For the record (more Brian Leiter content, unfortunately)

To what degree, if at all, should student evaluations and/or complaints be taken into account for the purposes of tenure or post-tenure review? What about judgments regarding a faculty member’s “collegiality”? Consider this story about changing tenure standards at Brooklyn Law School.

The Board of Trustees recently adopted “demonstrated incompetence” to the list, defining it as “multiple unsatisfactory performance reviews or complaints from supervisors; multiple complaints from students or multiple unsatisfactory student evaluations; [or] sub-standard academic performance.”

Bloggers say the change could threaten academic freedom at the law school school — especially since the definition of demonstrated incompetence also includes exhibiting a “lack of collegiality,” a criterion the American Association of University Professors has vocally opposed as a factor in performance evaluations.

Ah yes, “bloggers:”

Brian Leiter, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School who runs Leiter Reports, said in a blog post that it is alarming the language equates demonstrated incompetence with “wholly unreliable and disreputable criteria like students evaluations [and] complaints from supervisors.”

“[P]oor teaching evaluations from students do not constitute demonstrated incompetence — for reasons the enormous empirical literature on teaching evaluations would make clear, quite apart from AAUP norms,” Leiter wrote.

A couple of notes:

(1) Amusingly, when Leiter is in the mood to libel someone, student evaluations are magically transformed from “wholly unreliable and disreputable critieria” into compelling evidence:

I have to admit that knowing Campos, and knowing that he cares not a whit about his students (see his teaching evaluations) or about prospective law students or about scholarship or about anything but himself and his own media exposure [etc etc etc]

Leiter, needless to say, hasn’t actually seen my teaching evaluations, which in any event he claims are meaningless, except when they aren’t.

Even more amusingly, Leiter not only cites his own student evaluations, but actually provides an on-line link to them when fulminating about the awesomeness of his academic accomplishments:

My teaching evaluations, by the way, are a matter of public record, will ScamProf Campos share his?

(2) Since I’m addressing the public record for the purpose of dealing with Leiter’s ongoing libel of my academic reputation, this is as good a time as any to point out that, during a period when according to Leiter, I was doing “almost no scholarly work,” I published, among other things, two pieces of scholarship that have each been cited in the academic literature quite a bit more than anything Leiter has ever published.

I wonder what Peter Aduren thinks of all this?