The California Faculty Association (CFA) is urging San Jose State’s president to reconsider extending the option for instructors to exclude Summer 2020 and Fall 2020 Student Opinion Teacher Evaluation Surveys (SOTES) from faculty evaluations through an online petition.
According to the CFA Collective Bargaining Agreement, students are emailed questionnaires at the end of each semester and can anonymously provide feedback about their instructor’s teaching. Responses are placed in the faculty’s Personnel Action File, which is used to assess performance, Retention, Tenure and Promotion (RTP).
“I want to hear what my students are saying and that will help me in the next semester, but at the same time being evaluated based on all these unusual circumstances, I think, is not quite fair on the faculty,” said Sharmin Khan over Zoom.
Khan is a lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and Language Development and SJSU’s CFA lecturer representative.
Khan said students may feel frustrated with this semester’s online classes and can use SOTES to express their grievances.
“It's . . . very stressful for students, we understand,” she said. “It's also very stressful for faculty, because . . . we're being forced to teach in a way, and this is not anyone's fault, this is because of the health situation, we are being forced to teach in a way that we're not very comfortable doing.”
Previously approved policy vetoed
In March, SJSU President Mary Papazian approved an Academic Senate bill that gave faculty members the option to exclude student feedback from SOTES for the Spring 2020 semester. Papazian rationalized the decision by saying that because of the pandemic, faculty members were adjusting to new teaching modalities, according to the Academic Senate bill (S) 20-4.
“[Faculty members] may harbor concerns that the changes will negatively impact their student evaluations,” Papazian said. “This policy seeks to allow faculty to concentrate on course conversion and supporting their students unburdened by that particular fear.”
Vincent Del Casino, SJSU provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, said in an Aug. 10 letter to faculty and deans that it is unknown how long the pandemic will alter teaching, research and service.
In the letter, he listed guidance that review committees should consider for future faculty evaluations.
“Evaluators must read the entire [SOTES] and contextualize the differences that faculty may see in these relative to other similar courses taught in different modalities,” he said.
In September, the Academic Senate approved the same policy, giving faculty the option to withhold Summer 2020 and Fall 2020 SOTES results from their evaluation. However, Papazian vetoed the initiative in a Nov. 18 email, according to Academic Senate documents.
SJSU political science lecturer Robert Ovetz said the uncertainty surrounding online instruction still continues.
“Many faculty are under a lot of stress having to teach in a new way and many students are under a lot of stress having to learn in a new way,” he said over the phone.
Ovetz said not many faculty members are experienced in teaching online, causing a number of students to struggle.
He said this puts pressure on lecturers like him, who are on one-to-three year contracts with the university because SOTES play an important role in contract renewal.
“It just seems that [excluding SOTES from faculty's evaluation] would be a reasonable adjustment, to take those issues into account,” he said.
Student opinion concern
The university provided a link to SJSU’s website on background information about RTP and faculty evaluations, but didn’t wish to further comment.
However, Khan, who also represents the College of Humanities and the Arts in the Academic Senate at SJSU, said Papazian’s reasoning behind the decision was that students’ voices need to be heard and the resolution would silence their opinions.
Sang Kil, a justice studies professor and chair of the CFA Anti-Racism, Social Justice Transformation Committee at SJSU, said student opinions were taken into account for evaluations in the spring, but faculty had the option to exclude them from evaluation, range elevation, promotion and tenure matters. She said the CFA is asking for that same policy to apply to Summer 2020 and Fall 2020 SOTES.
“That's not ignoring student opinion,” Kil said. “That's just giving faculty flexibility about whether [instructors] want their SOTES to count towards something that contributes to the advancement of their career or not.”
Ovetz agreed and said instructors just want the option for student feedback to be excluded in their evaluation.
SOTES big key in evaluation
Del Casino reiterated in the Aug. 10 letter that the sole use of SOTES to evaluate faculty is prohibited.
Apart from SOTES, faculty evaluations also require direct observations, faculty input and submission of teaching materials and are used so the review committee can determine teaching effectiveness, according to Amendment C of the Senate Management Resolution.
While there are several written documents that state student input is one part of a faculty’s evaluation, Kil said the university places a lot of emphasis on SOTES.
“Because this campus has a problem not applying its policies faithfully and using SOTES against faculty [instead of holistically as required] as a sole determiner of their teaching effectiveness, that's why this becomes so much more important,” she said.
Kil is among nine faculty members who were denied tenure or promotion by SJSU during the 2018-19 academic year, despite meeting requirements, according to a Dec. 16 Spartan Daily article.
For most levels of career retention and advancement, faculty is required to score “excellent” in teaching, research and service, according to committee training on RTP policies.
Khan said SOTES are disproportionately used to evaluate faculty, even though SOTES should only be a fraction of evaluating professors.
“It should be more holistic, but it's often not,” Khan said, adding that about two-thirds of the evaluation is based on student opinion.
Summer training
Khan said another reason Papazian vetoed the amendment was because faculty had more preparation after Spring semester, citing training that was available over summer.
Kil said the university offered one training session over the summer. Taking one online teaching course doesn’t equal “pre-pandemic excellence” because teaching is a gradual learning process.
“I think it's a little [unrealistic] of the administration . . . three weeks of online training, which not all faculty went for, and nor do they have to, was absolutely not adequate for the kind of work that we are doing,” Khan, who took part in the training said.
Khan explained parts of the training were useful, but most of the material was geared toward asynchronous teaching. She said it didn’t benefit her because she teaches synchronously and redesigning an entire course would take months.
James Lee, the SJSU senior director of faculty affairs, stated in a May 8 email to faculty that more training for online and hybrid instruction would be provided during winter and faculty will receive a stipend for participating, but didn’t state a dollar amount.
Lacking proper resources
Khan admits she was nervous about SOTES in Spring 2020 despite receiving the 2020 Outstanding Lecturer Award for teaching effectiveness and service.
“But my SOTES were fine,” she said. “I think students were very kind because . . . I'm not a technological person.”
Khan is still concerned about faculty who are dealing with low bandwidth and a lack of equipment and workspaces that may be detrimental to teaching.
Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data transmitted over an internet connection in a given amount of time.
“I think [administrators] often don't realize [that] there are faculty members who don't have a place that they can work from, who don't have, you know, computers or . . . high speed internet, or webcams, microphones and we are not getting a lot of that stuff,” she said.
Khan said a number of faculty have paid for their own instructional expenses. She said administrators had told faculty members to ask for financial assistance from their departments, but many departments lack the money to help.
Faculty wants flexibility
Faculty members agree they’ve provided students with flexibility, per university request, but they don’t feel they have been given the same courtesy.
“I've allowed a really generous lowest grade drop policy . . . because you know, the pandemic is hard for me as much as it's hard for [students],” Kil said. “The flexibility . . . [is] similar to the flexibility that I think faculty are asking the administration to give them about teaching, but they're not.”
Khan agreed the petition shows a lack of collaboration between administration and faculty.
“There is this feeling that, ‘oh, life is back to normal, except for you know, meeting in person, everything is as should be.’ But it isn't that way,” Khan said.
Faculty ask peers to petition
Khan believes Papazian will not change her mind but said the petition is important in letting Papazian know faculty members’ stance on the issue.
“[Papazian] will get the message that this wasn't [the right move] from our perspective,” she said.
Kil hopes all faculty members will sign the petition but understands why some are hesitant to include their name in a list of demands to Papazian.
“Because (faculty) might feel . . . there could be retaliation,” Kil said. “I've heard repeated stories from lecturers expressing that and they’re union lecturers. These people are the union and they're still hesitant because their name will be sent to the president.”
But Kil said if all SJSU faculty sign the petition, the university is less likely to retaliate, because lecturers are the heart of the university.
“It's trying to really kind of make people feel that solidarity among faculty in order to create a safer campus for faculty,” she said. “And that's an uphill battle because we have to organize together against the retaliatory and punitive nature of this campus. It's a hard job.”
Khan said about 300 faculty members have signed the petition as of Nov. 21. She hopes the petition reaches at least 1,000 signatures before it is given to Papazian
