The practice spread slowly, noted Robin Wilson in "New Research Casts Doubt on the Value of Student Evaluations of Professors." In 1973 only about 30 percent of U.S. colleges and universities mandated evaluations. Today, however, they are ubiquitous, and they have sway. George Niketas, chair of the English department at Charleston Southern University in South Carolina believes they exert the greatest force at small colleges and universities that value teaching over scholarship. "Evaluations were used [at Charleston Southern University] as a club to keep someone from advancing," he said.

Robert S. Owen knows how powerful they can be. In 1995 Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania denied him tenure because students had given him mixed reviews. His marriage crumbled, and his savings evaporated along with his faith in the purity of academe. Despite these hardships, Owen got a second chance, landing an assistant professorship at SUNY at Oswego. He will never underestimate the influence of student evaluations.

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Fourth Estate

Got Copyright? Resources and Information About Fair Use in the Classroom and On-Line

by P.D. Lesko

IN 1842, CHARLES Dickens and his wife, Catherine, traveled to the United States. While trekking cross country, Dickens often spoke in support of an international copyright agreement. The lack of such an agreement enabled printers in the U.S. to publish his books without permission and without paying the Englishman any royalties.

This situation also impacted other writers, such as the American author Edgar Allan Poe. In England, Poe’s works were published without his permission.

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Juggling 101

Death & Dying: A Love Story

Posted: March 13th, 2010

Last semester I walked into a class that I had been petitioning to teach since I began at this particular school. It is a class on the dark and brooding subject of death. When I first talked with the department chair about this class, and about how I would bring a completely different perspective to the material, I actually had no idea what the class was about. Hubris, I know. I'd seen the name in the catalog and thought it would be fun to tell people I teach a class called Death and Dying. It is fun saying that, I admit it. I am a 40+-year-old woman, and the name sounds cool is a frivolous reason to want to teach a class.

In that meeting with my chair he gently but firmly informed me that he was quite content with the gentleman currently teaching the course. Last summer that changed. I was suddenly mired in the culture of death, grief, mourning, and more. I was going to bring in various cultures and how they approach sickness and death. I was going to show students how Freud's oft-misunderstood "death wish" was alive and well. I had so many plans.

The reality, of course, is that I also had to find a textbook (or five) that allowed me to do all of that. And that was when I hit the wall. Had no one ever taught this course the way I wanted to? Was there no instructor out there who saw the ceremonial purpose of body tattoos that commemorate our beloved dead, and had a textbook made that showed pictures of them? And what about those "in loving memory" car tattoos that everyone drives around with? Wasn't there a collection of essays someplace that had academics discussing the healing merits of such things? I did find some rather oddball books about zombie and vampire culture as outgrowths of our collective fear of dying. But the books were expensive, and the essays proved to be difficult to integrate into any other kinds of lecture. In the end, I went with a collection of essays that more or less outlines the historical development of the cross-cultural study of death utilizing essays and chapter excerpts by anthropologists, ethnographers, psychologists, folklorists, and other scholars. Mostly the students like the book. I'm constantly looking for supplemental materials, though, to fill in the gaps.

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