There is currently considerable and appropriate discussion regarding how Dartmouth students are woefully under-informed when choosing from the more than 1,400 undergraduate courses that the College offers. The ORC/Catalog provides 100-word descriptions of each course, Greek houses and athletic teams share “layup lists” cataloging the easiest classes and just one student-run website offers a largely unreliable compilation of student reviews from the past decade.
Dartmouth is world-renowned for its undergraduate education, but ask any student and they will recount the horror story of a class they signed up for excitedly that turned out to be a complete dud. In short, the resources available inadequately identify professors who are disengaged from their material or students, or harbor such extreme bias that they make their class unenjoyable for anyone who ideologically disagrees with them.
This situation is easily remedied: the administration currently has access to extensive student course evaluations on every professor at the College, which students are required to complete before receiving termly grades. By making these evaluations public, the administration could achieve two goals that should be of paramount importance to those running the school.
First, it would enable students to make informed decisions about enormous investments of time, intellectual energy and money. Students, at the very least, should have the opportunity to avoid professors seeking to cram a political agenda down their throat. Moreover, perhaps students would be more willing to step out of their academic comfort zone if they were properly informed about the classes for which they registered.
Second, perhaps public course evaluations would hold professors accountable to both their students and their academic responsibilities in a way they currently are not, and increase the overall quality of both teaching and learning at Dartmouth — a quality that is admittedly already high but could always stand to be improved.
Some objections to such a plan, such as certain faculty questioning how public course reviews would help students, or whether student satisfaction should be an administrative priority, are to be expected but are clearly not relevant to the issues at hand.
Administrators should address other concerns when finalizing a plan. For example, faculty members have raised concerns that anonymous reviews could devolve into a deluge of racism and sexism. But the onus is on the administration to come up with a system that equitably provides students with the resources they deserve to make educated decisions about the classes they are paying enormous sums of money to take. Such a system is clearly plausible. After all, Harvard University, Yale University, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell University all have public course evaluations. Why do we lag behind our peer schools in such a basic student service?
What is especially disappointing is that there is little evidence of progress since the delayed faculty vote on this matter in May. This lack of general support comes in spite of the committee of chairs’ vote in favor of the course reviews’ publication last year. This administrative lethargy is particularly upsetting considering the Moving Dartmouth Forward initiative that is clearly being rushed, at the expense of current students, to combat the recent barrage of negative press and the subsequent precipitous decline in applications last year. The Moving Dartmouth Forward initiative has also failed to garner extensive student support, provided tenuous evidence that suggests it will be even marginally effective and adopted a focus removed from the central goal of the College: the academic education of its students.
College President Phil Hanlon has noted that his vision for the College includes adding “mechanisms to stimulate greater academic productivity and risk-taking.” It is time for Hanlon to put his money where his mouth is, so to speak, and make a public statement encouraging the faculty to make course evaluations available to all Dartmouth students.
Hank Balaban '16 is a guest columnist.
