I try my hand at academic schmoozing

All stories of academia in the days of yore seem to revolve around two themes: there is the "good old days" narrative, in which the young professor finds a college/University she likes, has an amiable chat with the president or dean or whoever, and then is informed at the end of lunch that she's been hired. That's the kind of story told during departmental teas that makes me wish for a seal club (to use on either myself or the story-teller). There is also the "bad old days" narrative, which inevitably involves references to academia's old-boy network and lecherous old profs with beds in their offices.

While I have never had the misfortune to come across a bed in an office--only some suspiciously squishy sofas--I've spent quite a bit of time in the last several years feeling frustrated about the inner circles that continue to dominate academic life. At every conference I've ever been to there always seems to be a "cool group," usually comprised of the plenary speakers, the conference hosts, and a few assorted friends who eat, drink, and sit with each other and generally shun everyone else. Even at post-talk receptions in graduate school there were unofficial groupings; all the graduate students scrambled to talk to either the speaker or the hippest professors in attendance in the hopes of establishing some kind of credibility. I mostly used to sulk in a corner and nurse grapes before quietly slinking off.

While I am a very friendly and sociable person, I'm pretty wretched at schmoozing. I can never think of an intelligent comment or witty question on the spot, I'm afraid of annoying the person or seeming stupid, and I simply lack the necessary verve to approach total strangers. At the first major conference I attended I was intent on speaking to one of the plenary speakers whose book I loved and used in my conference paper. I stalked the man for two days in desperation before I figured out a way to meet him. Ten minutes before my paper started I saw him looking a book display, so I wandered over, pretended to browse, and dropped a book at his feet. I felt like an 18th-century Frenchwoman with a handkerchief, but it worked. Unfortunately, after that first meeting (and he kindly came to my paper), he didn't seem particularly interested in talking to me, and I was so afraid of being a pest that I didn't approach him again after that.

Once I actually got a job, I figured professorship would automatically propel me out of the ranks of the desperate and mute. Alas, I've now discovered new obstacles to academic hipster status: my lack of a book and a network of academics who know and love me. I was recently at a colloquium where I was the junior-most faculty member, and as I watched everyone else reminisce about conferences ten years ago, first books, and life pre-tenure, I felt utterly alone. No one knew who I was, and with only one small publication to my name I can't exactly spear-rattle. So, as the sun set over the first-night party, while all the other professors sat together on lawn chairs and caught up I grabbed several stems of grapes and found the little contingent of grad students huddled together in a corner. They were glad to see me.

Evaluating evaluations

In my last job, student were asked to evaluate instructors in two ways: first, by choosing a number that ranked the instructor based on questions provided ("On a scale of one to five, how would you rank the intellectual challenge of this class?") and second, by developing on those numbers in written comments. The questions were at the top of the page, giving students ample space to reflect, criticize, and judge. Some students merely write down numbers, but most of them actually wrote several sentences about the course and the instructor (me).

As nerve-racking as it always was to get copies of those evaluations and pull them out for a read, it paled in comparison to the experience at my new job. When I got ready to pass these evals out to my students, I noticed that they looked like a scan-tron test-- lots of bubbles and almost no place to actually write. And when I got a chance to look at the results, I got several pages of bar graphs and statistics that told me how my averages related to departmental averages, averages for similar courses, and a whole lot of other confusing crap. What I did not feel I got was a sense of how my students felt about my courses.

I have very conflicting feelings about course evaluations and their usefulness. I absolutely think that reflecting on a course and its usefulness is a valuable exercise for all students. I also think that any input an instructor can get about the course and her methodology is equally invaluable. Unfortunately I don't see course evaluations in their current form as helpful to either students or faculty. My older evals are rife with conflicting opinions ("She's very organized and gave great comments," "She's disorganized and doesn't really comment on papers"), nonsensical comments about other class members, and the all-too obvious diatribe written by the kid who clearly felt entitled to an 'A' from the beginning. While those evals were actually pretty good at pointing out my strengths as a teacher, they were less successful at helping me identify and correct the flaws in my pedagogy.

Unsurprisingly, these new evals are even more useless and frightening than the old ones. If I felt that I could once assess the value of each evaluation based on the comments, these new evals simply present a sea of numbers. Almost none of the students wrote down comments, so I can no longer distinguish between the student with a genuine problem with my pedagogy and a student who simply disliked me, the subject, or his classmates. As confusing as the older evals could be, at least I got a sense of what issues students had. Now, I have no idea. Clearly this kind of evaluation isn't about helping the students or the instructor, and I really resent the fact that my teaching ultimately boils down to nothing but a couple of averages.


Postscript: The obvious solution to this issue is, of course, to not read those damn evals. But I can never help myself. I just wish I could go back to the pre-scantron days.