Like most U.S.-trained academics, Rate My Professors (dot com) has been on my radar for a long time, but I never knew much about it, except that it’s completely public and seemed to include most of my teachers in U.S. higher education. Sperber explains that, predictably, it was founded by a Silicon Valley type, John Swapceinski, who later founded a slightly more subversive-sounding project, Rate My Boss.

I’ll skip a full summary, since Sperber’s report is already succinct and openly accessible. Let me just pick out a few key points:

• Rate My Professors (henceforth RMP) is structurally sexist, since all the implicit sexism in students’ perceptions comes out in the evaluations. No one is calling their male professors “shrill.”
• The students who write the reviews are themselves in a contradictory role. On one hand, their identification as “consumers” of higher ed is reinforced by treating their courses as products that deserve product reviews. On the other hand, they are also unpaid laborers for RMP itself, since they provide the content for free while RMP keeps the advertising revenue.
• Sperber argues that when RMP systematically encourages students to prefer “easy” classes and “easy” graders, this remains “a self-defeating effort insofar as it accelerates grade inflation, thereby diminishing the value and utility of high grades.” This point deserves further discussion, I thought. To take an analogy with currency: even in the face of inflating currency, consumers are still incentivized to seek the best bargains, are they not? Similarly, even if grades get more inflated, isn’t it always going to remain “rational” in our current system for students to optimize the ratio of effort to reward?
• Many students said that they write reviews, not because they love or hate their teachers, but because they had a “sense of duty to fellow students… coupled with a commitment to fairness.” A curious form of consumer altruism.
• Some adjunct teachers worry about the professional impact of their reviews, but others quip resignedly that “as an adjunct I have no job prospects” anyway.

I suppose I have two general questions about this study.

1. In my experience in U.S. higher education, the evaluations that “count” institutionally are the internal course evaluations, not these public online comments. So what’s the relationship between RMP evaluations and internal course evaluations?
2. It would be excellent to read further historical and comparative analysis. Sperber mentions in passing that student evaluations in the U.S. “developed as a tactic for advancing popular political demands for student empowerment during the 1960s and 1970s radical student movements.” Is there a history of this? Or any current comparative (international) research on it?

I’ve always read that early medieval universities, particularly in Bologna, were highly “market-driven”: students paid their instructors directly and “voted with their feet” about which classes to take. The early University of Paris is always put forward, on the contrary, as a more faculty-run model — one which eventually won out in much of the world. But a comparative, international history of “evaluation” — including the period before there were written, formalized evaluations — would seem to be necessary, if we are to grasp the longer term struggles between faculty and student power.

One can only concur, however, with Sperber’s conclusion that the “power” students exercise in consumerist course evaluations is extremely circumscribed, politically speaking, and in no way challenges the broader economy of higher education.

A question for Sperber, by way of closing — how did you come to do this research project, and do you plan to expand on it in the future?

The case takes place at the University of California, Irvine, circa 2011, when its Critical Theory Institute was threatened with losing its funding.

The Critical Theory Institute (CTI) has been a well-funded ORU (Organized Research Unit) of UCI for many years. Originally, it was the home and forum of famous French theorists, such as Jacques Derrida and Jean-Francois Lyotard, in the United States, spending their winter quarters away from Paris in southern California. The present small self-selected membership of the CTI was recently notified, among several other ORUs, that it would not be renewed for support. The meeting I attended, of distinguished humanities scholars whose careers have been defined by the era of critical theory, as well as two anthropologists (me being one), was called to discuss what was to be done now, how to survive. These discussions continue, but the conversations on that day were a snapshot of ‘old school’ resistance attempting to understand, negotiate and navigate its way in academic capitalism. Aside from the defence of critical thinking and scholarship in and for itself (eloquently articulated especially by the younger professors), others quite freely embraced vocabularies of academic capitalism: what we had left to offer was a brand – how could we trade on it?

A local businessman offered to contribute to the Institute if it would offer a course for corporate and business personnel in ethics. This idea was seriously discussed. More successful grant winners among us tied every idea and theme that the group might take up to writing a proposal and getting funding for them in the terms by which trends in the humanities are being supported today (e.g., in the realm of digital communication). Respectable ideas are financially supported ideas. Appeals to interdisciplinary value would be made for contributions from deans. By the end of the meeting there were a number of ideas for piecing together funding to keep the Institute going in the near term; most of these involved, frankly, begging, at best, taxing. All were trading in the vocabularies of academic capitalism, toward its embedded philanthropic side. The other anthropologist and I remarked following the meeting how weird it had been.

The details here remain scanty, but I take it that the paradox is clear: it’s disconcerting if you think you are an academic who doesn’t practice “academic capitalism” and then it becomes clear that… actually, you do.

If anyone from the Institute stumbles across this post, I would be delighted to hear details about the aftermath of the story. As the Center still survives today, it seems apparent that some new funding sources were worked out.

“The New Political Economy of Higher Education”, Special Issue of the journal Higher Education, Editors: Johannes Angermuller, Jens Maesse, Tilman Reitz, Tobias Schulze-Cleven, Higher Education, Volume 73, Issue 6, June 2017. https://link.springer.com/journal/10734/73/6/page/1

Eli Thorkelson put me on to this special issue of the journal Higher Education. I confess I had not seen it and that I was pleasantly surprised to see the robust theoretical and empirical work coming from a group of scholars who I was unaware of. Since I read as much as I can on US and European higher education (in English and Spanish), the fact that I was unaware of this network of researchers suggests that others might gain as much as I have from learning about their work.

This special issue contains the following articles:

1. The new political economy of higher education: between distributional conflicts and discursive stratification, Tobias Schulze-Cleven, Tilman Reitz, Jens Maesse, Johannes Angermuller
2. Worlds of higher education transformed: toward varieties of academic capitalism
3. Tobias Schulze-Cleven, Jennifer R. Olson
4. Autonomy or oligarchy? The changing effects of university endowments in winner-take-all markets, Heinz-Dieter Meyer, Kai Zhou
5. Varieties of academic capitalism and entrepreneurial universities, Bob Jessop
6. Academic hierarchies in neo-feudal capitalism: how status competition processes trust and facilitates the appropriation of knowledge, Tilman Reitz
7. Fief and benefice feudalism. Two types of academic autonomy in US chemistry, Oliver Wieczorek, Stephanie Beyer, Richard Münch
8. The elitism dispositif: hierarchization, discourses of excellence and organizational change in European economics, Jens Maesse
9. On stratification in changing higher education: the “analysis of status” revisited, Roland Bloch, Alexander Mitterle
10. Academic media ranking and the configurations of values in higher education: a sociotechnical history of a co-production in France between the media, state and higher education (1976–1989), Julie Bouchard
11. Academic careers and the valuation of academics. A discursive perspective on status categories and academic salaries in France as compared to the U.S., Germany and Great Britain, Johannes Angermuller
12. Academic mobility, transnational identity capital, and stratification under conditions of academic capitalism, Terri Kim

This is a rich collection of work ranging across a wide spectrum of political economy issues from a variety of perspectives. It is a dense set of works and so an attempt at a summary would be futile but I guarantee that reading it through will provide lots of new ideas and data on the processes of higher education. So I will only comment on things that struck me personally.

Throughout, the authors maintain a focus on comparison and their comparisons are often quite nuanced. General processes of hierarchization and neoliberal ideology are evident but a number of the articles leaven this generalized perspective by showing that national paths through these processes are anything but homogeneous. This is a helpful corrective to overly abstract generalizations about neoliberalism in higher education and also provide an anchor for local reform activities.

Many of the authors are quite sophisticated in economic analysis and thus do not fall for the simplistic argument that what is happening in mere “corporatization” of higher education. Their analyses are a good deal more nuanced and useful.

In a number of locations, they refer to the development of neo-feudal relations. In taking this up, the authors provide an interestingly new way of framing issues that have been talked about in other terms (new public management, neo-Taylorism, etc) and get additional analytical purchase on these authority systems.

A persistent theme is how ranking and stratification in academia itself can support the rising inequality in capitalism in general. This is a version of the famous cartoon strip “Pogo” where the cartoon characters say “We have met the enemy and they is us.”

There is a wonderful analysis of the way university endowments are being used to consolidate and protect the money of the rich under the guise of public-spirited charitable philanthropy. There is also an insightful argument about the need to distinguish between academic capitalism and emphasizing market mechanisms.

Regarding national differences, I greatly enjoyed the arguments that are made for the general trends in higher education being played out through highly path dependent scenarios in individual countries. So national differences persist and still matter, even though all countries are affected by neoliberal forces.

And there is a great deal more of interesting and nuanced analysis offered here.

I urge readers to delve into this collection. It provides fresh perspectives on many of the issues that traverse the whole field of higher education research and reform.