After an hour of debate, the University Senate resolved to encourage all Columbia schools to make course evaluations public, in a 44 to 12 vote
The University Senate passed a resolution urging all Columbia schools to make course evaluations public on Friday. After over an hour of intense debate, the senate approved the course evaluations resolution in an overwhelming 44-12 vote.
“The current system does not work,” said Ryan Turner, a graduate student in the School of Engineering and Applied Science who helped draft the resolution. “The students need and want more information to evaluate courses … That demand is very strong.”
“The student voice is very clear on this,” he said.
In passing the policy, the senate resolved that “all Columbia University schools work to implement an open course evaluation system during the 2012-2013 academic year, with due consideration to the specific needs and limitations of each academic program, and the expectation that open course evaluations should become the norm.”
“We have heard already, and I hope you hear today, how important this issue is to students and faculty alike,” Student Affairs Committee co-chair Alex Frouman, CC ’12, said before the vote. “If the senate is going to continue to be an authoritative body, we need to be a body of action.”
The debate leading up to the vote was heated, with representatives from both the Faculty Affairs Committee and the Faculty Caucus expressing opposition to the resolution. Biology professor Ron Prywes spoke on behalf of FAC, which voted against the resolution 7-2.
“We feel that open course evaluations will negatively affect the courses, such that the faculty will pander to the students in order to please them, rather than teach in a manner that is best for the students’ learning and development,” Prywes said.
Prywes said that publicizing course evaluations could lead to grade inflation and a suppression of academic freedom. He also noted a lack of faculty involvement in drafting the policy—which came out of SAC—and argued that evaluations could be skewed by racial or gender biases.
“I don’t think that … we should be subject to public ratings that are, in many cases, derogatory and without context,” Prywes said.
There was some student opposition to the proposal as well. GSAS student and senator Cristina Perez Jimenez said that the senate needed to do additional research before passing the resolution.
“There is no single evidence that open course evaluations make teaching better,” Jimenez said. “And I think until we have that evidence that open course evaluations improve education, we really can’t forward the discussion.”
The Faculty Caucus voted against the resolution 9-2. Although the caucus is made up of all of the senate’s 50-plus faculty members, only 11 were present for the vote. Astronomy professor Jim Applegate spoke on behalf of the caucus, saying that it would “support a joint effort by appropriate Senate committee—student affairs, faculty affairs, education, and the Commission on the Status of Women—to determine ways to provide more and better information to students to aid them in choosing courses.”
But many faculty members said that the votes of FAC and the Faculty Caucus did not represent the opinions of all professors.
Pharmacology professor and FAC member Alice Prince pointed out that many of FAC’s 17 members were not present for the committee’s vote.
“I think it’s very unfair to lump all of the faculty based on the few—very vocal and very well-reasoned—arguments of my colleagues that are here,” she said. “We get evaluated all the time. It’s part of what life is like now. You have to be responsible for your actions.”
Several faculty members from schools and departments that already have open course evaluations, such as the Law School and the economics department, also spoke out in favor of the resolution. Both economics professor Brendan O’Flaherty and law professor Philip Genty said that some professors’ fears are unfounded.
“The experience has really been quite positive throughout,” Genty said. “I think it’s a benefit to all of us. It’s caused a greater attention to teaching.”
Although individual schools will determine the specifics of how to make their course evaluations public over the next academic year, many senators expressed support for a rollout period, an idea first pitched by Provost John Coatsworth. During this period of time, faculty members would be able to choose whether to participate in a public evaluations pilot program.
“If we learn, as other schools have, that consequences feared are relatively minor—or absent altogether—it might be possible to move forward in a way that makes us competitive with other institutions at the end of that period,” Coatsworth, who voted for the resolution, said. He added that this was what Harvard University’s approach to open course evaluations was when he was a faculty member there.
The senate’s resolution suggests, but does not mandate, that “the implementation of open course evaluations be done with consideration to the Report on Open Course Evaluations published by the Student Affairs Committee and its recommendations.” The report proposes the release of qualitative and quantitative evaluations data, a two-semester rollout period, and a two-semester grace period for new faculty members.
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