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Show Thursday. December The Daily Utah Chronicle - Page Four 10, 1992 L PpSniohs The Daily Utah Chronicle ASUU fails Instructor guide good idea, needs improvement Affairs Board of the Associated The Academic of the University of Utah has taken an " important step towards improving education at the university. The 1992-9- 3 Instructor Guide was released last week containing evaluations and comments on Liberal Education professors. However, the guide will do little to help students choose instructors and ' classes. The basis for evaluation varies from department to department making it difficult, if not impossible, to directly compare professors and courses. Student comments are missing from many of the evaluations and when they are included, they are worthless pieces of fluff. For many of the courses, fewer than 20 people responded, making the results questionable at best. For one course only four respondents filled out evaluations. 45 pages are devoted to profiles of The last professors teaching the coursesthis is almost completely useless. No professor is going to say that he or.she is an awful instructor and the course is worthless. These pages seem to be included just to add bulk to the guide. Another problem lies in the fact that, due to changes in class schedules, the professors no longer teach the courses for which they are evaluated. The guide should reflect either an evaluation of the course or the professor, but a correlation between the two will be of little benefit if the professor is no longer teaching the given course. Despite these minor problems the guide is a good concept that, given some refinement and focus, could be a valuable tool for students enrolling in courses. ASUU acknowledges these shortcomings in the introduction to the guide and, hopefully, they will be refined in the future. Dashed hopes that Wasatch County's Who would have guessed conscious youngsters would be tricked by the County Commission? Wasatch County, claiming that it was only conducting a test, last week revealed that the garbage residents so meticulously separated was thrown into a landfill. County officials claim they were testing residents to see how many would participate in a recycling program before they implemented one. is particularly damaging to children The fake-owho have been taught to protect the environment. As a Steven Miller rebuts ASUU criticism When I to the Associated Students of the University of Utah official stance on a column I wrote a few weeks back ("Nutty Iranians give Islam bad rep, need to rescind bounty on Rushdie," Nov. 19) about the savage behavior of certain Iranians mullahs, I realized that perhaps it was time for me to make a few comments of my own. Many of the accusations leveled against me (at least those that have been leveled by the minority of commentators who actually bothered to really read the piece a minority the upstanding members of the Executive Cabinet are apparently not among) are true. I did use language that was very derogatory about those mullahs and follow those them who unquestioningly and I stand by every remark made in that column. But I did get my epithets confused, as an Iranian and a Syrian student were kind enough to point out. I also made the assumption that the Ayatollah Khomeni's remarks about sex with animals in Solutions to Problems were widely known. For those errors, I apologize. But, like I said, the point of my column is still something I stand by. Nothing any of the letter writers over the past couple of weeks have said has done anything toward making the official acts of the Iranian government seem any more civilized or sane from my perspective. Which brings me back to ASUU and the 15 members who make up the Executive Cabinet. They seem to be operating under a double standard or perhaps they are simply moved by whatever group in their constituency can scream the loudest, or b) blinded by the phrases used, and thus failed to notice that they no matter how read Robert Gerhke's W little that shouting has to do with the reality of what the is about supposedly Apparently, the shouting Executive Cabinet Steven Miller Chronicle Associate Editor has no problem with my columns poking fun at Republicans and that great line about how a vote for anyone but George Bush was a wasted vote. Nor did they issue formal objections to disparaging remarks directed at John Bangerter and his friends in Zion's National Park. Doing that is politically correct and therefore, seemingly, all right. Saying bad things about Iranian mullahs and . their ilk well, that's against multiculturist principles and therefore unacceptable. I don't know, maybe no one on the Executive Cabinet read those other columns. Maybe they read them like they read the one they objected to in a cursory fashion and thus missed elements they might otherwise have objected to. Maybe they just decided that it was time to jump on the bandwagon. At any rate, they didn't read what was there in the column, or at least didn't acknowledge they'd read it. That problem is actually much d more than I would have wide-sprea- ever believed. From most of the letters run about that column in the paper, those who were responding were a) responding to some preconceived notion of what should be in a column about "nutty Iranians" . were being applied to a very specific group of individuals. In a couple of unpublished letters, the writers even came right out and said that they hadn't read the original piece, but that they felt a need to express their indignation anyway. An English professor once told me that the Chronicle is written for lowbrow readers. I agreed with him. I didn't, however, realize how low many of those brows were. I didn't realize that many students on this campus are only able to read on one level and are unable to look beyond whatever insecurities or political biases they may possess. Part of me would like to apologize to these people as well, but their fragile egos are beyond my abilities to repair. If I did as the ASUU Executive Cabinet seem to be asking by the timing of their response, if I just toed the party line every week parroting stuff about how Western culture is pure evil, and everything else is all goodness and light; how heterosexual white males who have no major handicaps or physical defects are only capable of doing wrong, while all other classifications of humanity only capable of doing right then I'd be failing in are recognizing my "responsibility to the university community." (To quote the official statement as issued by the Executive Cabinet.) : Having access to a diversity of viewpoints is the only way anyone gets a real education. As far as I'm for concerned, nothing is me. (As long as I'm not violating the off-limi- ts laws, as covered by Robert yesterday.) see "Miller" on page six i ut result, children have become even more environmentally conscious than their parents. But the ploy by Wasatch County shows youngsters that government, in fact, doesn't care about preventing landfills, so much so that it will lie about it. All people should demand honesty from their government. If Wasatch County wanted to conduct a test, it should have implemented the program temporarily and then determined future actions. TL I . yr T. - CLrcJdj b an independent student tHizLi rttA Can -,-r ,.,. newspaper. Unsigned Editorial Board of the view majority Student opinions valuable to policymakers Editor: I wish to register a simple complaint regarding the current discussion about the potential change from quarter to semester terms at the U. Where are the students in this discussion? Considering the platitudes that ceaselessly emanate from the President's office, i.e., "Semesters will provide a better format for educational achievement" and "Semesters will allow professors to teach students more effectively," I can't think of a better group than the student body to consult regarding the effect of a semester system on a student's education. So why are we absent from the discussion? Why have we not been invited to offer our views on a change that may have drastic effects on the education that most of us are paying for? President Smith, I implore you to invite the whole student body (not just the ASUU administrative to discuss this issue with you as your administration develop a policy that has a direct bearing on our education. If the reasons for this change are truly for the benefit of the lap-sitter- s) student, and we are invited to participate in the discussion, you may find that you could have no greater ally than the student body, especially when approaching the tradition-boun- d faculty on this campus. If, however, you neglect to approach the students about his change, that fact will speak volumes about your true feelings for and about the students at this university. I certainly hope that this is not the case. senior Chip Bornemeier biology, health education |
