Indignant Professor Miffed That Students Have Opinions
For those of you who are not devout followers of the British higher education blogosphere, allow us to bring you up to speed: UK professors are strongly opposed to the rude idea of students expressing opinions about UK professors.
Inside Higher Ed points us to this blog post by Right Hon. His Highness Your Lorde and Learn-ed Professor Bill Cooke, who is a "lecturer," which is the dumb thing that British people call college professors. The Right Hon. Cooke is absolutely aghast at this website, RateYourLecturer, which is the British version of the very popular American site RateYourProfessor.com, where students can rank their professors on qualities like teaching style and I Would Totally Do Him. Cooke's blog post is entitled "WE ARE NOT DANCING BEARS: OPPOSING RATE YOUR LECTURER," which is just a crackerjack title for a blog post, I think.
His objections to the concept of college students being able to share information about a service for which they are paying are numerous, including:
I am a human being. I’m not a dancing bear. For my work, as part of my teaching, I stand in front of a class and ‘lecture’. Its demanding. I do my best... I have a mum and a dad and a partner and children, and friends and neighbours. If my occupation makes me personally the subject of anonymous, public comments about my day to day performance or appearance that they and anyone else can read then that is not the job I signed up for.
It is absolutely outrageous that we live in a day and age when people who pay someone to do a job might discuss whether or not that job is done well— in public. People have mums and dads, you know.
Let us hope that the Right Hon. Cooke never discovers Twitter.
