At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences last May, when Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 introduced a motion calling for all courses of five or more students to be formally evaluated, he unexpectedly provoked a minor uproar. Several professors spoke against the motion, including Kenan Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield ’53. He strongly criticized the proposal, saying, “Course evaluations introduce the rule of the less wise over the more wise, of students over professors.” Professor of German Peter J. Burgard went further, claiming that required evaluations would “undermine a strong tradition of faculty self-governance in the area of teaching.”

The Search for a President an editorial series Previous editorials: To the Presidential Search Committee

When it comes to their research and scholarship, professors have, and should continue to have, complete freedom. But professors do not deserve this absolute autonomy when it comes to teaching. Burgard is naïve to think that faculty self-governance in the area of teaching is equivalent to faculty self-evaluation. It is hard to gauge the actual level of faculty self-evaluation at the College, be it faculty members’ evaluating their own courses or each others’. More importantly, there is a tremendous difference between a professor’s and a student’s opinion of a course’s pedagogy because, quite simply, courses are made for students’ benefit, not professors’. And if the Faculty refuses mandatory course evaluations, it is the University’s president who must override their protests.

Students come to Harvard seeking an outstanding education, and many are disappointed. For undergraduate teaching to become the priority that it ought to be, it is essential that professors have measures of their success as teachers. And while students may not be qualified to judge the content of a professor’s scholarship—that is not the goal of course evaluations—students must be the primary judges of a professor’s teaching abilities. One does not need a doctorate to determine whether a professor is well-organized, whether she can present a coherent, original lecture, or whether, in the end, she inspires or bores a classroom of students.

In the past, the Faculty has stubbornly resisted required evaluations. To their credit, most faculty members accept CUE evaluations, as well as allowing their publication in the annual CUE Guide. “Most,” however, is not enough. Gross said last spring that about 60 professors chose not to have their fall 2005 courses evaluated. This is no small number. If the full Faculty will not force these professors’ hands, the president must.

Mandating course evaluations and their publication benefits students by improving professors’ teaching and by providing more information about a course before enrolling. But refusing CUE evaluations hurts teaching fellows (TFs) as well as their future students. The 60-odd professors’ rejection of CUE surveys left more than 230 TFs without the formal student evaluations that would help these aspiring academics develop their teaching careers. If Harvard is to expect, as we firmly believe it should, its tenure-track faculty to be as proficient in the classroom as they are in the library or the laboratory, it must cultivate the teaching skills of academia’s future teachers. But instilling this sort of cultural shift in what Harvard values in its faculty—that they must demonstrate competence in the classroom in order to be hired—requires a prior commitment to evaluating teaching.

In the mean time, there are a number of changes that should be made to the CUE evaluation process in order to further increase its efficacy. Recently, the College has made several improvements to the evaluations, such as moving to online forms in the spring of 2005 and adding some course-specific questions this fall. In addition, the current one-to-five numeric scale should be expanded to a seven-point system, since students’ hesitancy to grade below a “3” effectively shortens the scale to three points.

More importantly, the evaluations should ask for more extensive qualitative comments from students. The CUE Guide only publishes tabulations of numerical scores and of brief qualitative descriptions, which tends to flatten any interesting remarks into bland platitudes about a professor being “excellent” or “knowledgeable.” Publishing students’ thoughtful remarks online, as a list below the existing evaluation, would afford students a much better understanding of a course.

All of these improvements will have little effect if students do not evaluate their courses. But students cannot give formal feedback if professors do not universally allow CUE evaluations. The College suffers from a culture where teaching ability plays essentially no role in hiring, where faculty, out of professional “courtesy” to their colleagues, are hesitant to evaluate each others’ courses, and where some instructors even refuse to hear students’ feedback on their own courses. If Harvard College wishes to remain the preeminent undergraduate institution, it must improve its undergraduate instruction. The first shortcoming—hiring faculty without regard to instruction—must change for this goal to be reached. But nothing will change until, at the very least, the University requires professors to open their ears to students. And Harvard’s next president ought to make sure they listen.