15 CL22 Butcher proofed JR


Cultural Logic: Marxist Theory & Practice 
2015-2017 (Whole Number 22), pp. 233-249 

 
 

Student Evaluations, Neoliberal Managerialism,  
and Networks of Mistrust 

Ian Butcher 

Cyrus Duffleman, the beaten-down, adjunct professor protagonist of Alex Kudera’s Fight 
for Your Long Day (2010), experiences any number of daily humiliations that convince him of 
his worthlessness—low pay, no benefits, little if any respect from his tenured colleagues and 
bosses. Perhaps the most direct humiliation, though, comes from his own students, who 
describe him on their student evaluations as “a ‘wannabe,’ ‘a fake who fails to inspire,’ with 
a ‘voice worse than screeching chalk,’” assessments with which he often agrees (Kudera 237). 
Such abusive sentiments are not uncommon on student evaluations. In a recent piece for Slate, 
Rebecca Schuman reproduced colleagues’ student comments, and found an “overwhelmingly 
depressing and depressingly unsurprising” list of judgements about hair, clothing, body shape, 
and attractiveness, along with demeaning comments about female intelligence or teachers’ race or 
political beliefs (“Needs Improvement”). None of the comments discussed the actual act of 
teaching itself. This should be surprising—they are student evaluations of teaching—but it is 
distressingly common, and it points to the main problem with student evaluations: they do not 
evaluate teaching. 

Student evaluations are an unpleasant end-of-the-semester ritual for many, a chance 
(supposedly) to see what the students really thought of you that, more often than not, opens a 
window onto bilious rejoinders to poor grades or perceived slights. They constitute one part of 
the vast river of information that modern higher education devotes itself to collecting, and while 
they are often unpleasant, their increasing omnipresence across disciplines, schools, and levels has 
a tendency to render them innocuous in most eyes despite their widely-reported flaws. Teachers 
almost always scorn evaluations when they are mentioned, deriding them as customer 
satisfaction surveys, popularity contests, or opportunities for cowards to take anonymous 
potshots, but they rarely mention the much more troubling consequences of evaluations’ 
institutional support and presence. Even ignoring student evaluations’ failure to provide 
meaningful data because of real methodological limitations (chief among them that evaluations 
tend to quantify traits that are irrelevant to their stated objective of measuring teaching 
effectiveness), repeated studies suggest that student evaluations are biased against females, for 
example, a pretty damning charge when, according to the National Centre for Education 
Statistics, as of 2013 females made up 48.8% of all instructional faculty (53.6% of all part-time 
faculty) and 47.3% of all grad assistants.1 Given the prominent (and, in some cases, exclusive) role 
that student evaluations play in performance reviews of graduate students, adjuncts, and non-
tenure-track faculty and promotion and tenure reviews of tenure-track faculty, these well known 
flaws take on a much more disturbing import. 



	

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Though student evaluations and their flaws have been much commented on lately—in 
addition to recent coverage in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Slate, and NPR’s education 
blog, major newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post have also devoted 
coverage to this issue—there has been little attention paid to student evaluations’ place and 
function in the larger ideological framework of contemporary higher education. That is, the 
flaws of student evaluations are not isolated from the larger issues threatening higher education 
today, but rather are symptoms of the way neoliberal policies have reshaped the university and 
the roles of teachers and students within it over the past three decades. By virtue of its position 
as “a hub institution of our time,” higher education has come to serve as a prime venue for 
neo-liberalization in American society (Williams “Deconstructing” B7). In particular, student 
evaluations function as a tool in the restructuring of higher education into a service industry that 
offers a saleable commodity (the “college experience”) with a recognizable brand (Harvard or 
Princeton, for example) to student-consumers who are in the process repackaged as branded 
advertisements to entice future student-consumers. Faculty in this model are less teachers than 
experience managers, acting according to the stated preferences, qualities, and characteristics of 
the brand. In order to fully implement this model, though, education must be standardized and 
homogenized and quality control monitoring must take the place of assessment. Student 
evaluations, then, represent one arm of the proliferation of easily quantifiable (and thus 
comparable) data points within the “responsible” and “accountable” neoliberal university. This 
shift in function has been accompanied by a shift in governance away from faculty and students 
and toward an administration convinced of the value of student evaluations, and the overall effect 
of this change has been the creation of networks of mistrust between teachers and students, 
teachers and other teachers, and teachers and themselves. Ultimately, challenges to (and 
proposed reforms of) student evaluations can be successful only if they are framed as challenges 
to the vision of higher education to which student evaluations belong. 

Neoliberal Managerialism: Neoliberalism Meets Managerial Democracy 

I want to locate the significance of student evaluations within the shifting understanding 
of the goals and purpose of higher education and the roles of faculty and students in the post-
Golden Age (1945-75) university. As part of the broader postwar economic boom driven by a 
Fordist-Keynesian welfare state, the Golden Age university massively expanded, with enrollment 
increasing by almost 400% (from 2.3 to 11.2 million) between 1950 and 1975 and faculty 
enjoying the steadiest growth rate for full-time positions of the postwar period. After initially 
coming under attack during the late 1960s, the combination of stagflation caused by the Nixon 
Shock, the end of the Bretton Woods system, and the oil crises of 1973 and 1979 all “broke 
the back of the Keynesian orthodoxy—as both a generative theory and as a system of 
government” (Peck 5). This marked the end of the postwar boom, and the Golden Age of higher 
education would not last the decade, either. After 1975, enrollment growth rates would drop, 
not returning to the double digit growth figures regularly seen during the preceding 25 years until 
the twenty-first century (aside from a brief resurgence in the second half of the 1980s), and 
academic employment was subjected to increasingly severe casualization that reduced full-time 
employment from almost 80% of all faculty positions in 1970 to just 50% in 2011. 

The replacement of a Fordist Keynesianism with a post-Fordist neoliberalism following 
the crises of capitalism of the 1970s changed the environment in which higher education 
existed during the Golden Age by subsuming the state and civic life to the market and changing 



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the dominant forms of labour and employment. During the “great convulsion of world capitalism” 
of the 1970s and the “period of major restructuring” of the 1980s, neoliberalism consolidated 
itself “as the new dominant common sense, the paradigm shaping all policies,” achieving 
hegemony in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other Western nations like Chile 
(Gamble 21, 25).2 Conceived of, at least in part, as the alternative to Keynesianism (and all other 
managed and interventionist systems, like socialism), neoliberalism argued for “monetarist 
economics [that] provided readily presentable, if ultimately flawed, ‘solutions’” to the crises of 
Keynesianism (Peck 5). In contrast to the Keynesian welfare state, neoliberalism is “an 
articulation of state, market, and citizenship that harnesses the first to impose the stamp of the 
second on the third,” repurposing the state as a guarantor of free markets and unfettered 
competition and civic participation as engagement with the market and its practices (Wacquant 
71). At the same time, the rigidity of Fordism, with its emphasis on mass production of 
standardized products on a national scale, gave way to what David Harvey calls “flexible 
accumulation,” which favoured smaller production runs and more specialized or niche 
products and patterns of consumption (147). Even as neoliberalism stripped the Keynesian state 
of its social functions, post-Fordism rendered the nation-state largely obsolete, other than as 
guarantor of market freedom, privileging the multinational corporations that dominate the 
service, telecommunication, and financial industries. Industrial capitalism gave way to 
“Semiocapitalism,” or immaterial labour, which “takes the mind, language and creativity as its 
primary tools for the production of value” (Berardi 21).3 The rhetoric of flexibility that 
characterised this shift into post-Fordism, though, masked a widespread casualization that 
offered security and prosperity for the elite and precariousness and continued re(or de-) skilling 
for a much larger segment of the population in place of the Fordist-Keynesian goal of full 
employment. 

Eventually, during the 1980s, declining levels of state and federal funding, coupled with 
policy initiatives that promoted competition for sources of revenue, brought neoliberalism to the 
university, necessitating structural changes that shifted higher education’s mission and self-
understanding. In its efforts to repurpose the state, neoliberalism emphasized a twin operation of 
privatization and marketization, both of which were (and continue to be) applied to higher 
education.4 The former can be seen in public institutions’ increasing reliance on tuition and fees to 
generate revenue as state funding has declined. In 1980-81, state funds accounted for 45.6% of all 
revenue for public institutions, compared to 12.9% for tuition and fees. In 2012-13, state funds 
accounted for just 21.1% of all revenue, while tuition and fees accounted for 20.8%.5 

Accompanying this privatization has been an intensification of the competitive, market-based 
relationships between institutions of higher education that has been ongoing since the 1970s. The 
Nixon administration initiated widespread marketization of higher education by reformatting 
student aid policies, “g[iving] aid to students rather than institutions, thus making students 
consumers in the tertiary education market” and tying funding to schools’ abilities “to attract 
students and their Pell grants” (Slaughter and Leslie 44). The passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 
1980 furthered this marketization by granting schools the right to patent research developed 
with federal money in the hopes of actively encouraging corporate partnerships. By the 1990s, 
accommodating this new, market-based approach to higher education was more a survival 
mechanism than anything else.-6 

As institutions felt the need to secure new sources of revenue to a greater degree than 
during the Golden Age and higher education decision making was increasingly rooted in 



	

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financial considerations, governance structures changed, as did the role of faculty and students 
within the university. Following the Second World War, faculty had won the right to “determine 
the shape of the curriculum, the content of particular courses, or the use of particular books” 
largely without interference, and had a significant say in the hiring of faculty and administrators 
(Jencks and Riesman 15). At the same time, though, administrative power was also 
increasing as boards of trustees were “more likely than they once were to delegate authority to 
the college administration, either de jure or de facto,” particularly with regard to business, 
budgetary, and fundraising matters from which faculty were largely excluded from 
participating (Jencks and Riesman 16). As casualization of the faculty accelerated in the 1980s and 
1990s, the administrative presence increased, a development predicted by figures like Clark 
Kerr and Jacques Barzun, who saw this as natural given that “as the institution becomes more 
complex, the role of administration becomes more central in integrating it” (Kerr 28).7 

Casualization made for an increasingly fragmented faculty who began to lose their ability to 
influence areas like the curriculum and hiring in the face of an administrative culture “becoming 
ever more internally consistent and cohesive” (Bousquet 11). As the elements of higher 
education over which administrators had gained oversight in the postwar period (like the budget) 
came to exert more influence over the structure and mission of institutions, the opinion of groups 
vested in the educational mission, like faculty, declined in institutional importance. 

The rise of administration had a rather drastic impact on governance in higher 
education, paving the way for new management philosophies imported from the corporate world 
that accelerated the effects of neoliberalism and promoted new understandings of faculty and 
student roles. During the height of faculty and student power in the 1960s and 1970s, the 
dominant form of university governance was what Christopher Newfield has termed “managerial 
democracy,” in which “major decisions affecting one level of the institution are made by levels 
above it, but usually with at least formal rights of consultation and participation” (“What Was” 
111). As early as the 1960s, though, the understanding of the university began to shift away 
from an institution tasked with fulfilling its educational mission toward a brand, or “a certain 
standard of performance, a certain degree of respect, a certain historical legacy, a characteristic 
quality of spirit” that was being sold to students and their future employers (Kerr 19). The 
chief goal of faculty and administrators, then—which, viewed by an administration with “the 
power and, crucially, the intention to remake competing campus cultures in its own image,” 
were increasingly synonymous—became the “[p]rotection and enhancement of the [brand’s] 
prestige” (Bousquet 11; Kerr 20).8 Acting in part under the influence of a resurgent financial 
sector that held profits to be the sole determining criterion of quality, higher education turned to a 
financially-based understanding of its own performance and prestige. Students became 
consumers and higher education a product to be sold to them (one part credentialing service, 
another part life experience) in this model. The relative autonomy that faculty had won in the 
immediate postwar years, in which they found increasing influence over university affairs, began 
to disappear as those aspects they influenced most directly became less central to the 
university’s purpose. 

As managerial democracy became less effective and protecting and advancing the 
university’s brand assumed increasing importance in a field of commodified higher education, 
Total Quality Management (TQM) became the dominant administrative paradigm. Starting from 
the premise that “quality is achieved by improvement of the process,” TQM stresses efficiency 
above all else, using statistical analyses of production processes to reduce errors and waste 



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that limit output and value (Deming 12). In its academic manifestation, TQM supported an 
emerging rhetoric of “responsibility” and “accountability” that made “[f]inance . . . the 
privileged language of reality,” as “[h]ow the institution was doing was first and foremost a 
question of its economic situation” (Newfield Unmaking 169). This reinforced public perception 
that higher education (like all services) should be run as a business, an attitude that Mark Fisher 
calls “business ontology” (17). This view, however, is a fundamental misunderstanding of higher 
education’s role as a social institution, one that “exists to spend money on making . . . what is 
sometimes called ‘human capital’” (Newfield Unmaking 169). Though TQM’s emphasis on 
financial responsibility provided faculty with more information about the budget, it neither 
increased their formal powers nor gave them a larger voice in governance. Instead, under the 
guise of efficiency and accountability, administrators (with the aid of outside study groups or 
task forces) challenged faculty control over curricular issues that provide “faculty [with] a 
privileged claim on university resources and decision-making priorities” (Ginsberg 10-11). 
Taking over, then, and putting in place accountability mandates that make teachers responsible 
to administrators (and, ultimately, financial benchmarks) reduces the possibility of faculty 
self-governance and the educational mission’s competing claim with the bottom line as the 
dominant public understanding of the university’s function. As with the neoliberal subject, the 
neoliberal university exercises its freedoms in terms of the market. Faculty are free to research 
and teach with full university support as long as their activities can be packaged as part of the 
branded commodity for sale. It is the operations of student evaluations within this regime of 
privatization and marketization (and their contributions to its solidification and perpetuation) to 
which I now turn. 

Networks of Mistrust in Commodified Higher Education 

Student evaluations work within the neoliberal managerialism described above through 
their creation of overlapping networks of mistrust, which pit teachers against students, other 
teachers, and themselves. This mistrust serves a powerful political end, eroding the ability of 
universities to serve as sites of the development of class consciousness, solidarity, and 
collective action. Without the ability of teachers and students to work together (and amongst 
each other) in a spirit of trust, no meaningful collaboration that might increase the agency of 
these groups within higher education can take place. As a result, higher education jettisons its 
ability to support a truly enfranchised citizenry, offering in its place a supposedly lifestyle-
enhancing commodity that prepares students to live in a state whose strengths and abilities are at 
once defined and curtailed by neoliberal policies. Today, the state “no longer needs to offer the 
middle classes this ideological sense of belonging” and offers in its place consumerism, with 
its limited horizons in which “no benefit exterior to the system can be imagined, no benefit that 
would not be subject to cost-benefit analysis” (Readings 52, 48).9 Yet this shift to 
consumerism offers no replacement for the development of an inner life and a civic attitude that 
education traditionally has been tasked with providing. In the past, access to higher education 
was “interwoven with the mainstream and politically powerful ideal that [graduates] w[ere] to 
have interesting work, economic security, and the ability to lead satisfying and insightful lives in 
which personal and collective social development advanced side by side” (Newfield Unmaking 3). 
Commodified higher education decouples the university from these possibilities and, far from the 
claims of those who see elevating business concerns above all else as the university finally facing 
up to and entering the “real world,” these changes remove higher education from its central 
place in the public sphere. Despite the supposed pragmatism of this “realism,” its continued 



	

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attempt to locate the value of higher education outside of the educational mission ultimately 
reveals the hollowness of neoliberalism’s notion of society and its inability to address even 
those needs and desires that it promotes in students. That student evaluations disempower students 
and teachers from making meaningful decisions about what higher education has a duty to 
provide demonstrates the need for reform, if for no other reason than students deserve a better 
product for their money. 

Student evaluations foster mistrust between teachers and students by challenging 
teachers’ authority in the classroom, affirming administrative control over higher education, and 
encouraging students to see as natural the processes of management needed for a society that 
replaces inner life with work. The challenge student evaluations pose to teacher authority comes 
out of the asymmetric relationship between evaluations and the classroom space, the one 
location above all others in which teachers should be able to exert their institutional knowledge 
and experience in a governance situation. Student evaluations are not a regular part of the 
classroom structure, but have a discrete existence from classroom time—either a specific period is 
set aside for them or they are done on university webspace. This gap suggests that the teacher’s 
authority is conditional, probationary, and granted only at the discretion of the administration. In 
turn, student evaluations encourage students to identify with the administrative vision of 
commodified higher education, in which they are consumers who rate teachers based on their 
ability to deliver the experience for which they have paid. This experience is not expected to entail 
hard work (and especially not hard work accompanied by tough grading), so despite student 
evaluations couching themselves in the rhetoric of learning, teachers who create situations in 
which actual learning takes place are rarely rewarded with positive evaluation scores.10 

In this environment of mistrust, students are quick to accept the ideas of financial 
accountability and responsibility advanced by administration that subsume teaching effectiveness 
to the customer satisfaction on which they depend. Students ostensibly pay for their teachers, in 
this argument, who therefore must be evaluated in order to make sure that they are facilitating 
courses in a way that is best for the bottom line. Given the widespread acceptance that financial 
health is the key sign of an institution’s overall quality and excellence, when students are told to 
consider higher education as an investment (in their future, in themselves, etc.) they begin to 
see philosophies like TQM not just as forms of management, but also as the content of higher 
education itself. The university’s prestige is, in this case, something like the guarantor of the 
student’s investment, and students have a vested interest in ensuring the satisfaction of future 
customers in order to maintain that prestige. However, that the chief method for them to do so is 
student evaluations naturalizes surveillance and self-surveillance, both of which are necessary in 
TQMlike systems. Student evaluations are framed as opportunities for teachers to get 
feedback on their teaching and to develop professionally by adapting their teaching practices in 
response to it. Students see, then, that a professional career is one of continuous evaluation and 
understand that they are in competition not only with other students, but also with the 
evaluative data that accompanies their completed purchase of a particular educational brand. The 
end result is a system of higher education designed for “triggering a ‘chain reaction’ by 
producing ‘enterprising subjects’ who in turn will reproduce, expand, and reinforce competitive 
relations between themselves” (Dardot and Laval). However, with no other way to recognise 
quality or growth, students expect their higher education investment to provide them with the 
materials for professional success, as “labor [i]s the most essential part in [our] lives, the most 
specific and personalized,” the sphere in which we “invest [our] specific competences, [our] 



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creative, innovative and communicative energies . . . the best part of [our] intellectual capacities” 
(Berardi 76, 78).11 Students are encouraged to desire this because it is what a commodified higher 
education, one that sells a brand, can provide; and mistrust between students and teachers means 
that students discipline teachers who do not directly provide them with what the brand guarantees. 

Beyond this disciplining student evaluations also foster mistrust between teachers 
through their quantified nature, which contributes to the competitive atmosphere of higher 
education. Evaluations facilitate easier comparison and ranking of teachers and further 
fragmenting a population whose power and influence on campus has declined through 
casualization and the solidification of administrative tactics. When teachers receive their student 
evaluation results, they are often formatted as an explicit comparison between teachers and the 
rest of their department, school, or university, with average scores right next to the teacher’s own 
score. By making a direct comparison, these evaluation results reinforce the validity of student 
satisfaction as the gauge of teacher effectiveness and offer specific data points to which the 
administration can hold teachers accountable. At the same time, the data necessarily inflects 
other modes of teaching evaluation, like peer observations, which must use the idea of teaching 
that results in high evaluation scores as some kind of assumed base of good teaching because 
that kind of teaching is recognized by the administration. Tenure and promotion, hiring, and 
contract extension increasingly rely on demonstrations of teaching effectiveness, for which 
student evaluation scores serve as a shorthand that allows candidates to be ranked, sorted, and 
dealt with appropriately. That is, the quantified nature of student evaluations combines with 
the finance-based understanding of higher education as a whole to elevate improving one’s scores 
to level of a responsibility for all teachers. As neoliberal managerialism has spread 
throughout higher education, teachers have come to be permanently “on the market,” in the sense 
that professional success and advancement occur in an increasingly competitive environment 
even after one has secured a job both because that job is increasingly likely to be part-time, and a 
competitive, market-based approach is deemed to be the most effective way of determining 
value and worth. This environment renders teachers unable to meaningfully engage with each 
other through discussions on teaching that might come out of peer observations and thus unable 
to increase their power within higher education as a whole. Like students, teachers come to 
realize that they are engaged in a competition amongst themselves and with the data that is 
produced about them. 

Teachers come to expect it, and to shape their own practices to work within, this 
competitive environment early on, with the spectre of an oversupplied and ultra-competitive job 
market pushing graduate students into an ever earlier regime of professionalization in the hopes 
of succeeding at what seems to be a zero-sum game. Once out of graduate school, the 
competition ramps up, as “[t]he faculty workforce often voluntarily competes with each other 
for funding, raises, course relief, and so forth and tends to view competition— even 
competition for wage increases lower than the cost of living— as ‘natural’” (Bousquet 107). 
For the increasing majority of precariously employed academics, competition is simply part of 
the ambient experience of life in academe. Solidarity is, in this environment, a difficult process, 
particularly given the uneven levels of significance attached to each semester’s evaluations: 
tenured faculty are free largely to ignore them, while non-tenured faculty (particularly those 
who are precariously employed) cannot ignore any evaluation if they hope to keep their jobs. 
Where Richard Ohmann could once frame teachers’ objections to evaluations of their teaching 
by students or peers in terms of the norms of professionalism, neoliberal managerialism’s 



	

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elevation of competition and accountability to guiding principles for higher education has turned 
observation of teaching into a particularly alienating process.12 Though most teachers use 
observations to initiate conversations about pedagogy and to encourage collaboration on teaching 
across and between members of the department, under neoliberal managerialism teaching must 
always be seen to be exceptional lest the teacher lose some sort of competitive advantage. This 
has the effect of squelching the very developments that observations are intended to foster, 
because observations rarely focus on, and teachers rarely admit to, failures, despite a frank 
discussion of a failure or missed opportunity in the classroom often serving as the springboard 
for real teaching breakthroughs. Instead, teachers maximize their chances in the competitive 
environment by representing themselves in the classroom and to their peers as just that ideal 
representation of the teacher created by student evaluations and the commodified higher 
education to which they are tied, particularly since this kind of teaching is most likely to garner 
recognition. Trapped in a never-ending cycle of competition, teachers reinforce the administrative 
agenda by reifying these representations and eliding the distance between them and reality. 

Perhaps most significantly, though, student evaluations foster mistrust between teachers 
and themselves by enforcing unstated norms and expectations that challenge teachers’ identities 
and ultimately estrange them from the work they do as teachers. This estrangement stems from 
the competition between teachers and data outlined above. In a phenomenon endemic to 
contemporary capitalism, this competition leads “not [to] a direct comparison of workers’ 
performance or output, but [to] a comparison between the audited representation of that 
performance and output,” a distinction that shifts teachers’ roles “towards the generation and 
massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself” (Fisher 42). 
Teaching belongs to the realm of emotional labor, “the management of feeling to create a publicly 
observable facial and bodily display . . . that produces the proper state of mind in others,” a 
system that necessarily privileges representations and expectations (Hochschild Managed 7). 
Student evaluations produce a certain model of an effective teacher that replaces any notion of 
furthering the educational mission as the definition of quality teaching. In essence, to the extent 
that they tacitly reward certain behaviours (fewer lectures, easier grading) and dispositions 
(bright, funny, charming, sexy) and punish others, student evaluations help to establish norms for 
teaching that, while not officially recorded anywhere, become a requirement for continued 
professional advancement. What is more, these expectations often proceed from sexist, ethno-, 
and heterocentric assumptions that render the behaviours of straight, white males as the model and 
put instructors who do not (and cannot) conform to this model in impossible positions. 

The estrangement teachers feel in this scenario results from the need for them to 
identify (and be identified with) these representations that deny the realities facing most teachers 
today in the interests of the institution’s brand, which is a process of self-exploitation. In 
general, higher education treats difference as do most corporations: it is “encouraged so long as 
basic rules and values circulate through the corporation’s every subculture without impediment” 
(Newfield “What Was” 127). Managed diversity, accomplished through the imposition of unstated 
expectations and norms like those communicated through student evaluations, acts like a 
subtle attack on teachers’ identities to prevent the expression of uncontrolled difference that 
might disturb or undermine the college experience that a particular educational brand seeks to 
provide. With the rise of immaterial labour, “[y]ou are forced, weirdly, to be yourself:” 
management cultivates difference in order to bring the human touch to the emotional labour of 
teaching, with student-consumers paying top dollar for the “non-exploited, non-controlled and 



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freely expressed” (Cederström and Fleming 16). As customer satisfaction surveys, student 
evaluations provide a measurement for the extent to which any distinct identity characteristic 
belonging to a teacher adds value to the brand and should be encouraged or fails to add value and 
should be disciplined. Thus, despite the fact that “the typical faculty member . . . [is] a female, 
nontenurable part-timer earning a few thousand dollars a year without health benefits,” she is 
forced to comport herself as if she were otherwise, as if she were the classic college professor—
witty, intelligent, inspiring, and in no way overworked or overburdened (Bousquet 6). This 
performance amounts to self-exploitation, or the use of one’s personality to sell a representation 
of teaching that convinces students that the education they are paying for is a boutique product 
rather than mass produced. Given consumers’ widespread suspicion of affective performances 
“because companies now advertise spontaneous warmth, too,” students will never prove to be 
fully satisfied customers, and the performance required of teachers must come to seem ever more 
real, more genuine, more the actual personality of the teacher (Hochschild Managed 5). 

As the distance between the representation and the reality increases, so too does the effort 
involved in performing the self that conforms to all norms and meets all unstated expectations. 
Eventually, it becomes easier simply to be that self. 

Ultimately, this estrangement reveals teachers’ lack of agency within higher education 
and underscores the need for reform of student evaluations as a first step in a larger reform of 
education more generally. Though teachers often speak about their love of their work or their 
sense of vocation, these are the first qualities that teachers find themselves alienated from by 
their self-exploitation. Instead of an expression of one’s self, one’s passions and commitments, 
teaching becomes a shtick designed to appeal to the widest number of consumers. That self or 
those passions might still exist within the performance, but they are constrained and shaped by the 
performance. However, performing to these expectations also limits teachers’ pedagogical 
choices. Course content is superseded in this model by presentation and delivery, 
homogenizing courses across disciplines and schools. Students expect interactivity and 
entertainment, and so all information must be delivered in ways that are interactive or that 
entertain, regardless of the pedagogical effectiveness of available strategies to do so. Here 
again, student evaluations set up and police these norms, managing teachers’ pedagogy in case 
they are unable to frame it within the expectations of the brand they represent. In this way, 
student evaluations make visible the idea that teachers no longer own their teaching because they 
no longer have control over the environment in which they teach, nor over the demands the 
environment makes on them. To regain control and ownership, then, requires addressing those 
aspects of student evaluations that contribute most directly to neoliberal managerialism’s vision 
of higher education by perpetuating these networks of mistrust. Only by regaining this control 
will actual collaborating between empowered teachers and students become possible. 

The Problem of “True” Education 

Despite their flaws, student evaluations start from a laudable goal: students should have 
some say in their education, both in terms of its content and the environment in which it is 
delivered. There should be conversations about teaching between teachers and students, and those 
conversations should be opportunities for collaboration that are supported by formal, 
institutional power for both groups in deciding on the shape and content of education. There are 
obstacles to the realization of this vision, though, not the least of which is student evaluations 



	

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themselves. Mark Fisher highlights education as a key area of possible resistance and calls for 
“the strategic withdrawal of forms of labour which will only be noticed by management: all the 
machineries of self-surveillance that have no effect whatsoever on the delivery of education, 
but which managerialism could not exist without” (Fisher 79-80). It is in this spirit that I offer 
the following suggestions for how to remake and repurpose student evaluations to best advance a 
more teacherand student-friendly vision of education. At the outset, I agree with Rebecca 
Schuman that we should: 

Combine peer evaluative measures (of lesson plans and assignments, not just 
classroom charisma or test scores) with student evaluations—but make the 
students leave their names on the evals. . . . Actual constructive criticism can be 
delivered as it ought to be: to our faces. Any legitimate, substantive complaints 
can go to the chair or dean. There is no reason for anonymity. (“Needs 
Improvement”) 

I think that there are other necessary reforms that are equally simple and that can have far-
reaching effects, though. These are not endpoints, but they serve as useful beginnings that 
highlight the flaws of student evaluations and demonstrate the necessity of more widespread, 
systemic reform. 

My first suggestion is to massively de-quantify student evaluations and combine the more 
holistic methods Schuman describes with evaluative narratives. While quantification is not 
inherently a bad thing, it proves less than effective with student evaluations, offering a false 
sense of objectivity and accuracy about a topic (teaching effectiveness) that lacks concreteness. 
The difference between scoring a 4.6 or 4.9 on email communication with students is virtually 
meaningless, despite the appearance of precision implied by the decimal point.13 Beyond this 
issue, though, the real problem with quantification and student evaluations is the loss of context 
in which judgements are made. Student evaluations separate students’ opinions about their 
courses from their views on education by transforming those opinions into a number in response 
to generic questions that refer to a preconceived idea about education. Instead of allowing 
students to articulate their sense of their education’s purpose, the specific course’s role in that 
purpose, and its ability to fulfill that role through the teacher’s instructional methods, 
quantification skips past this valuable framing work. In so doing, quantification removes the 
impetus for the kinds of conversation that would make students more active agents in the design 
of their own education. While a comments section appended to the quantified survey is common 
on student evaluations, these comments are typically offered in response to specific questions or 
prompts designed to reinforce the rest of the survey. This tends to position the information that 
teachers receive from student evaluations as antagonistically oppositional or blandly 
complimentary. Nuance is lost and students miss out on a chance to engage with their professors, 
who continue to be forced to conflate the pre-set idea of education provided by student 
evaluations with actual student needs and desires. 

Rather than focus on creating an unnecessary set of numbers intended to provide in toto 
the portrait of a teacher’s effectiveness, then, I propose that student evaluations should take the 
form of evaluative narratives, with a heavy emphasis on the framing information that the current 
survey approach strips away. Writing student evaluations as evaluative narratives will require of 
students a certain selfconsciousness with regard to their education and will make clear the 



	 Butcher	243	

distinction between teaching quality and effectiveness (which student evaluations do not 
measure) and student satisfaction (which they can measure quite easily), along with the relative 
value of student satisfaction when framed appropriately. While it will still be possible to dash 
off an unengaged response to a course or to use the evaluation as a venue for revenge or personal 
attacks, I believe this approach will reduce both issues. Knowing that there is a more substantive 
portion of the evaluation dedicated to explaining, in their own words, their educational needs 
in relation to the course they just took and its ability to satisfy those needs, students are more 
likely to see a chance for real conversation on the structural and institutional aspects shaping 
their education. Though some students might lack the vocabulary usually used to describe 
educational or pedagogical practices, student evaluations could help develop that vocabulary or, 
equally effective, they might discover a vocabulary more conducive to the discussion of their own 
visions of education. Also, narratives would serve to short-circuit the links between student 
evaluations, the rhetoric of accountability, and the financialization of higher education more 
generally. While it is still possible to argue for a vision of education in terms of the bottom line 
with a narrative, the faux-objectivity and easy comparability of student evaluations in their 
quantified form makes it much easier to transform teachers and courses into assets and products 
in a market, with student evaluations as a key performance index. Indeed, the chief benefit of 
student evaluations in their current form is their relatively low cost and the ease with which they 
offer readymade data and conclusions about teachers. In narrative form, they would 
encourage a much more holistic approach to the evaluations of teachers’ effectiveness and a 
more serious consideration of the need for students and teachers to have formal power in 
designing and implementing the curriculum to serve the educational mission. 

My second suggestion is to strip norming language from student evaluations, reducing 
their ability to set up and enforce unstated expectations. Though the shift away from a quantified 
approach will accomplish some of this, the prompts for students and the context in which 
student evaluations are presented to them will also need to be addressed. I do not mean by this 
simple language policing or the substitution of PC-friendly euphemisms in the service of some 
vague sense of liberal tolerance, but rather a system for framing evaluations that does not tie 
authority and agency to a particular set of racial, gendered, or sexual characteristics. Student 
evaluations, to be productive, must constitute an actual dialogue between teachers and students. 
The terms of that dialogue should be set in advance by the teacher in consultation with the 
students so that it will not challenge the teacher to perform according to norms that would 
estrange him/her from his/her self. In a system that provides students and teachers with real 
institutional agency to design and supervise the curriculum, this would not be an unusual set of 
circumstances. The teacher should not be forced to teach to the norms that will be enforced at 
the end of the semester by the evaluation (and that have been set up by previous semesters’ 
evaluations); rather, through conversation with students, evaluation should start from a 
recognition of that teacher’s identity and abilities as valuable and valid outside of any external, 
commodified norms. While this might seem to shield the teacher from any kind of meaningful 
critique, when combined with a more holistic approach to evaluating teacher effectiveness that 
includes observations, discussions on pedagogical strategies, and teaching portfolios, I believe 
this would produce a stronger sense of teachers’ strengths and weaknesses and an environment 
more conducive to discussing teaching without enforcing norms that might challenge a teacher’s 
identity. 



	

244	Cultural	Logic	

My final suggestion is to use the reform of student evaluations as a stepping stone to 
increase the agency of students and teachers in the design and management of higher education 
and advance higher education’s ability to promote true needs and eliminate false consciousness 
more generally. To the extent that confronting student evaluations in the proper context requires 
an acknowledgement that they are inefficient, produce bad data, and fail to measure what they are 
supposed to measure—despite the claims of administrators who base their expanding power on 
their privileged role in the cult of efficiency of neoliberal managerialism—any meaningful 
conversation about student evaluations should lead to proposals for increased agency of 
students and teachers. What is crucial, though, is directing these calls into strategies for new forms 
of governance or opportunities for collaboration that do not further the managed self-
governance on which neoliberal managerialism is predicated. To do so requires a reclamation 
of the educational mission, a rearticulation of higher education’s role in the public sphere, and a 
rededication to higher education’s responsibility to aid in the development of enlightened 
citizens. Addressing the well-known issues with student evaluations will make the current 
system much more pleasant, though it will not eliminate the environment that allowed those 
issues to help shape higher education. Indeed, in order for student evaluation reform or even 
the replacement of student evaluations with more holistic methods of evaluation to matter, they 
must be accompanied by a revaluation of the role and purpose of teachers and students. 

Student evaluations do more than hurt feelings or replace constructive feedback with 
abuse; through the mistrust that they foster, they present the neoliberal subject not just as the 
paragon of success, but as the only figure capable of fully navigating the current environment. 
Building personal brands, monetizing hobbies and passions, extending the horizons of work, 
and managing personal and professional networks are the activities of subjects who root all 
human activities in competition and financial transactions. Commodified higher education 
peddles this to students, who come to believe that they need to adopt these attitudes to be 
successful (in part because all definitions of success available to students are economic). This is a 
false need, though, “superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests in his 
repression . . . [to] perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice” (Marcuse 5). It is 
the substitution of competition for meaningful interaction, and it constitutes the political basis 
of “the dreariness of late capitalist culture:” the increased atomization and alienation, the 
resigned hopelessness, and the fleeting pleasures meant to distract from it (Dean and Fisher 
32). This dreariness prevents the emergence of any kind of class consciousness that might enable 
students (and people more generally) to see this offered culture as incompatible with or even 
irrelevant to their real needs. One part of a reclamation of the educational mission, then, is an 
education in how “to relinquish the compensatory desires and intoxications we have developed in 
order to make the present livable,” one that would challenge the substitution of civic life with 
consumerism (Jameson 384). The other part, which is much more difficult, requires that students 
and faculty have real power to shape higher education, as they must collaborate on a form that 
addresses those needs that neoliberalism evokes but cannot fulfil. If reforming student evaluations 
can forge networks of trust to replace the mistrust that makes such collaboration impossible in 
the current university, then there will be a real opportunity to remake higher education as an 
institution that promotes justice, equality, and growth, rather than simply toil and misery. 

 

 



	 Butcher	245	

Notes 
1 For some recent research on the failure of student evaluations to measure teaching 

effectiveness (and the specific methodological limitations that cause this failure), see Philip B. 
Stark and Richard Freishtat’s “An Evaluation of Course Evaluations,” Michela Braga, Marco 
Paccagnella, and Michelle Pellizzari’s “Evaluating Students’ Evaluations of Professors,” Laura 
Langbein’s “Management by Results: Student Evaluation of Faculty Teaching and the Mis-
measurement of Performance,” Robert Sproule’s “The Underdetermination of Instructor 
Performance by Data from the Student Evaluation of Teaching,” and Mark Shevlin et al.’s “The 
Validity of Student Evaluation of Teaching in Higher Education: Love Me, Love My Lecture?” On 
gender bias in student evaluations, see Lillian MacNell, Adam Driscoll, and Andrea N. Hunt’s 
“What’s in a Name: Exposing Gender Bias in Student Ratings of Teaching” and Susan A. 
Basow’s “Student Evaluations of College Professors: When Gender Matters.” 

2 Histories of neoliberalism tend to mark the 1970s as the start of its ascendance to 
political and economic hegemony, with the economic reforms instituted by Augusto Pinochet 
after his takeover in Chile in 1973, based on advice from his “Chicago Boys,” as an early 
milestone. As Jamie Peck points out, though, “airbrushing out many of the tangled prehistories” 
of neoliberalism prior to the 1970s, especially during the long years between the 1930s and 1960s 
when the movement coalesced around various nodes (mainly the University of Chicago and the 
Mont Pèlerin Society), makes understanding the inconsistent and often contradictory neoliberal 
program difficult (5). For a fuller account of neoliberalism’s complicated history and its rise to 
prominence, see Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe’s The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making 
of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (2009), Peck’s Constructions of Neoliberal Reason (2010), 
and Daniel Stedman Jones’ Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal 
Politics (2012). 

3 For more ethnographic explorations of this concept, see Andrew Ross’ No-collar: The 
Hidden Cost of the Humane Workplace (2003), Rob Lucas’ “Dreaming in Code,” Ivor 
Southwood’s Non-Stop Inertia (2011), Carl Cederström and Peter Fleming’s Dead Man Working 
(2012), and Jonathan Crary’s 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013). 

4 Recent comments by Steven Long, Vice Chairman of the Academic Planning Committee 
of the Board of Governors of the University of North Carolina system confirm that this process 
is ongoing. Justifying the cutting of 46 degree programs across the UNC system, Long 
described the board members as “‘capitalists, and we have to look at what the demand is, and 
we have to respond to the demand’” (Schaefer). 

5 Though already privatized to a much greater degree than public institutions, private, 
non-profit institutions similarly saw federal funding decline during this period, from 18.8% of 
revenue in 1980-81 to 11.7% in 201213, as tuition prices rose by 156% during the same period. 

6 Increasing recognition and accommodation of a more diverse national and student 
population was another major factor in structural shifts in higher education following the 1970s, 
though it is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss diversity’s role in this process. For a cogent 
discussion of this, see Walter Benn Michaels’ The Trouble with Diversity. 

7 As Benjamin Ginsberg points out, perhaps the best gauge of the increasing power and 
prominence of administration in university affairs is the federal employment category of “other 
professionals,” who, though not administrators per se, “work for the administration and serve 



	

246	Cultural	Logic	

as its arms, legs, eyes, ears, and mouthpieces. . . . This army of professional staffers is the 
bulwark of administrative power in the contemporary university” (25). Based on information 
from the National Center for Education Statistics, between 1976 and 2011 the growth rate for 
executive, administrative, and managerial employees (a little less than 135%) was roughly in line 
with that of the faculty (a little over 140%). However, the growth rate for administrative staffers 
and other professional employees was almost 350% over the same period. 

8 For a fuller treatment of prestige management and its role in higher education 
governance, see Frank Donoghue’s The Last Professors, especially Chapter 5, “Prestige and 
Prestige Envy.” 

9 Mark Fisher terms this inability to imagine alternatives capitalist realism, “the 
widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but 
also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it,” and labels this the 
paradoxically utopian and deflating ideology of neoliberal society (2). 

10 In their “Evaluating Students’ Evaluations of Professors,” Michela Braga, Marco 
Paccagnella, and Michele Pellizzari conclude that “teachers who are associated with better 
subsequent performance receive [the] worst evaluations from their students” (72). In general, 
“students evaluate teachers on the basis of their enjoyment of the course,” which means that 
because “[g]ood teachers—those who provide their students with knowledge that is useful in 
future learning—presumably require their students to exert effort by paying attention and being 
concentrated in class and by doing demanding homework,” none of which corresponds to high 
levels of enjoyment for students, “it is very possible that good teachers are badly evaluated by 
their students” (Braga et al 84). At the same time, knowing that students rate courses based on 
their enjoyment of them, “faculty have the ability to ‘buy’ higher evaluations by lowering their 
grading standards” (Krautmann and Sander 61). 

11 Arlie Russell Hochschild dubs this phenomenon “when work becomes home and home 
becomes work.” As management philosophies like TQM or Tom Peters’ “liberation 
management” have taken hold and seemed to return autonomy and creativity to employees (at least 
on a limited basis) while offering the chance for public recognition of a job well done, 
employees have been encouraged to locate personal growth and fulfillment in the success that 
their labour brings to the company. At the same time, as “the cult of efficiency, once centered in 
the workplace, is allowed to set up shop and make itself comfortable at home,” domestic life 
becomes more harried and less fulfilling, a place of never-ending hard work for which there is 
little recognition (Hochschild “When” 90). 

12 In his English in America (1976), Ohmann observed that “many teachers object to 
student rating” on the grounds that “[t]he professional knows better than his client what the client 
needs; student ratings challenge a basic right of the teacher,” while peer observations were 
regarded as tantamount to “an illegitimate exercise of power” (239-40). 

13 This is, strictly speaking, not true, but the meaning that such distinctions have is different 
than what is probably intended. As Laura Langbein points out, “the impact of a unit increase in 
the expected grade (say, from B to A, which contains most of the observations) would raise the 
instructor’s rating by an average of nearly 0.6 on a 6-point scale. In a rank order system, this is 
not irrelevant; on a percentage basis, each additional 0.6 of a point is a 10% higher ranking. 
Over time, the effect of an additional 0.6 in the SET on an increase in a merit pay ranking could 
be considerable” (424). 



	 Butcher	247	

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