Twelve Years a Servant: Race and the Student Evaluation of Teaching

Abstract

The end of year student course evaluations (SETs), the dreaded final act of a semester of teaching and learning that serves the “supposed” purpose of evaluating a course and its instructor. Various studies have already shown how SETs are ineffective in serving such a purpose, yet SETs are still used for major decisions such as tenure and promotion, and annual merit pay increases. Further, the fact that SETs are rife with racial, gender, and ethnic bias towards instructors is equally troubling. The aim of this reflexive essay is to highlight a form of racialized intellectual violence that is heaped upon faculty of color based on a content analysis of the author’s negative and potentially racially motivated SETs over the span of a 12-year career. The outcomes of such a reflexive essay is to bring awareness and highlight the professional and psychological impacts that make teaching in/and of color in academia a precarious endeavor, as well as problematizing SETs use as a true evaluation of teaching effectiveness.

KEYWORDS:

• Intellectual violence
• racial bias
• students’ evaluation of teaching (SETs)
• tenure