Last December, Baruch’s campus news posted an article proudly announcing that a professor at our college had made RateMyProfessors’ top ten hottest list. The website lists assessment categories, including the easiness of the class, the rater’s interest in the subject, and clarity. Hotness is given the caveat “just for fun.” A ‘rate my realtor’ website has relevant categories such as communication, market knowledge, and negotiating. A ‘rate my doctor’ website has categories for punctuality, friendliness, and helpfulness. Neither of these cites include hotness. Why would RateMyProfessor.com invite students to judge their teachers by appearance, even by sexual appeal?

Part of what RateMyProfessor.com offers is a chance to level the playing field. The power dynamic between students and teachers can sometimes seem so severe. I’ve had many conversations with fellow teachers about grade grubbing: emails and office visits with students who either plead, bully, or plead and bully at the same time. There is something raw and vulnerable to the badgering of course, and that is what makes the situation stressful and sometimes even wrenching. I sweat through these conversations when they were happening, and they turned my stomach later at night.

“I am not a B student” (or fill in whatever the disappointing grade is). I think this is the gut feeling behind a lot of grade issues even when it isn’t said. And this is what I mean by an uneven playing field between teachers and students. I’ve realized there is a crucial difference between the relationship of teacher and student to those between realtor and client, doctor and patient. A flakey realtor can definitely be annoying, could keep you from the perfect apartment. The effects of an incompetent doctor could have a major impact on your life. But grades affect people’s identity, their sense of who they are at a time when the clay is still wet. When majors are still not entirely decided, much less careers, a grade might seem like a public judgment, affecting your own, private sense of self. When I was in college, the A’s in English and B’s and C’s in math and science told me I was a certain kind of person, they also directed me towards one career and away from other. My students at Baruch have an even more pragmatic grasp of the way grades affect their sense of themselves and way the outside world sees them. They know what grade point average it takes to get into business school, or to get an interview at Ersnt & Young. They have a keen sense that a grade attaches to their fate.

Paolo Carpignano, in “The Shape of the Sphere: the Public Sphere and the Materiality of Communication,” defines the public sphere as any practice that mediates between the public and the private. I went back to the readings from his class at the New School recently, when some recent events made me think about students and their identities, and my own, and also the public/private practice of judging, rating, and grading—the way it effects our sense of ourselves and the way others see us.

In the past few years, I’ve reconnected with people through Facebook and a few have told me they’ve Googled me; to find out what I’ve been doing since high school, or since the last family wedding or funeral. And this summer after a cousin mentioned Googling me, I of course Googled myself. I have an unusual name, so any hit I get is pretty surely me. And there, the very first one, was RateMyProfessor. And the very first rating, above several with comments such as “nice” and a few “boring” and one or two more generous, was a very detailed and sexually explicit post. I guessed, after thinking about it a lot, that a C might feel like the same kind of humiliation, affecting the way you see yourself and the way other people see you. Reading the post made me think that my sense of vulnerability might be right in line with what my student had felt.

For weeks after that post I fantasized about wearing a bomb suit to class. I wanted to prevent students from judging my appearance at all: here is an area in which I am no less vulnerable to judgment than anyone, no matter my maturity or professional accomplishment. For awhile after I found that post, I measured a student’s likelihood to retaliate on RateMyProfessor while I turned in grades. I eventually pushed this to the side, but a sense of wariness remains. I wonder how many other teachers are affected by the site and how we might clear a space for it within the academy, to absorb and reflect with students over what it has to tell us.

There has been some stone throwing on both sides, since RateMyProfessor began to offer teachers the chance to respond. (You can see a striking example from a past cac.cophony post: http://cac.ophony.org/2008/02/21/when-professors-strike-back/). But this has been like a back-alley scuffle behind the lecture halls where we talk about things like the public sphere and the role of the Internet in the academy. Grading and RateMyProfessor.com seem like very public spheres that affect our identities, that mediate between the public and private. But the practices themselves, as Michael pointed out in a recent post, aren’t the source of much open, deliberate debate.

Paolo Carpginano, “The Shape of the Sphere: The Public Sphere and the Materiality of Communication,” Constellations 6, no. 2 (1999).