You may have heard of my situation and me. It has been reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, and People Magazine, and discussed on "The View" with Barbara Walters. I myself have appeared on "The Today Show," Fox TV, and CNN, as well as on BBC radio and many American and Canadian radio shows.
What happened to me--and to others--raises important questions about the terrible power of student evaluations and the "freedom" of the internet. Since I have filed a lawsuit against the former student who maintains the Teacher Review World Wide Web site on which I was defamed, there is only so much my attorney will allow me to say about it in these pages of The Montana Professor (the case is now in discovery).
Allow me to at least tell you how it all began three years ago. First, a little context.
I teach creative writing and other courses at the City College of San Francisco. I am 62, and have published lots of fiction and essays, and had plays produced in New York and San Francisco, and won a number of writing contests.
City College is a two-year community college with all the problems of a big urban American school, including students who didn't do that well in high school and expect the community college to cure their previous shortcomings, and students from foreign countries who have very poor English skills (a real example: "I enjoy to read Hamlet because I am laughable and enjoyable"). I know it is politically incorrect to call attention to these shortcomings but they are too prominent to ignore. There are also students whom I call the Gifted But Wounded. These are students who may be bright, but they have, to put it bluntly, something wrong with them: psychologically, emotionally, culturally, whatever. It may be drugs or decadence or laziness or lack of effort or an inflated sense of Entitlement, but the problem shows up as very low levels of verbal skill or factual knowledge, combined with hysterically inflated self-regard. Nothing is their fault. Society has failed them! The schools have failed them! They have heard this crap for so long that they believe it.
So basically what we have at City College are tons of unassimilated ESL students, along with spoiled-rotten Americans who have trouble communicating on what used to be called a "college level," and hordes of the burned-out and screwed-up, with a sprinkling of some quite competent and quite nice students.
City College is not unique; faculties across the country observe the same demographics. Students blithely demand "better" teachers, when the lack of competent teaching is the smallest part of the problem. People who have not been in the classroom as living, breathing teachers do not comprehend what has been happening. I shudder now, three years later, that I was eventually forced to invite journalists from CNN, The San Francisco Chronicle, and the San Jose Mercury-News into my classroom, just to demonstrate to the world--talk about pressure!--that I was not the evil monster being depicted by cyberthugs who had never even met me.
I had been at City College for seventeen years--eight of them as a part-timer. I had gotten a Ph.D. to try to protect myself from the perils of my working class Detroit background (a mother with a third-grade education from the hills of Tennessee, a father who went to the seventh grade in the farmlands of Illinois). Eventually I got tenure. And I was delighted to have my heart--not to mention my other body parts--in San Francisco!
One day I was in the faculty dining room--"unelitistly" open to anybody off the street--when somebody said there was this new-fangled thing called a "website" about teachers. (Oh, brave new world!) There was a telling silence. "Am I on it?" I asked. More silence. "Well, yes, you're on it, Dan, and it's not...nice." I didn't want to know any more. "Well, as long as they don't say I'm boring," I said, a bit too smugly. "Oh, certainly not that," I was told, by a person looking increasingly superior.
So naturally I checked out this "website." (Unlike a lot of people at the time, I was computer literate, being all for the charms of the Internet.) My face flushed. I was "arrogant," and an "unfair" grader. Sure, occasionally I assign my own plays and novels, but don't I have the right to be proud of my accomplishments? I wasn't even a very tough grader, and certainly not unfair.
But these comments were positively tender when compared to others that followed three years later, again written by people trying to keep the Internet "free" but not written by students who had taken my classes. I was called a "faggot" in several postings, and another one claimed that I had raped and molested students in exchange for better grades. "He raped me in front of the whole class--it was embarrassing," read one posting. "I wish you kill yourself" [sic], wrote another, and "there's no need for faggots in this world." I'll spare you more examples.
These slanders and the new ones that come in every day, I felt, had to be answered. Yet there was and is no way on the Teacher Review website to reply to the accusations and lies. There was merely a place near the instructor's name where he could put a statement about his educational principles and such. But there was no way to contradict the one-sided, distorted "reviews." My heart began to thump. Who were these people and why were they saying these terrible things about me?
I went to teach an afternoon class and remember some students smirking when I entered the classroom. They seemed to be sharing some information. One of them said, "Oh, we read all about you, Doctor!" "Oh, really?" I said.
Another student told me that he had been in the cafeteria writing a paper for my class when another student in his thirties noticed that the essay was for me. "Oh, yeah," this other person remarked, "I hear Curzon-Brown is an insolent bastard. I've never had him myself, but I just sent in some bad reviews of him to Teacher Review, and I may send in some more." I had my student write a statement about this bizarre confession from the other "student." No one was verifying that the postings were coming from students in the teachers' classes. Anyone was free to send in "reviews" of teachers they never had. Anyone!
Even worse, they could send multiple reviews. They could literally sandbag or target a teacher by giving the false impression that many students were disgruntled when it might be just the same person over and over again. We had more than our share of "disturbed" students. Indeed, my college had done "outreach" to mental institutions.
I sent a quick e-mail "review" to the Webmaster himself, trying to make clear how easily phony reviews could be sent in. Although he had never taken a class from me, I wrote that I remembered him and how he used to tell our class that he hoped someday the world would learn to accept Nazi pedophiles like himself. Edgy, to say the least, but I wanted him to feel what it was like to be lied about. He got angry and would not remove my name from the website.
I foolishly decided to go onto the Forum part of the Teacher Review website to discuss the problem with anyone there. All this did was convince everyone that anytime anyone attacked the website it must be Curzon-Brown doing it. I also sent in some reviews of myself in which I praised myself to the skies, contradicting the distortions and slanders being posted by people who had not even taken my class. I even got a Thank You for sending them in "successfully." I wanted to see just how ridiculous the situation would become. When the webmaster became suspicious about positive postings about me, he omitted them, but left in only the negative ones The negative ones had to be true, you see, because I was daring to criticize the webmaster's baby. My colleagues had already caught on to this self-flattering strategy but kept it quiet. I know for a fact that other teachers sent in glowing reviews of themselves or had others do so. I imagine that "collegial" colleagues also sent in negative reviews of other teachers. How delicious. There was no end of ways to exploit this wonderful innovation in higher education.
I was not the only one getting trashed. "This teacher is pure evil," "He is foul-mouthed and does not respect women," "he has a sence [sic] to racial discrimination. He ever [sic] asked a question like this: Why the English of students from Japan, like you, are so bad?" "She likes to get freaked doggy style."
Clearly, the situation was crazy. But it got crazier, once I went to the Administration to seek help.
There is a view that students are "consumers" and teachers provide them with a "service." It is a pernicious, destructive idea for genuine education and one that is warmly embraced by most administrators. In every one of my dealings with administrators about this website, it was clear to me that they would do anything to protect it. Their tack was to say that it had nothing to do with the university! Here was a website run by a student, purporting to review the faculty of City College, using the name of "City College" every chance it could, listed under campus information on the school's official website, but the school had nothing to do with it.
I wrote to the Provost, I wrote to the Chancellor, I wrote to the Dean of Student Affairs. I heard nothing from anyone. When I saw the Provost in the faculty dining room, she said she'd get back to me about the website, but she didn't.
So, I am suing. I hope it ends this nightmare, but I fear it will not. The ACLU represents the webmaster. I believe every teacher should cancel his or her membership in the ACLU and write letters of protest about this egregious misuse of their money. Are not the vicious and vindictive defamations found on this site a form of hate crime? And the ACLU is defending them and even defending a website that doesn't have the basic respect for the teaching profession to provide reviews by actual students and only by actual students. What if there were a website with "recommendations" and "grade point averages" for students available for the world to read and there were even one item there that wasn't by an actual teacher of the actual student? Would we ever hear the end of it? But because it's only teachers, it doesn't matter. No one should go into teaching under these conditions.
Growing numbers of students like to intimidate their teachers into giving higher grades. Now they have a powerful weapon for doing so. But there are still those who believe that this website is a good ideas. If it is, perhaps it should be expanded a bit. Faculty members should create a website in which they can anonymously post reviews of students; prospective employers could have access to them. Perhaps this will intimidate students into working harder and performing better.
Not that interested in all this? You should be. It can certainly happen to you--and probably will. A similar website has already been established--a larger one--on which there are reviews of teachers from at least 288 schools. The goal, I believe, is to have all student governments submit reviews to this newer site. Good luck! Hope you don't have any enemies. If you do, this is the perfect place to destroy your reputation.
If the Internet triumphs in my case, watch out. Calumnies about you will be heard around the world. And there will be little or nothing you can do about it--except of course to beg for good reviews from your students or get them in exchange for the high grades which they no doubt will now be able to extort from you.