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?

Cockain’s paper has four major empirical claims. 1) Students are generally disappointed by the impossibility of realizing their own educational ideals at the university. This stems from the social realities of “boring” and “useless” classes, frustrating bureaucracies, unintellectual classmates, the university’s low institutional status, the diminished social value of university degrees, and the unstructured anomie of everyday student life. 2) In such circumstances, cynicism can come to seem realistic while naive faith in education becomes “outdated” (320); some students then find themselves painfully suspended in “double binds” between incompatible idealisms and cynicisms. 3) Faced with a university institution that no longer reliably provides “symbolic and cultural capital,” some students develop a frenetic “spirit of self-help,” looking to outside institutions and activities to try, in effect, to make their self-investment a success. However, this “energetic individualism” (321) in turn produces half-concealed, competitive hostilities among the students. 4) Finally, students manage this social instability by developing “masks and hypocrisy” and at times by idealizing the retrospective honesty and simplicity (laoshi) of their pre-university selves. Cockain notes in conclusion that this cynicism resonates with the “ideal subjects of neoliberal philosophy” who are forced into the “free dom” of being perpetually autonomous economic actors (324).

Conceptually speaking, the paper draws quite broadly on modern theories of subjectivity and narrative, such as Abelmann’s notion of university imaginaries, Foucault’s technologies of the self, Sloterdijk’s cynical reason, and even Fromm’s 1965 account of capitalist dehumanization. As Cockain sums up this complex body of theory, identity is “multiple, and always in the process of becoming” (323), and the self tends to meet contradictory social circumstances with ambivalence, even as it strives to recover narrative coherence or to reconstitute some form of agency. For Cockain, importantly, this view of student selfhood is not just an a priori (generically postmodernist) stance, but is a reflexive accomplishment of his research. He began the project, he recounts, with a sense that his students appeared “reduced” or “passive” as he encountered them in the classroom (315). Yet he explains that “interviews enabled me to attain a degree of critical distance from frustrations associated with my teacher perspective” (316). One major accomplishment of the paper is thus to remind us that teacherly knowledge is a form of structural blindness, not least because students have a strategic interest in managing their teachers’ perceptions, and that teachers need some other form of knowledge (such as ethnography) if they are to transcend the epistemic limits of their own positions.

The paper does raise a few additional reflexive questions. We learn in passing that the student population here consists of future teachers in training; what difference might it make to the analysis that these cynical students themselves want to become teachers? And conversely, I wondered what the subjective impact of this research had been for its author. Has Cockain’s own pedagogical stance shifted as a result of his work? Finally, like Abelmann’s Intimate University (2009), this paper is based methodologically on self-talk — through interviews and written self-reports — rather than on in situ observation of everyday life. Would student subjectivity seem different if the research method had been based on real-time observation, along the lines of various American dormitory ethnographies? But then, as the paper reminds us, subjectivity always exists through narrative, which implies retrospection (towards pasts) and projection (towards futures). And again, Cockain’s own inferences about student subjectivity in classroom interaction are shown here to be structurally incomplete and partial. In that sense, one key implication of Cockain’s paper may just be that real-time observation is fundamentally inadequate, if we are interested in the interior life of human subjects.