Many students dread public speaking and say they only sign up because the class is required. But in Sam Blank’s classroom, they find it isn’t so terrifying. “I’m a pretty well-liked person, considering the fact I teach a course that creates fear in people,” jokes Blank, 62, a communications professor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College in New York . Blank is among millions of educators who are praised, glorified — and sometimes verbally torn to shreds — on websites where students go to rate their professors. Luckily, he got a stellar rating: the No. 1 community college professor on the website RateMyProfessors.com . RateMyProfessors.com, known as RMP, is the front-runner among such sites, with about 1.9 million unique visitors a month, says comScore, which tracks Web traffic. Owned by MTV ‘s college network, mtvU, RMP lists more than 1 million professors from 6,500 schools in the USA, Canada and England . Other smaller such sites include KnowYourProfessor.com and ProfessorPerformance.com . On RMP, professors are rated on a five-point scale, for overall quality, helpfulness, clarity — and how easy it is to get an A in their class. Students also give chili peppers to professors they consider “hot.” Despite some harsh comments warning others away from professors some raters didn’t like, the website is about “shining a spotlight” on the best professors, mtvU’s Carlo DiMarco says. “College students always sought the advice of their peers, friends and family members” about which classes to take, he adds; online, they can seek advice from thousands of voices. Rodney Kashem recently bought RMP’s rival, ProfessorPerformance.com, and has revamped the site. Kashem, 24, a grad student at Dartmouth College, says it’s the same as checking hotel ratings before spending money on vacation; students are “customers” who want to make sure their tuition is well spent. Blank says he didn’t know about his top rating on RMP, but when a reporter told him, he said it was “absolutely wonderful. … Perhaps it’s an affirmation of my ability to teach.” Juann Watson, a psychology and mental health professor at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, N.Y., was rated the site’s “hottest” professor of the year. Watson, 44, says she’s honored to be recognized, but “a chili pepper means nothing at this stage in my life or in my accomplishments.” Ted Coladarci, director of institutional research at the University of Maine, has studied how closely RMP’s ratings align with the teacher evaluations students write at the end of courses, and he says there’s a strong correlation. His findings , with co-author Irv Kornfeld, were published in the journal Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation. But he cautions that students motivated to go online to rate a professor do not necessarily share the same opinions as everyone who took the class. “An instructor’s RMP ratings tend to derive from an exceedingly small and arguably biased sample of all students the instructor has had,” he says. Coladarci adds that some instructors receive less-than-stellar RMP ratings but nevertheless enjoy high ratings on their school’s official student evaluations of teaching. These cases, he says, “serve as an important cautionary note for RMP users. In short, it’s risky to form judgments about instructors and their courses based solely on what you see on RateMyProfessors.com.”

ATLANTA — The oppressed conservative student is a regular theme in the right’s critique of higher education. You know the stories — mocked for displaying the American flag or a Ronald Reagan bust, shouted down for suggesting that that Iraq war is just, always in fear of earning a low grade for criticizing affirmative action or some other widely held belief among the left-leaning campus majority. Research presented here Tuesday at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association affirmed that many conservative students feel that way, but also that many do not — and that the latter group in fact thrive on the very campuses that tend to be portrayed as hostile to them. ON THE WEB: New view of faculty liberalism MORE FROM INSIDE HIGHER ED: The liberal (and moderating) professoriate The difference, the research suggests, isn’t the relative size of the conservative minority or the commitment level of the more liberal majority. Rather, campus characteristics — many of them most commonly associated with small liberal arts colleges, and harder to pull off at large universities — may be the determining factor. In fact, one suggestion from the research that might distress fiscal conservatives is that low student-faculty ratios may contribute far more to the comfort of conservative students than would efforts to promote ideological “balance” on a syllabus or in a department. The study presented here was conducted by Amy J. Binder, an associate professor of sociology at the University of California at San Diego, and Kate Wood, a graduate student there. They did in-depth interviews with conservative students at two colleges that they named only in general terms — “Eastern elite,” a small private institution, and “Western public,” a large university. Both are institutions that have been identified by conservative critics as being particularly left-leaning. At both institutions, they sought out as interview subjects the students who are members of conservative groups or who are visibly conservative, and also “in the closet” conservatives — by asking the conservative student leaders for the names of those who had indicated their agreement but who were not involved in public campus discourse. The conservative students at Eastern elite were under no illusions that they were anything but an extreme minority — and the institution’s reputation is such that some were discouraged by friends back home from even enrolling. But almost uniformly, they were happy. They identified their professors as being liberal, but admired them nonetheless. In fact, as Wood noted here, “they viewed the experience of being in the minority as a positive one” in teaching them to examine and defend their beliefs, and “almost every single one said that they received a better education” by being in the extreme minority, a finding “in contrast to the conservative critique.” Further, she said, “not a single one of them said that they regretted not going to a more conservative school.” The students at Eastern elite were clearly aware of the conservative critique and many times answered questions about possible bias by saying that they had heard about that elsewhere but had never experienced it themselves. At Western public, in contrast, many conservative students did feel that they were the victims of bias in interactions with students and faculty members. The research focuses on student perceptions, not the reality of what went on in the classrooms. So Wood said it wasn’t clear whether the bias actually took place, but she said that the researchers wanted to see why it was that some students perceived fairness and challenge, while others felt a bit abused. So what were the qualities that made some conservatives feel so contented, even in their minority status? They were many of the same qualities that elite liberal arts college advocates talk about. “They were proud of their institution. They saw their peers — liberals and conservatives — as future leaders of the country,” and that made the conservatives want to be part of the community and part of the conversation. They also felt that they had very close relationships with faculty members with whom they disagreed on politics. “They viewed their faculty members as professionals, as experts in their fields, as people who would never be biased” based on a student’s politics, Wood said. One key measure of the extent to which conservative students felt comfortable at the college, she said, was that the most popular majors for conservative students were identical to those for liberal students (and all students). There were a small number of courses that conservative students tended to avoid, Wood said, citing “critical gender studies” as one. She also noted that the college has policies that make it easy for students to change schedules at the beginning of the semester, and that this seemed to relieve any students who might be worried about a professor’s politics. It’s not that they left classes they signed up for, but the knowledge that they could try something and change their minds was reassuring, she said. Much of this related to “very small class size” and to a sense that all students and faculty members were part of a common community, and wanted to disagree with one another respectfully. As a result, Wood said, while the conservative students generally said that they didn’t hold back their views, they didn’t describe going to class looking for a fight — and they talked about wanting to disagree with professors in respectful ways, since they felt treated with respect. In contrast, she said, at Western public, with larger classes and much less faculty-student interaction on an individual basis, students were more likely to say that they were the victims of bias — but also that they didn’t really know the faculty members. And at Western, students talked about “trying to get in fights” with professors in class, of “trying to catch their professors in the act of liberal indoctrination.” Another difference Wood noted relates to the role of faculty members on both campuses who were in the conservative minority. In the close-knit environment of Eastern elite, these faculty members were visible on campus, taking part in the debates, organizing lectures and so forth. At Western public, she said, there was a similar cohort of right-leaning faculty members, but they were far less active. The implication of the findings, Wood said, was that colleges of all sizes should focus on the elements of community and civility that seem to make it possible for disagreement at Eastern elite to be welcome in ways that don’t belittle those in the ideological minority. She noted that some elements present at Eastern elite — such as its prestige and traditions — aren’t things that colleges can up and create. “But it’s clear that access to faculty members makes a huge difference, and that anything that creates smaller pools of students” — so that people know one another — has a real impact. Sarah S. Willie-LeBreton, associate professor of sociology at Swarthmore College, was the respondent to the paper, which she praised. She noted that much of the public discussion about conservative students focuses on incidents that take place at certain campuses or claims made by various groups. “It’s nice that somebody is finally asking the students themselves” in a comprehensive way, she said. For faculty members, the research is an appropriate challenge, Willie-LeBreton said, to “celebrate our conservative students’ sense of minority status and to think about what can be learned from that.” Willie-LeBreton said that Eastern elite sounded like it shared many values with Swarthmore, and that she thought that “taking all students seriously” was a big part of a faculty member’s job. But she said that she worried that in much of higher education today, “it’s hard for professors” to engage with students “when faculty members have been marginalized” through larger class sizes that hinder close student interaction.

As a professor, how do you get dropout-prone college students to stay in school? Give them your cellphone number. How do you get professors to promptly field text messages, calls and e-mails from students? Buy them smartphones and pay for the service plan. That is the logic Georgia Gwinnett College employed when it decided to offer its more than 300 full- and part-time faculty members cellphones and encouraged them to respond to any calls or texts from students within 24 hours. ON THE WEB: The retention guru MORE FROM INSIDE HIGHER ED: Coppin plays catch-up on retention Under the program, professors are offered a state-of-the-art smartphone and a Sprint data plan that includes the most sophisticated wireless Internet coverage. It is part of a several-tier effort by Georgia Gwinnett — a public, four-year, noncompetitive-admissions college founded in 2005 — to defy the historically low retention rates typical of colleges that set such a modest bar for admission (Georgia Gwinnett admits any Georgia high school graduate). And so far, they say, it is working. The retention rate for returning sophomores at Georgia Gwinnett stands at 75%. That is about double the average rate for noncompetitive-admissions colleges in Georgia, according to Tom Mundie, dean of the school of science and technology at Georgia Gwinnett, and on par with many public institutions that have competitive admissions. In engagement surveys, Mundie says, students have reported “feeling that faculty care about and are accessible to them.” These plaudits and retention numbers are not driven solely by invitations to call or text professors and expect a reasonably swift response, Mundie says. Other aspects of the college’s retention effort probably contribute as well, including small class sizes and a mentoring program that arranges for professors to advise students on academic, career, and personal matters. But professors and administrators at the college seem to believe there is a substantial correlation between the cellphone program and the young institution’s impressive retention numbers — enough that the college, which has grown its student body and faculty by leaps and bounds since its founding five years ago, is preparing to spend $350,000 on faculty cellphones and data plans this year. That works out to about $1,000 per faculty member — a significant investment, and one Lonnie D. Harvel, Georgia Gwinnett’s vice president for instructional technology, is hesitant to divulge, given the eagerness of Georgia legislators to find anything to cut. Georgia Gwinnett sprung for some pretty sophisticated gadgets: for full-time professors, it offers Motorola Evo smartphones with Google ‘s Android operating system and 4G coverage. For part-time professors, it offers Sprint’s HTC Snap smartphone, which is lighter-weight but still retails for several hundred dollars. The college offers the professors regular upgrades. Professors can make the college-funded phone their only phone, and there is no ban on using it for nonwork purposes (Georgia Gwinnett’s deal with Sprint allows additional activity on the network without added costs). If the professors do not want the phones, the college offers to pay the bill on their existing cellphones as long as they put the contact number on their syllabuses. Harvel says that if state legislators try to frame publicly funded Georgia Gwinnett’s cellphone giveaway as wasteful, he’s “ready to fight that battle.” He says the college has observed a bump in faculty productivity as a result of the phones equivalent to “hundreds of thousands of dollars” in labor. For example, Georgia Gwinnett faculty are not required to hold office hours — the idea being that a big bulk of outside-of-class communication with students can be handled via the mobile devices, allowing faculty to deploy their energies on other things. Also, the desktop phone bills are down and inter-faculty communication is up, Harvel says. “A cost analysis demonstrates that the program saves more money than it costs,” Harvel says (though he adds that the benefits are “only valid if the institution is intent on expending resources on student engagement”). A burden on professors? So the cellphone program appears to be a boon for student engagement, but is it a threat to faculty sanity? Does giving students such access and pledging a prompt response invite a deluge of text messages — sometimes at odd hours, sometimes inane or easily answerable elsewhere — that might leave professors feeling held hostage by the technology? Apparently not, according to a handful of professors contacted at random by Inside Higher Ed. “I’ve never known a professor to keep business hours, anyway,” says Brigitte Clifton, an English professor. “{hellip}Yes, I’ve talked a student through a research assignment on my cell in the grocery store while contemplating a bag of beans, but several folks in the aisle around me were doing the same thing in their own lines of work.” Tee Barron, an associate professor of mathematics, says she sometimes gets texts from students asking questions that they could easily have answered by consulting a classmate or the syllabus, but that can be corrected with a benign rebuke. “I’ll sometimes text back, ‘Hahaha by the time it took to e-mail or text me you could have found this out yourself and now you’re going to have to anyway,’ ” Barron says. “I think after the first couple times the [students] who are high-maintenance and try that — they start getting it.” She said she is contacted “daily” by students via her phone, but has hardly been overwhelmed. The key is defining boundaries at the outset, they say. While professors say the college encourages a 24-hour response time, they say it is a guideline more than an enforced rule, and that they have the autonomy to lay out expectations — and limitations — to students on a class-by-class basis. The idea is not so much to turn professors into a 24/7 support service as much as to establish a connection with students that ventures, to a reasonable extent, into the world of real-time, person-to-person interchange. “Even those students with perhaps unreasonable expectations for communications will learn that the professor is not at their immediate disposal, but that we are readily available for questions outside of class,” says Clifton. “In my real-world experience, bosses have much more rigid expectations of access and response outside of office hours.” Engagement, after all, is a two-way street, says Mundie, the technology and sciences dean; faculty are expected to be responsive to the needs of students, just as students are expected to be responsive to the expectations of their professors. And if a student skips a few class sessions, he says, “They might even get a call on their cellphone.”

The American Bar Association is moving ahead with changes in its accreditation system that faculty members fear could erode tenure protections for many professors and further weaken job security for clinical faculty members, many of whom don’t have tenure to start with. A special committee of the ABA last week released the latest version of proposed guidelines on academic freedom — just days before an ABA committee met Saturday to discuss (but not alter) the draft language. In the weeks before the draft was released, many faculty leaders had urged the ABA panel not to do the two key things its draft does: • Remove language from the ABA standards that has been interpreted by faculty members as requiring law schools to have a tenure system. (The ABA panel that wrote the revisions now says that tenure was never a requirement and that it is removing references to tenure for reasons of clarity — although that interpretation of current policy is being met with skepticism.) • Remove specific language requiring law schools with clinical professors and legal writing professors to offer them specific forms of job security short of tenure. The ABA panel recommending the changes has stressed that the accreditation requirements still insist that law schools protect academic freedom, and that many law schools would not necessarily change their tenure or other job protection procedures. The report accompanying the most recent draft characterizes the protections for clinical faculty members that would be eliminated as “intrusive mandates” that “are not the proper providence of an accreditation agency and provide approved law schools with latitude and flexibility to articulate and implement policies to attract a qualified faculty and protect faculty academic freedom.” OSU: Leader of USA’s biggest campus takes on tenure 2010: The year of the education documentary? ON THE WEB: Tenure as a tarnished brass ring Many law professors think otherwise. They are angry not only over the recommendations, but the fact that the new draft came out immediately after so many groups had issued lengthy statements in favor of preserving existing protections. “They are trying to ramrod through an ill-advised proposal,” said Michael A. Olivas, a professor of law at the University of Houston. The proposal is “the worst of all worlds, disguised as administrative tinkering.” Olivas is president-elect of the Association of American Law Schools, although he said he was speaking for himself, not the association. Many of the association’s leaders, however, share his concerns. In recent weeks — just before the ABA committee came out with its new draft — a series of impassioned letters were sent to the panel. Robert A. Gorman, an emeritus law professor at the University of Pennsylvania , wrote to the committee that tenure was particularly needed for law schools. “The research, scholarship and teaching of the law professoriate commonly deal with matters of public moment and controversy, more so than is the case in most other parts of the university; and the style of teaching is typically more challenging, argumentative and indeed on occasion confrontational,” Gorman wrote. “Reliance on tenure as a buttress for academic freedom is thus particularly justified for law faculty.” After Gorman’s letter circulated, another was sent endorsing it — by 11 other former AALS presidents, among them two former deans of the law school at the University of California at Berkeley and a former law dean at New York University ( John Sexton , currently the university’s president). The American Association of University Professors came out against changing the tenure protections. And the Clinical Legal Education Association has come out against the changes and the timing of the latest proposal. (Links to many of the letters opposing the changes can be found on the ABA site .) With all these legal luminaries opposed to change, why is it going forward? The push started several years ago, and was led by David Van Zandt, the dean of Northwestern University ‘s law school. Van Zandt said at the time that characterizing the changes as an assault on tenure was unfair. He said that it was wrong for the ABA as an accrediting group to require a tenure policy — and that institutions should decide such matters. “Sometimes some people portray this as an attack on tenure,” he said in 2007. “The real issue is whether or not you’re required to have tenure by an outside body such as the ABA. Not that we don’t want to have that institution.” After a period of some momentum, the move to change the standards stalled — but now is proceeding with the new draft. The current policies say that for a law school to be accredited it must have “an established and announced policy with respect to academic freedom and tenure….” That language would be replaced — under the new draft — with this: “A law school shall have an established and announced policy with respect to the protection of academic freedom of its faculty members and shall provide procedures to ensure that its policy is followed….” While the initial push to change the standards came from those saying that tenure was an inappropriate requirement, the new draft says that tenure was never really a requirement at all, so removing the reference to it doesn’t change things in a material way. “[T]he current standards do not require approved law schools to have systems for tenuring of any or all of their faculty members and this draft retains this feature,” the report says, adding that some have seen a tenure requirement as “implied” by the current language, but that this isn’t really the case. “Interests of greater clarity and transparency require that the revised standards explicitly state whether or not schools must provide tenure rights and for whom on the law faculty. So, this draft retains, explicitly, the current policy that tenure rights are not required as a matter of accreditation policy,” the report states. It notes that there are numerous references to the importance of academic freedom and its key role in legal education. While publicly the ABA leaders pushing for change say that they are not against tenure or law professors, supporters of tenure have noted a steady stream of criticism of law professors that emerges whenever the issue heats up. The National Jurist , a publication for law students, recently ran an article called ” When Law Profs Slack, the Students Suffer .” And that prompted coverage in a The Wall Street Journal blog: ” Are Law Professors Just Plain Lazy? ” Olivas said that he believes that a small group within the ABA leadership “just doesn’t believe in tenure” and wants to change the system. This is more than a little ironic, Olivas said, noting that ABA’s leaders include judges and law firm partners — two categories of people who themselves enjoy a kind of tenure, the latter “tenure with real money.” He said that the declarations of support for academic freedom are empty. “Academic freedom doesn’t anchor tenure. Tenure anchors academic freedom,” he said. So the panel is recommending that academic freedom be preserved while “undercutting” the very system that has protected it. Rights of clinical faculty Another key issue in the changes concerns the rights of faculty who may not be on the tenure track — in law schools, clinical and legal writing faculty members are most commonly in this category. Clinical law professors run programs in which students are supervised as they take on legal cases — frequently on controversial issues — and law schools are regularly attacked over the choice of such cases. Some lawmakers in Louisiana and Maryland pushed legislation this year to crack down on these legal clinics. In Maryland, a clinic at the University of Maryland offended the poultry industry by representing environmental groups. In Louisiana, the target was a law clinic at Tulane University that has done environmental work that angered business interests there. The language that the ABA panel wants to remove from the requirements says that law schools “shall afford to full time clinical faculty members a form of security of position reasonably similar to tenure, and non-compensatory perquisites reasonably similar to those provided other full time faculty members.” Gorman, the Penn professor, said in his letter that removing protections for clinical law professors was a move in the wrong direction. “Nor should it be necessary to explain that of all faculty categories, it has been the clinicians whose teaching — most especially, in the form of live-client litigation clinics — has placed them in the position that is most vulnerable to criticism and pressure (often of the most coarse and intolerable nature) from persons, corporations and legislators who are discomforted by the work of the clinic,” he wrote. “It is precisely the clinical faculty member for whom academic freedom is a vital concern and not merely an abstract slogan, and for whom tenure provides a crucial guarantee that instruction can be carried out in the best interests of our students, and of the public.” Olivas said he was bothered by the way the current standards let law schools place clinical and writing faculty in a separate class, with some protections but not the same as tenured faculty members. He criticized the ABA for moving to end the limited protections these non-tenure faculty members have, rather than moving them to an appropriate equal status with other professors. “There should be no bright line distinction between the two” kinds of faculty members, he said. “If clinical education and legal writing are appropriate parts of legal education, they should have the same protections, the same resources and the same faculty governance and all the academic freedom that is provided, including tenure. They need it more.” A spokeswoman for the ABA said that it would take at least 18 months, should various association panels endorse the changes, for them to take effect.