{"id":436,"date":"2006-07-28T11:02:59","date_gmt":"2006-07-28T11:02:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/07\/28\/a-little-perspective-please\/"},"modified":"2006-07-28T11:02:59","modified_gmt":"2006-07-28T11:02:59","slug":"a-little-perspective-please","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/07\/28\/a-little-perspective-please\/","title":{"rendered":"A Little Perspective, Please"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve linked to Inside Higher Ed<\/cite> almost every day this week, so why stop now? Today’s Views section features Terry Caesar being outraged<\/a> over RateMyProfessors.com<\/a> (which he refers to in BLOCK CAPS throughout). Among the many sins of the site, he includes this paragraph:<\/p>\n

\n

In fact, students at RATE don’t even have to be students! I know of one professor who was so angered at a comment made by one of her students that she took out a fake account, wrote a more favorable comment about herself, and then added more praise to the comments about two of her colleagues. How many other professors do this? There’s no telling — just as there’s no telling about local uses of the site by campus committees.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

OK, I have to say something, here, and bear in mind that I say this as an assistant professor coming up for tenure in the fall: Get a fucking grip, people. <\/p>\n

This is a site where students are blowing off steam. That’s it. Your tenure decision isn’t riding on your “hotness” score, and if by some fluke, your committee happens to look at it, you can rest assured that it will be treated with all the seriousness it deserves, which is to say damn little. It’s not worth perpetrating sock-puppetry to boost your scores, any more than it would be worth dressing up as a student and hanging out in the snack bar to offer “spontaneous” testimonials to your own excellence as a professor.<\/p>\n

If you’re bothered by this sort of thing, don’t look at the site. It’s as simple as that. But if you must look, for God’s sake, try to keep a little perspective, will you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve linked to Inside Higher Ed almost every day this week, so why stop now? Today’s Views section features Terry Caesar being outraged over RateMyProfessors.com (which he refers to in BLOCK CAPS throughout). Among the many sins of the site, he includes this paragraph: In fact, students at RATE don’t even have to be students!… Continue reading A Little Perspective, Please<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=436"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}