SOME FOLLOWUP THOUGHTS ON STUDENT EVALUATIONS

A followup on my post about student evals from the other day, inspired by some insightful points a friend emailed. Two comments that she made really struck me as suggesting the relationship between my issues with student evals and my questions/concerns about the place of the academy in society in a slightly larger sense. The first was her point--which I fully agree with--that as instructors at universities "our job should be teaching the committed." The second is her ultimate conclusion, and is related to the first: "So, the key question here and for higher-ed institutions is: What is more important, learning something or liking the class?" My only response to this is "Yes." I think the academic setting has been backed up into a corner in which learning something and liking a class are presented as distinct choices--you can have enjoyment or you can have learning--even as their pairing in this presentation inevitably suggests that liking the class is the preferred outcome (and, therefore, the appropriate measuring stick for the quality of instruction) within the context of the culture at large.

In its ideal form, teaching the committed means that learning and enjoyment/entertainment are neither inextricably linked nor forced into some kind of hierarchy. Learning can be enjoyment/entertainment, but it can also be something that exists outside of enjoyment/entertainment as another sphere of experience that is accepted as necessary on its own terms. At the very least, a course, its outcomes, and the quality of instruction to reach those outcomes can be separated out (where/when appropriate) from the enjoyment/entertainment factor when it comes to evaluation. I might not enjoy or be entertained by a class on injuries and illnesses (I'm squeamish that way), but setting my enjoyment aside, I could evaluate whether or not the instructor used methods that helped me to develop skills, apply concepts, or whatever the course outcomes suggested I should be able to do/comprehend by its completion. Now, I might enjoy certain pedagogical methods more than others--and here, student commentary can be particularly valuable when he/she articulates which methods were enjoyable, why they were enjoyable, and (this is the crucial part) how that enjoyment helped him/her to meet the course outcomes more effectively than he/she otherwise would have been able to do--and that can help to nuance my evaluation, but it shouldn't be the sole basis of that evaluation.

One of the issues, though, is that the committed--in the ideal sense outlined above--are rare. It's much more common to come across the student who remains convinced that this course/subject/four year trek through higher education generally is useless, a joke, something to be endured on the road to a career. One of the strongest moments of cognitive dissonance I've experienced as a teacher came last Fall. During a unit of my composition class in which we examined arguments on the value (or lack thereof) of higher education and the liberal arts from a variety of perspectives, my students maintained that the system would protect and care for them even as the articles we read--both for and against higher ed and the liberal arts--repeated over and over again that the system was profoundly uncaring and students should identify the most appropriate ways to prepare for this reality. In this climate, learning and a commitment to education as a valuable aspect of life outside of preparation for a career doesn't seem to offer much (though, as I'll try to explain below, the reverse is true). I don't think this is just me being an elitist, privileged white male with a graduate degree when I suggest that more access to and emphasis on learning and the tools it offers is the solution here, though, not less.

This is all still a little underdeveloped, but I want to return to a point I made in the original post about needing to clarify, for example, a question about the instructor's ability to stimulate a student's thoughts by identifying the form of that stimulation and the instructor's ability as compared to what. Here, "liking the class" again requires these kinds of qualifiers, particularly among a generation of students who are, in Mark Fisher's words, "'too wired to concentrate,'" and for whom "to be bored simply means to be removed from the communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of texting, YouTube and fast food; to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary gratification" (24). He goes on to link this to life under capitalism and the very specific kinds of mental processes it requires of its subjects: 

If, then, something like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a pathology, it is a pathology of late capitalism--a consequence of being wired into the entertainment-control circuits of hypermediated consumer culture. . . . Teenagers process capital's image-dense data very effectively without any need to read--slogan-recognition is sufficient to navigate the net-mobile-magazine informational plane. (25)

There are real consequences to this for higher education, obviously, and they manifest themselves (at least in part) in the tensions facing teachers that I tried to outline in my original post. Against the constant cries of right-wingers and "liberal communists" about higher education's disengagement with the realities of contemporary life, Fisher suggests it serves as:

the engine room of the reproduction of social reality, directly confronting the inconsistencies of the capitalist social field. Teachers are caught between being facilitator-entertainers and disciplinarian-authoritarians. Teachers want to help students to pass the exams; they want us to be authority figures who tell them what to do. Teachers being interpellated by students as authority figures exacerbates the "boredom" problem, since isn't anything that comes from the place of authority a priori boring? (26)

The two poles outlined, facilitator-entertainer and disciplinarian-authoritarian, are dead on in the education climate surrounding student evaluations as currently formatted. During class time, the teacher is expected to substitute for the entertainment offered by the now inaccessible "entertainment-control circuits" at the same time that he/she is expected to handhold. One of the more striking aspects of the latter category--and one that I meant to mention in my original post and forgot--is students' inability to see evaluation of their performance on an assignment as anything other than a personal commentary, an evaluation of their very subjectivity. That is, no point about a rough patch in an argument or a well-turned phrase can be seen as anything other than an insult or a compliment on the student as a subject because the disciplinarian-authoritarian is seen as evaluating the student him/herself, rather than the work as it relates to assignment guidelines/course outcomes. Students will turn in drafts to me and say "Please don't judge me. I had to rush to finish this, and I know it needs a lot of work," as if a poor piece of writing would lead me to believe that the student is a "bad" person. I might be frustrated if a student who has turned in high quality work throughout the semester suddenly submits a piece of writing well below his/her previous level, but I'm more likely to ask the student how I can help clarify the assignment or to discuss areas for/methods of revision with him/her than I am to leap to some judgement about his/her character. That reaction doesn't fit into the above roles, though, and parses with difficulty, if at all.

To ask students, then, to evaluate a class in such a way that enjoyment and entertainment are the only available categories for the students to use when evaluating any experience would seem to be a losing prospect, not only for teachers but for higher education as a whole. Here's where it all starts to get a bit murky, but stick with me and maybe I'll have something for you. In The Parallax View, Slavoj Žižek claims that:

What we have today is not so much the politics of jouissance but, more precisely, the regulation (administration) of jouissance . . . the superego aspect of today's "nonrepressive" hedonism (the constant provocation to which we are exposed, enjoining us to go right to the end, and explore all modes of jouissance) resides in the way permitted jouissance necessarily turns into obligatory jouissance. . . . [A]lthough the immediate and explicit injunction calls for the rule of a pleasure principle that would maintain homeostasis, the actual functioning of the injunction explodes these constraints into a striving toward excess enjoyment. (310)

In the wake of the past half decade of financial crises, the dominant logic of late capitalism--Consume! Enjoy!--isn't "corrected" by austerity rhetoric and current financial situations so much as redirected by it: You've enjoyed in the wrong way; learn to enjoy denying yourself as part of the greater good and you can continue to enjoy. That there is a barrenness to accepting such a life seems to me obvious, and part of the increasing levels of discontent among youths especially might be attributed to a glimpse of the barrenness that they can look forward to. As Fisher points out, "There is a sense that 'something is missing'--but no appreciation that this mysterious missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle" (22). Thus, when in Valences of the Dialectic, Jameson argues that there is a fear "of repression: that socialism will involve renunciation, that the abstinence from commodities is only a figure for a more generalized Puritanism and a systemic willed frustration of desire," a situation that "allow[s] us to grasp, but only from the outside, how difficult it may be to relinquish [the] compensatory desires and intoxications we have developed in order to make the present livable," he articulates the social context in which the political work that teachers must undertake (of which addressing student evals is one part) emerges and the challenges it faces (384). In an increasingly damaged and unsustainable world: 

rationing of some sort is inevitable. The issue is whether it will be collectively managed, or whether it will be imposed by authoritarian means when it is already too late. Quite what forms this collective management should take is, again, an open question, one that can only be resolved practically and experimentally. (Fisher 80)

Jameson echoes this conclusion, arguing for "a collective decision and a collective will to live in a different way" (384), and the task that  Žižek proposed to Occupy Wall Street is strikingly similar: 

Fall in love with hard and patient work . . . [W]e are allowed and obliged even to think about alternatives. There is a long road ahead, and soon we will have to address the truly difficult questions--questions not about what we do not want, but about what we DO want.

Here there is an echo of the problem to which David Foster Wallace's later work--especially "This is Water" and The Pale King--attempted to find an answer: how to will different desires and modes of thought into existence and what those new desires and modes might look like. As Jameson points out, paraphrasing Marx, capitalism is desire's "stimulant and an immense machine for producing new and unforseeable desires of all kind" (384). There are opportunities for exploiting this immense machine, though, especially if those unforseeable desires, such as the missing something discussed above, cannot be met by that same machine. Indeed, it becomes increasingly clear in the wake of movements toward austerity that it is only through positing alternatives (especially to austerity and its logic)--and then actively working to achieve those alternatives--that both new desires and the existing desires produced by capitalism can be identified and met.


If Fisher is correct in saying that higher education (and the education system more broadly) is "the engine room of the reproduction of social reality" and if that social reality, for students, consists of an "entertainment-control circuit" into which they are plugged in order to experience this obligatory jouissance--whose logic Žižek describes as "'You must, because you can!'"--student evals would seem to function as a way of turning the environment of higher educations into one more compatible with the texting, smartphone, social media, internet matrix. Here, student evals are a way of applying the social reality (re)produced by higher education to higher education itself: enjoyment replaces learning because learning, as a category of experience separate from enjoyment, doesn't fit into the obligatory jouissance that Žižek claims governs our current social reality. This is why, as currently formatted, those evals are a losing prospect--they undermine the ability of higher education to maintain goals that are not in direct service to capital's demands.

This is also why the task of remaking student evals and their function within higher education is a political issue. One of the reasons that this seems to me like a key area in which teachers can exercise a certain kind of power against the pressures of capital on higher education is because student evals have a definite form, one that is a reflection of the ideological assumptions that undergird the social reality that Fisher, Jameson, and  Žižek discuss above. Challenging this form and replacing it with a new, more effective form, then, requires an engagement with those ideological assumptions. Crucially, it is also an example of "the strategic withdrawal of forms of labor which will only be noticed by management . . . the machineries of self-surveillance that have no effect whatsoever on the delivery of education, but which managerialism could not exist without" (Fisher 79-80). At the same time, producing this new form of student evals necessarily requires a re-articulation of how learning functions in the present moment not just as a way to reproduce current social reality, but to challenge and correct that social reality. It is a way to reinscribe higher education within a larger anticapitalist project, one that teaches students how to articulate and form new desires on their own terms, rather than settling for, as Jameson terms them, "compensatory desires" to make a poor situation livable.