Publishing student evaluations of lecturers will improve teaching

Well, courses do publish their NSS-UNISTATS data online, don't they, but this doesn't have the potential for cyberbullying that Dr Colley's proposal has. And to me, the US health system is the last place that I would look for exemplary practice. I have been to Dr Colley's website, and he does teach a lot, from languages to strategic management and leadership. I can't see where he is leading by example by publishing his own scores. Nor what his research chops are that make his 'my view is' worth the status the Times Higher has given it.

An arrogant, narcissistic, short-sighted view from someone who has addressed the issue of research-teaching balance apparently by publishing no research. What Dr. Colley ignores is that staff are under unreasonable pressure to "provide excellence" in four separate tasks--research, teaching, administration, and recruitment/raising NSS scores. And this is with no real pay increase in the last half-decade and drastically-cut administrative support. The specious argument of this ill-written piece is that staff are _still_ not slaving away hard enough, and require yet another managerial "metric" to flog them further. This passage is particularly galling: "Some staff are less than cooperative about the process and not all teaching is assessed, but one could argue that SET gives universities access to a tool that could be more fully exploited." Oh yes, there's _so much_ more room for exploitation! How foolish and irresponsible of management boards not to use the full power of fickle student opinion to their best advantage. But, if Dr. Colley is so eager to press his opinion on us, by all means, let him lead the way and provide his full SET scores in the comments, along with the research he has published and his guidance as to how he accomplished all this and still had time left over to write opinion columns in the THE Supplement.