The Academic System: Smart People Do Dumb Things, but Dumb People Rule

Some people, with some justification, are suspicious of smart people, yet they often do not have the same suspicions about dumb people. And, oddly, dumb people tend to rise up in institutions, particularly academic ones. We now have administrator generators in graduate education programs. It used to be that administrators came from marginal academic areas like Speech. Now they emerge from college administration programs. My last encounter with my current avatar involved a discussion about student evaluations: we now rely on them to tell us if an instructor is doing a "good" job--turning teaching into a consumer product. This adminstrator told me that the student evaluations were the only way to see how we compared to other schools. Education as a competitive sport? I don't care how I compare to other schools--or even other teachers. If a teacher has knowledge and believes in it, then there is a good chance that he or she will be able to impart that knowledge to others. That is what we must believe in. At best, students can have only a vague idea about how well an instructor knows his or her field. The best way to evaluate each other is to have a colleague sit through a term, but, obviously, we can't do that. Instead, we undermine our status and transform ourselves into articulate sales personnel. What a ghastly mistake student evaluations have been--another idiotic legacy of the 1960s. Of course, I question those mandarins who arrogantly insist on pompously intimidating students, but we disrespect teachers by insisting that their knowledge is meaningless. And, yes, smart people can do dumb things, but now our lives are directed by an administrative caste that is oblivious to what a college, any college, needs or ought to be. Little wonder that students come into the academic world with a sense that their instructors are servants.