This will be at least the third round of collective bargaining in which we have beseeched UBC to act like a university, respect the overwhelming scholarly evidence, and stop using student survey data for purposes for which they are manifestly unfit. Statistically unreliable, obviously not addressing the question at hand, and riddled with discriminatory, toxic, and uninformed opinion, anonymous student surveys (SEoT’s, or SEI’s) are deeply inappropriate for their intended purpose. UBC’s own Senate has acknowledged as much, and yet, so far, UBC continues to cling to these untrustworthy and inequitable instruments. We have made all of the arguments and pointed to all of the research in previous bargaining posts on this subject, so this time we think it will be helpful to hear from ourselves on this troubling and persistent problem. In this round’s bargaining survey, we asked our members:
“Have you ever received inappropriate, irrelevant, discriminatory or abusive comments in SEoTs?”And we received hundreds and hundreds of responses. Here is a sampling:
First, the general responses:
“Too many to mention”
“Hasn’t everyone?”
“As has anyone, in my experience of [more than 2 decades] teaching, who is a woman, who speaks and looks “non-standard”
“In my field it’s quite common”
“Constantly. Comments are personal attacks, nothing related to improvement of teaching”
“Abusive remarks are routine”
“This is getting to be ridiculously abusive”
“As a woman I have reviewed some terrible offensive comments on these surveys, they are painful to read”
“Students are not content or teaching experts and sometimes their comments are hurtful and misogynistic”
“I have stopped reading the surveys because I’ve had enough of sexist crap”
“The structure and design of the anonymous student feedback creates trolls….I have literally never felt as awful about myself…as immediately after reading troll comments in SeoTs. Sure, I get lots of positive feedback mixed in, [but] these do not make the hurtful troll comments less painful. If I give you a nice warm hug and then I violently punch you in the teeth, the two events do not cancel out to “neutral”. That is not how emotional accounting works.”
“The potential for abuse is enormous”
“They are morale- and soul-crushing”
“It is shocking, actually. SEI surveys are so terrible that I have stopped being able to read them in order to protect my mental health. And I am a multi-award-winning instructor.”
Our members also shared personal examples, and the fact that our colleagues remember these confirms the toxic effects to which our members repeatedly refer:
“negative comments on my disability”
“Sexism, comments on personal appearance, racism”
“comments on my physical appearance”
“I have directly received sexist, homophobic, and ableist student comments”
“antisemitic, violent threats, sexual harassment”
“We were encouraged by our program to collect anonymous mid-course feedback, so my grad student had to walk back into the classroom to teach the student who wrote this: “she puts the T&A back into TA””
“I got comments like “X is a bitch, but at least she’s kind of hot”
“go back where you came from”
“you looked fat in that outfit”
One colleague summarized this toxic mess clearly: “The focus on SEI given its well-documented problems for equity-seeking groups is so hard to understand. Why does our employer ignore the science and focus so much on these reports? I feel this is dangerous in so many ways… it impacts merit, promotion and also changes how people teach in worrying ways.”
Our colleagues also rightly note that scrubbing the comments themselves only masks (and potentially exacerbates) the issue if the university continues to use this data for summative/employment purposes. And this is quite apart from the ever-falling participation rates, or from the glaring fact that students cannot reliably speak to the actual question at hand (teaching effectiveness).
If “do no harm” is the first vow of the physician, it should also be the baseline for university policy. So far, UBC hasn’t met that test; we hope they can do better.
