Advice From Yale

TENURE DECISIONS crop up in almost every debate over the role of student input in University operations. One side contends that student voice in the hiring of professors is imprudent, since undergraduates lack the expertise to gauge scholarly quality. The other camp argues that students have an obvious interest in decisions that will affect their academic futures and that of their institution. It reasons that students do, in fact, have valuable advice to offer on a junior faculty member's skills in the classroom.

The debate inevitably bogs down here, in arguments over precisely how much emphasis a scholar's teaching skill should receive in tenure deliberations. Yet these philosophical tangles obscure the simple fact that students do sense well whether a junior professor can teach. They should be encouraged to provide their impressions to tenure committees who can take or reject it.

Attempts to introduce student input into the Harvard tenure system, accordingly, have gone nowhere, and students can convey their impressions only haphazardly through personal contact. But the quiet implementation last week at Yale of a new teacher-evaluation mechanism may well cut the knot of such endless debate, and could serve as a valuable model.

Under the new system, Yale students in courses taught by junior faculty members fill out forms specifically evaluating their instructors as teachers. These appraisals become part of a file to be consulted when the junior faculty members comes up for tenure. One of some 40 recommendations spawned a year ago by a faculty review of tendering, this procedure has not created much excitement among Yalies. Many rightly view it as a "baby step"--for the student evaluations could be totally ignored behind closed departmental doors. Nevertheless, the mere act of formalizing such a process has considerable value.

Baby step or not, students here could use the security of such a formal, no-strings-attached channel for their words of wisdom. The practical details are unimportant; anything from a beefed-up and better-targeted CUE Guide to some form of closed file would do the trick.

Representatives to the Undergraduate Council, after some promising campaign rhetoric on the subject, have apparently let the meaty issue of tenure be relegated to a back burner. But it is well within their scope to set up a procedure to ensure that--whether or not tenure committees want the information only students can give--it's on their desks. Just this once, we might do well to take the tip from Yale.