The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
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Monday, April 18, 2016 — 3A

addition, no evaluations for faculty 
during their first three years at 
the University will be released. 
Finally, if there are unforeseen and 
significant circumstances, faculty 
are able to opt out of releasing the 
data for that semester.

In 2014, the average response 

rate for course evaluation data 
was marked at slightly above 50 
percent.

Courses 
for 
which 
the 

evaluations are not released will 
be marked with a code that will 
inform students why the data 
was not released. SACUA chair 
Silke-Marie Weineck, professor of 
comparative literature, said this 
will help flag faculty that are opting 
out time after time again.

“If there was a faculty member 

that abused the opt-out option — 
which I don’t think they will — it 
would show up pretty quickly 
because there would be opt-out 
after opt-out,” Weineck said. “I 
have no worries about that; I just 
want to protect faculty, because 
every once in a while, someone can 
have such a brutal semester and it 
wouldn’t be fair or representative.”

Angela 
Dillard, 
professor 

of 
Afroamerican 
and 
African 

Studies and associate dean for 
Undergraduate Studies in LSA, 
wrote in an e-mail interview that 
the release of evaluations is a way 
for students to learn more about 
the courses they are taking.

“Giving students access to more 

information about courses is a 
benefit,” Dillard wrote. “It could 
also begin to make students more 
accountable for both the quantity 
and quality of feedback they supply. 
We need to address this dimension 
of student evaluations and begin to 
shift the culture around them.”

The process of releasing the 

evaluations 
has 
spanned 
the 

course of this academic year. After 
University administrators came to 
SACUA with a proposal to release 
course evaluations in Fall 2015, the 
Faculty Senate voted in October 
2015 to postpone the release of 
evaluations, opening debate on 
the issue up until the committees 
reached 
decisions 
earlier 
this 

semester.

Ultimately, the two committees 

were formed to balance out 
student 
concerns 
— 
Central 

Student 
Government 
leaders 

pushed heavily for release of the 
evaluations — and faculty ones.

In a November 2015 op-ed, CSG 

President Cooper Charlton and his 
administration stated their goals of 
having evaluations ready for Fall 
2016, saying “course evaluations 
were established for students, by 
students”.

LSA junior Anushka Sarkar, 

former CSG chief programming 
officer, served on both committees 
and said she was proud to have 
been part of the process.

“I am very proud of Cooper 

Charlton’s 
administration 
for 

pushing this out,” Sarkar said. 
“They had promised the student 
body at the beginning of their 
term that they would get this 
information available to students 
because they believed this would be 
incredibly important for students 
to have this data.”

Sarkar said alternatives students 

are using, such as Rate My 
Professors, aren’t allowing students 
to make informed decisions about 
their courses. She added that she 
has relied on alternative, biased 
information in the past to make 
choices about classes.

“Students are going to be very 

pleased to have this information 
available,” 
she 
said. 
“Now 

that students have access to a 
standardized and educated data 
set, they will be able to make 
more informed decisions about 
their courses and that’s really 
important.”

Engineering prof. Bill Schultz, 

vice chair of SACUA, said the 
postponement of the release until 
now allowed faculty and students 
to make the process more attentive 
to community needs.

“We wanted to do this in a 

thoughtful way,” Schultz said. 
“If this was going to be officially 
released, we wanted to have the 
instrument to change it, to make 
it less of a popularity contest and 
more of a thoughtful process that 
talks about learning outcomes 
students might see in the course.”

unique circumstance in which 
editorial 
and 
the 
business 

opportunities collide.

“Our audience, advertisers and 

subscribers reflect this reality: 
the world is a lot closer now. They 
are saying, ‘if you do something 
in Europe, count us interested,’” 
Harris said. “We are doing this 
because it’s interesting, but we’re 
also doing this because we think 
it’s a robust business opportunity. 
I think that’s pretty exciting 
when you can combine attractive 
editorial targets with a business 
model that can be sustained.”

Panelists also touched on how 

modern audiences can be reached 
in a world of social media and 
unlimited information sources 
online. Baquet said despite the 
shifts in accessibility, journalists 
should listen to their audiences, 
who he said have demonstrated 
they want serious and compelling 
stories — both domestic and 
abroad.

“If 
people 
look 
at 
their 

audience, people want serious 
stuff,” Baquet said. “No one’s 
coming to the New York Times in 
droves because of our coverage 
of Britney Spears.”

Amanpour noted that though 

foreign news often offers a 
platform 
for 
an 
audience’s 

desires and journalist’s interests 
to overlap, the craft of a journalist 
should also be focused on more 
than pleasing the audience.

“The 
whole 
point 
of 

information is to tell you about 
what you don’t know you don’t 
know,” she said.

Harris echoed Amanpour’s 

sentiment, 
saying 
journalism 

should emphasize “feeding them 
their spinach” in a compelling 
way.

“I think journalism has an 

obligation to be interesting,” 
Harris said. “The world is 
interesting, we should be 
interesting. 
The 
human 

dimensions 
of 
a 
story 
are 

important and I don’t believe 
in making an audience do 
something 
dutifully, 
it’s 
a 

challenge to your journalism 
storytelling abilities to make a 
story interesting.”

He added that distinctions 

between old and new journalism 
are outdated, saying just as the 
field of journalism as a whole 
evolves, so should the way 
foreign news is approached and 
discussed.

EVALUATIONS
From Page 2A

WALLACE
From Page 2A

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

The Michigan Daily, former 
CSG President Cooper Charlton 
said the amendment would have 
allowed CSG to review proposed 
amendments concurrently with 
SRAC.

“This doesn’t eliminate any 

power from anyone. It just 
allows students to be more 
involved in the process,” he said. 
“And they shot it down. We were 
very disappointed in this. The 
CSG team is very disappointed 
with SRAC this year. We believe 
they are very out of touch with 
students.”

Speaking to the honor code, 

Charlton said the proposal did 
not pass due to its alteration 
by the SRAC and their refusal 
to work collaboratively with 
students.

“SRAC was an extremely 

intelligent 
and 
wise 
body; 

however, they were extremely 
out of touch with the students,” 
he said.

MICHIGAN
From Page 1A

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

