I want a second opinion

The story goes that a mentally unstable and unattractive woman was seeing a psychiatrist.  She had been seeing him for awhile and no diagnosis of her difficulties was forthcoming.  "Well," the shrink said, when pressed, "You're crazy."

"I demand a second opinion," said the patient.

"OK.  You're ugly," responded the psychiatrist.

It isn't a pretty story, but it brings the hearer abruptly up against some other possible meanings of "second opinion."  There has been a lot of enthusiasm, lately, for the assessment of professionals by non-professionals.  There was an interesting piece in this morning's New York Times (here) about the online evaluation of medical doctors.

Here are two engaging paragraphs from that article.

Companies have tried to collect reviews of doctors since the early days of the Web, and RateMDs.com has gathered more than most. The founder, John Swapceinski, was inspired to create it after his success with a site called RateMyProfessors.com, which is well known for the “hotness” rating that college students assign (or not) to their teachers.

“Anything that people spend time or money on ought to be rated,” he said. RateMDs now has reviews of more than 1,370,000 doctors in the United States and Canada.

My first concern is the criterion of "hot" to rate university professors.  Over the forty years of so that I have been a professor, I have had me really good days in class and my really bad days.  I don't think I have every impressed anyone as "hot."  So the use of this criterion is not good news for me.  Also, I wonder whether one student who used that word to describe a professor would mean the same thing another student meant.  Beyond that, there is the question of the variety of uses to which the "hotness" criterion should be put.  Is there a relationship, for instance, between the availability of hot professors and the proportion of students who graduate within five years?

My second concern is with the standard John Swapceinski uses for rating.  "Anything that people spend time or money on," he says, "should be rated."  That seems overbroad to me.  Possibly, I have been reading too much about pure research and how hard it is to make the case for funding.  And as someone who spends a fair amount of time on his marriage, I wonder about the implication that I should be "rating" it.  On "hotness," possibly.

Seriously, I do have two sensible concerns.  The first is that students or patients will be competent to judge all aspects of their teachers or doctors.  My students know whether I come to class on time, they know whether I am egregiously partisan, they know whether I have enough office hours, they know whether I confuse them.  Probably, they do not know whether the confusion they experience from time to time is a stage necessary to the acquisition of new concepts or whether if comes from my own failure to explain.  It's an important distinction.  Every student who thinks about it, knows whether he or she is confused.  Only the best ones, and only by the end of the term, know whether it was necessary and worthwhile.

The second sensible concern I have is whether students can be trusted to voice the opinions they actually have.  That isn't as easy as it might seem.  It requires that I screen out my own feelings so that I can make a correct and useful assessment.  It means not giving high marks to the professors I like when they don't deserve them.  It means not giving high marks to professors I don't like when they don't deserve them.

Imagine that a student has been in to see me about a grade he thinks is too low.  It may be "too low" for purposes of his own, like graduating on time.  It may be "too low" in that the student thinks the answer is worth more than I think it is worth.  I am persuaded, let's say, that his is answer is notably worse than the other fifty answers to this question that I have read and I tell him, on that basis, that I cannot revise it upward.  He is angry because he knows it is something I could do and might even imagine that the score I recorded had to do with feelings I had toward him.  In any case, he leaves the office angry.

At the next class session, he is given a course evaluation form that will go straight to the head of my division.  If he goes through the unpleasant effort of screening out his personal feelings so that he can pass on a valid assessment, the purpose of the evaluation process will have been met.  If he treats the evaluation as a chance to get back at me for my refusal to raise his grade and, in that way, to meet his need, the purpose of the evaluation process will not have been met.

The student knows what his opinion is.  And he knows he is angry.  The struggle of which "truth" to pass on is sometimes, I am sure, fierce, and I am not sure that the better angels of his nature always triumph.

Republican Polar Bears

One of the most surprising events of recent years is the death by drowning of polar bears.  Polar bears are some of the strongest swimmers in the world of mammals.  Why are they drowning?  Well, it turns out that that as the polar caps melt, the bears have to go farther and farther from their natural home to find food.  Sometimes they make it back safely; sometimes they don't.

That strikes me as a dilemma unexpectedly similar to what the current crop of Republican candidates face.  Most of the undergraduates I teach don't know this, but for most of the 20th Century, the Republican party was the party of social moderation and fiscal restraint.  Republican candidates campaigned by referring to their party that way (the G in GOP meant "grand," although it is hard to remember it today) and promised that, if elected, they would govern that way.

Then the ice caps began to melt.  Party primaries became the principal route to the presidential nomination.  Discussions by party elders in smoke-filled rooms were superceded.  Then, as the parties became more ideologically consistent, the most extreme fringes of the parties took over the presidential primaries.  These extremists have long provided most of the funds and most of the workers for candidates.  Funds and volunteers are the food that has traditionally sustained candidates.  Where does that leave us? 

Any Republican who wants to be president will need to go to where the resources are, just as the polar bears must.  The distance between where the party has always lived--the prudent center--and where candidates must now go to get access to those resources has gotten larger and larger, just as it has for the bears.  Not all the candidates can manage the growing gap between the governing center and the campaigning resources and more and more of them drown in transit.  Actually, some of the best potential candidates decide not to make the trip at all.  If only that were an option for the bears!

There are two ways out of this swim to death.  The party elders, if there are still party elders, will need to recover control of the party and choose candidates who don't have to swim that far to get to the feeding grounds.  That's probably what will happen eventually, but it isn't going to be this year.  The second is that Republican moderates (and I know there are still Republican moderates because they complain to me that their party has forsaken them) will flow into the primaries and provide resources closer to the natural home of the Republican party.  "Closer" means that fewer candidates will drown trying to cross the open ocean between where they live--and where they will have to be if they are going to govern--and where they feed, where they must be if they are to endure the grueling nomination process.

Thinking now only of the political side of this analogy, I think that some Republicans--the elders or the voters--will have to find a way to reverse the global warming that has endangered their party.  Either that, or they will need to find a better answer to God's question to Noah in Bill Cosby's famous skit: "Noah.  Can you swim?"