[Finding of Fact] (10) On the evening of April 19, 2004, Respondent [Kenneth Kress, then a tenured Iowa Law School professor] distributed [class] evaluations to 10 students enrolled in his Mental Health Seminar. Later that evening, after the students had completed the evaluations, Respondent reviewed the questionnaire responses and then substituted three evaluations he had completed for three negative student evaluations. Additionally, Respondent altered two other evaluations by erasing the pencil marking of the "(3) Average" circle in Question 2, on teacher effectiveness, and filling in the "(5) Outstanding" circle on both forms....
(12) [The] Registrar at the law school, testified that on April 30, 2004 Respondent told her that he was anxious for [the dean] to see his student evaluations because he knew he had done a lot better on his evaluations that spring than he had in the fall....
(13) [A week later, when the matter was being investigated, Kress] initially responded that "his RA had been involved and it was possible that he had done something or there were others who had keys to the office." But when asked, he said he had no reason to believe anyone else would have done this. He did not admit or deny changing the student evaluations, but asked what would happen next....
The Grievance Commission is recommending that Kress be suspended from the Iowa bar, though he would be eligible for reinstatement in a year. (Kress acknowledged the falsification, but defended himself by pointing to his longstanding bipolar disorder, and claiming that his actions were the result of that disorder.) Kress resigned from his tenured position in January 2006, but the Des Moines Register reports that Iowa has given him a $226,000 severance package, plus other benefits, "to avoid 'the expense and time of further proceedings with the Faculty Judicial Commission.'"
Thanks to Paul Caron (TaxProf Blog) for the pointer.
UPDATE: I've updated the post to make clear that it's undisputed that Kress has suffered from mental illness. The Commission concluded, however, that the illness cannot excuse his actions, and that in any event his actions were not caused in substantial part by his illness.
It's happening everywhere you look. As an honors graduate of a pre-eminent Ivy League school presently embroiled in slush-fund scandals, may I suggest to fellow alumni that your sentimental donations might better go elsewhere. Let's face it, in today's "Mental Health" environment we wouldn't last a month. When "education" degenerates to phony credentialism (my alumni magazine is riddled with typos, ungrammatical, abusing a Fourth Grade vocabulary), realists of talent go their ways. Today that means any self-respecting 18-year old heterosexual male... and qualitative surveys of alumni "success" (financial and otherwise) are making this noticeably plain.
An academic Gresham's Law is inescapable: As bad teachers drive away good students, good teachers follow them until only miserable ideologues berate subprime intellects at vast expense. Call it "Mental Health", "Women's Studies", any other blatant scam you know-- the top 10% always knows the difference, and I among them will gladly eat the gabbling, grumbling others' unearned lunch.
Is it unimaginable that the school doesn't take such evaluations too seriously? But Jake (Guest is right, "At least we have an example of a tenured professor caring about student opinions..."
Doubtless. But then why give them at all? Or, if you're going to pretend, why not do a halfway decent job at pretending?
Whether those cases show that the previous security system was inadequate depends on what the marginal costs and marginal benefits (financial and otherwise) of a comprehensive security system would be.
Perhaps EV or another law prof can explain this to me, because I am stumped as to what the answer could be.
If you click the link to the Des Moines Register article, it states that the surveys were one of the tools used by the university to award pay raises to members of the faculty.
Read the article, it explains a lot about this sorry affair.
The great majority of the time, it works just fine. In a very few cases, it makes fraud possible.
Allow me to fix that for you:
The great majority of the time, it works just fine. Or the fraud is never discovered. Or it's discovered, dealt with quietly, and never disclosed to anybody not on the inside. Or it never makes the news and, while not secret, is effectively hidden from public view. In a very few cases, fraud becomes widespread public knowledge.
It's far more likely that the University simply doesn't care about student evaluations. The opinions and needs of students seem pretty low on the priority list of law schools-- it's far more important to humor the trolls at US News and World Report.
I read the article (though I acknowledge I read it after I posted the first time). The article makes it seem like it had to do with money--and that alone may be it.
However, I still can't imagine how a bad student evaluation or even a lot of bad student evaluations, is going to effect someone who is already tenured.
As to the comment about the "marginal costs" of changing the system, I find it hard to believe the "costs" of having anyone else collect and compile the evaluations would be so high. No one is asking for a secure electronic evaluation system here.
I think the school should be embarassed for its own failures, not just this professor's.
The professor has a student volunteer to hand out the evaluation. The professor leaves the room. The evaluations are completed. The volunteer walks the completed surveys down to the department secretary who turns them into the folks who compile the surveys.
This seems to be a very easy and straight-forward way to prevent this.
There is a mystery?
I expect there are very few who like being evaluated by their students, and I doubt that will ever change.
I know one college professor who quit and went into a completely different profession because he did not want to be subjected to student evaluations.
To me, a system which allows the subject of the evaluations to collect them spits in the face of the ethical professor who doesn't change his grids. How could you establish that a below-median score isn't the result of others changing grids?
To add food for thought, think of how difficult it would be to actually catch this kind of fraud - changing a few bubbles; maybe substituting a fake grid. It's astonishing that even one person was caught - and it seems likely that a large number of mildly more capable forgers have evaded detection.
Is this fraud really so serious that it warrants disbarring and firing him? A comment above suggests that this was just the tip of the iceberg, which may be, but also may not be. He had tenure already. Substituting fictitious favorable evaluations for real unfavorable ones violates academic norms, to be sure, but I'm not seeing how Kress could have obtained anything of tangible value through the deception.
I'm under the impression that state bars generally take fraud very seriously. Hence it is more problematic to have been caught cheating in school than to have been convicted of, say, marijuana possession. Whether or not one agrees with this stance (I happen to), treating this lightly would be hypocritical.
And personally, I have no sympathy for people who do wrong when they damn well know better. Others are of course free to disagree.
I'm under the impression that state bars generally take fraud very seriously. Hence it is more problematic to have been caught cheating in school than to have been convicted of, say, marijuana possession. Whether or not one agrees with this stance (I happen to), treating this lightly would be hypocritical.
And personally, I have no sympathy for people who do wrong when they damn well know better. Others are of course free to disagree.
As for caring about evaluations, I weigh them against my own self-assessment, which is as honest as I can make it. I use them to confirm where I thought I fell short. Considering the boundless sense of entitlement--"my check cleared, gimme my A and don't make me work too hard at going through the motions"--one often encounters among students (I teach MBA students), I don't get excessively invested in student evaluations.
While most students just filled in the bubbles, I always wrote long good comments if I liked the class/professor since I figured that was a nice reward. I was respectfully critical if I thought the assignments were poorly done, the teaching was poor, or did not live up to the description of the class.
I knew one person who typed up an essay beforehand to staple to the evaluation to express his displeasure with one professor's teaching ability.