Although New Holy claims she got the "irony" of my essay, I'm not convinced. Even if she did, she still seems to have missed my point.

New Holy claims, opaquely, that I have an "overly functionalist approach to higher education." But, of course, my sarcastic indictment of the pernicious effects of student-generated numerical evaluation forms on the quality of classroom instruction was intended to discredit precisely the "overly functionalist approach to higher education" that these disagreeable and noxious forms encourage. These forms, such as the Knapp form used by about 20 departments at this university (some with great misgivings), encourage many of us to do and say things that may not help students learn at all, but that merely flatter, humor, or impress them, as a functional way--according to the research I cited--to get higher ratings on the forms used to determine our employment, promotion, and merit-pay increases. Professors who believe that good teaching should be measured primarily by how much students learn, and not, for example, by how much students like their grade ("fairness on grades and evaluations"!) are disadvantaged by forms that assess the instructor's "enthusiasm" or "knowledge of material," judgments that few undergraduates are in the position to make.

Students brought up on Big Bird and Barney naturally love instructors who are bouncy, warm and understanding, and assume that if they have been entertained then they have also been taught. But research indicates that students learn more from instructors who are business-like and challenging, not humorous and warm. Indeed, in my essay I reference several studies that show an inverse relationship between how much students actually learn from an instructor and how much they like that instructor. There is nothing wrong with amusing students or with listening to their needs; I would like to think that I do both (and more). But we should always be cautious about turning the classroom into another episode of Oprah, with the instructor playing both moderator and victime du jour. Such self-dramatizations not only are, to my mind, demeaning, but detrimentally encourage students to see themselves as victims. As David Gelernter, maimed by the Unabomber, reminds us, "when you encourage a man to see himself as a victim of anything--crime, poverty, bigotry, bad luck--you are piling bricks on his chest." Today's students, many of whom have been under-parented and overly indulged, may be more badly in need of professors who ask them, as Jaime Escalante did the street-smart "victims" of the barrio in East L. A., to stand and deliver.

It is anybody's guess how often, to what degree, and in what numbers professors succumb to the ever-present temptation to do professionally dishonest and pedagogically unsound things to raise evaluation ratings, but the documented phenomenon of grade inflation suggests that teaching to the course evaluations may be widespread. That these forms are now having a negative impact on teaching is confirmed not only by what I have heard professors confess to doing, but by my own struggle to teach with integrity.