Evaluating Faculty: Classroom Consumer Report
J. D. Hayworth describes implementation of the Classroom Consumer Report when he was student body president. The CCR was a student evaluation of faculty.
Interview on 2015-07-11 00:00:00 -0400
Transcript
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Students – especially the NC State experience, and perhaps it will come this way again, given the usurious rates for student loans these days
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– a lot of people were working their way through school, and they wanted to have a way–. In much the way that Duncan Hines had his restaurant guide, or Mobil has a travel guide, people wanted to evaluate their instructors.
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Well, as you might imagine, not exactly popular with the faculty. But, now, wait a minute.
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Educators are charged with evaluating students. Fine, and we can say that relationship is different, but rather than being hierarchical I just think it was a laudatory effort
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to have a guide to see how students thought different professors and teachers actually dealt with the art of instruction.
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It made for some controversy, and the irony was I had heard, you know, about a big university, it’ll be impersonal and you won’t know your professors.
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Well, the obvious student buy-in is, hey; you get to rate your instructors. You get to grade the teachers.
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Now, and you have to remember the days of computer
programming and stuff, and there may be a couple of copies left in the Technician archives, but, as I recall, I believe the Technician printed the CCR as a supplement.
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The technology of the time did not allow itself to really get into kind of a micro breakdown. It was kind of more of a macro study of–. I don’t know how good it was.
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Probably the notion was more intent than the outcome, but then again, when you’re kids in college and you got – and I mean the guys who worked on this thing worked long and hard hours.
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It may have helped them academically too, in statistics and all that, and I think it was a laudatory effort. But I mentioned historian Stephen Ambrose a little bit earlier and his disdain for student government
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I read in the pages of his prose with great historical biographies. I think it’s an understandable tendency that professors and those who instruct callow youth
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don’t like a sophomoric evaluation coming back their way, and that’s just part of the institutional angst or the give and take that goes on in a university.
This video is an excerpt from a longer interview. Contact the Special Collections Research Center to request the transcript of the full interview.
