The student, Provost Jacques Barzun of Columbia wrote in 1968, is conscious that his teachers subject him to “cavalier treatment … unpunctual, slipshod in marking papers, ill-prepared in lecture, careless about assignments.” Student evaluations of teaching were supposed to be the corrective, but students turned out to be less interested in improved teaching than they were in better grades. By 1981, the Harvard sociologist David Riesman was warning that student evaluations might “mislead … students to flock to the courses of …‘easy’ instructors.”

Today, the ruling alliance in undergraduate education consists of students who value their studies as a sideline to their social lives, adjuncts whose livelihood depends on student evaluations, faculty members who are interested in research and their own socioprofessional activities, and administrators who want to maintain or expand…

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