Mitchell Stephens writes:
A frightening thought: The same "market priorities" to which, as evidenced by Salon's decision to consider "hit rates" when deciding whom to fire, we are losing Internet journalism could easily spread to academia.
Imagine, if you will, a system that allowed academic administrators to measure which courses and instructors were most popular with students. A nightmare of the far future? Not really. The whole scheme could be accomplished by pen and paper. Registrars might be asked to keep counts of how many students signed up for each course — how many "hits," in other words, there were on particular courses. Students might even be given forms at the end of the semester that allowed them to "evaluate" individual courses and instructors. And then. when it came time to schedule, to dole out raises, to tenure or to terminate, numbers from those course counts, numbers from those surveys might conveniently appear.
Before long we would be hearing: "Sorry Prof. Eminent Scholar, but the students" — the students, mind you — "simply don't find you interesting." Talk about (in Ellen Willis's words) a "scare factor"! Talk about (in Jay Rosen's words) a "creepy atmosphere"! What tenure committee, hypnotized by such statistics, would allow time to get the kinks out of one's lectures? What department chair, prostrate before "blunt realities," would consider the need to maintain a proper mix of courses? Gone would be the days when even unpopular instructors — supported by the success of courses taught by others — could make a living. Call it (paraphrasing Rosen): "death by evaluation."
One hesitates to sound like an alarmist, but it is important not to mince words here: Were such a system in place, academic administrators inevitably would be guilty, like Salon's David Talbot, of taking into account the preferences of those for whom what they do is intended!
And this might not be the end of it. Eventually editors of print publications — denied the statistics available online — might begin diluting their commitment to their own ideals and their own "deeper" journalistic sense by actually asking acquaintances which stories they liked. Why, eventually, people — ordinary people — might begin watching those to whom they were talking for signs of interest in what they were saying!
Then the triumph of "the market" — if we are to see "the market" whenever an attempt is made to be sensitive to the desires of those we are trying to reach — would truly be complete.
Click here to view "Their Eyes," a video experiment by Mitchell Stephens on this subject. You must have RealPlayer 7 Basic (free) installed to view this video.
