By MARTY LEVINE
“Incendiary or harmful language” is a small but growing problem in students’ evaluations of professors each year — known as OMETs, from the Office of Measurement and Evaluation of Teaching — and that office is formulating new guidelines for handling such comments.
Their suggestions were both welcomed and questioned by the University Senate’s Educational Policies committee on Sept. 19.
Incendiary or harmful language is “language that undermines the point of the teaching evaluation,” said Erik Arroyo, director of academic support services in the University Center for Teaching and Learning, in presenting the proposed guidelines. “What we don’t want is for students to use the OMET platform as social media. ... And we’re seeing that more and more. What we are seeing more and more are things that don’t help.”
Lisa Votodian, who manages the center’s evaluation office, showed the group several comments from evaluations that fit this description. They included comments on the appearance of female teachers — that one had “given up,” another was “out of shape and (had) zero interest in taking care of herself” and that “her lack of fitness makes other people uncomfortable.” Other students wrote that Pitt should “have an attractive white woman teach this recitation” or that the University should “stop letting these illegal people into the university. They are criminals.”
“These are actual comments that are beyond harmful. ... Sexist, racist, they provide no constructive value,” Votodian said.
Currently, “we don’t go through the comments; we don’t edit them. ... (Comments) are not removed or flagged,” she said. Only when they are pointed out to her office by faculty or teaching assistants do they get extra attention, such as a letter from her office to accompany the evaluation.
“As you can imagine, getting such comments … is upsetting, to say the least,” she said. The new guidelines are being designed, Votodian said, to “make it clear to students that this is going to happen — if you make comments like this, they will be reported, they will be removed and there may be consequences ...”
The guidelines also would establish an online form for instructors and department chairs to report and request the removal of comments from an OMET survey. A panel of five Pitt employees would review these removal requests.
Faculty have felt threatened by violent language in OMETs in the past, reported Lorraine Denman, French and Italian department faculty in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences and Ed Policies committee member. She recalled hearing this when she was a member previously of the Faculty Affairs committee.
Votodian asked if it would it be helpful to remind the students and faculty what sort of language can be reported and result in consequences. “Sometimes students do have very constructive comments and they are presented well.”
“There have been issues with OMET for some time,” Denman said. “It would be good to have this kind of language in your OMET” explaining appropriate comments. “I think I would quit teaching if I got these types of reviews.”
Why do we continue to allow anonymous OMET surveys, she asked.
“They actually are not anonymous,” Votodian pointed out. “The results are confidential and instructors receive anonymized data, but we can identify students.”
“I tell students they are anonymous but they are really only anonymous to me,” said committee co-chair John Stoner, faculty member in Dietrich’s history department.
Denman suggested that students should be required to add their PeopleSoft number to the evaluation to make it clear that they can be identified later.
“I don’t think this will cure it,” Votodian said, “but I do think this might be a good start.”
“I worry deeply about policing student language,” said another committee member, Frits Pil of the business school. “I just worry about stifling student expression. I believe there is a broader educational effort” that can be made instead, rather than policing language, which is “very Big Brothery. It just feels like we are shifting into a space we can improve differently.”
“I have no doubt,” he added, that departmental chairs and vice chairs are already aware that “this language has no place in any evaluation. We all have different points where we feel language is or is not offensive” and he would not want the University to create a formal definition, he said. And, in any case, “students make comments on faculty on other sites” on the internet geared toward faculty assessment, he said.
Votodian said she recalled reading comments that others thought were incendiary or harmful but which she herself “did not deem inappropriate. Perhaps it was not written in a light or a happy mood, but it was constructive criticism.”
It is also possible that such comments may not have been perceived correctly by her, she cautioned: “I was not in the classroom.”
Pil and other committee members agreed, as Votodian noted, that the rare threat of violence or self-harm that appears on an OMET needs to be flagged and reported to a Pitt office that can provide help right away.
“I don’t know why we need a committee of five people” to decide whether to remove such language in the examples Votodian offered, added Pil. “This should not be a challenge.”
“There shouldn’t be 10 eyes on everything,” Stoner said. “But the one thing that I like about this is that deans and student affairs are not always themselves critical readers of OMETs and have missed comments on OMETs.”
The reviewing panel won’t have the name of the faculty and the name of the student when they evaluate flagged comments, Votodian said. And the results of the panel’s investigation will not affect a student’s grade, which would already have been registered in any case. “If the comments are removed,” she explained, “we also intend to remove the corresponding numerical rating … and any other comments.”
Committee members suggested that the panel could include students — perhaps a member of the Student Governing Board — alongside faculty and members of the teaching center.
“We need to communicate to students how to give effective feedback,” said Votodian, “constructive and helpful and not negative and harmful.”
Votodian said her office hopes to apply these guidelines to this fall’s class evaluation, which will be done in December.
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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