Mark Edmundson on his students' evaluations of him:

I don't teach to amuse, to divert, or even, for that matter, to be merely interesting. When someone says that she "enjoyed" the course -- and that word crops up again and again in my evaluations -- somewhere at the edge of my immediate complacency I feel encroaching self-dislike. That is not at all what I had in mind. The off-the-wall questions and sidebar jokes are meant at lead-ins to stronger stuff -- in the case of the Freud course, to a complexly tragic view of life. But the affability and the one-liners often seem to be all that land with the students; their journals and evaluations leave me little doubt.

When someone says that she "enjoyed" my course -- and that word crops up occasionally in my evaluations -- I feel something quite different from self-dislike. I'm such a ____. I mean I don't know what that makes me. Sure, it'd be nice if there was what Edmundson calls "intellectual confrontation" "where the stakes matter". But for me it's a victory if the students can remember the material by the time the tests roll around. And no wonder: as John Sutherland says,

The UCLA system demonstrably encourages crowd-pleasing. I have trawled through a few hundred of the review pages and the one criticism which is never made is: "This professor is just an entertainer - there is no substance in his/her class". Students will happily put up with bad teaching if it is "fun" bad teaching. "Amuse me!", orders Demos (Class of 2003). The professor duly puts on his cap and bells.

(links via ButterfliesandWheels.com)

One of my favorite movie scenes is from the Blue Angel when Lola Lola degrades the Prof. onstage. Some people pay for that kind of humiliation, but I get paid to humiliate myself! Woo-hoo!

But let's face it: at our university, only the numbers matter. So the more we cater to students, the better. So much for standards.