Ohio University administrators are ambivalent about the school’s absence from the Princeton Review’s latest list, this one profiling the nation’s best professors.
In conjunction with RateMyProfessors.com, a site designed for students to gauge their professors’ performance, Princeton Review chose 300 top professors from schools across the country.
The Ohio State University, University of Akron, University of Cincinnati, Kenyon College and Oberlin College all had professors on the list, with OSU and Kenyon employing five and nine, respectively.
The Princeton Review began with a list of 1,000 professors from RateMyProfessors.com and narrowed it to 300 using “further input from school administrators and students, as well as from surveys of professors under consideration,” according to a news release from the organization. The book, titled The Best 300 Professors, was released April 3.
This kind of methodology can be effective in some areas, but does not take all factors into account, said Joe McLaughlin, associate professor of English and chair of Faculty Senate at OU.
“What someone told me once … is that students are very good at being able to evaluate whether or not a professor is good at delivering information,” McLaughlin said.
However, students don’t have as much experience when it comes to judging the quality of assignments, feedback and the information taught, he added.
Though no one from OU is listed in the recently released book, the university is doing all it can to attract the best professors, according to McLaughlin and Ann Fidler, chief of staff to Executive Vice President and Provost Pam Benoit.
“I think that every time there’s an opportunity to hire a faculty member, that all the departments and schools put a lot of effort into trying to recruit faculty that are well-suited for Ohio University,” Fidler said.
The departments look at where the candidate was educated, their research, whether they have been published and their teaching ability.
“I think just about everyone would tell you they try to do something to assess the candidates’ teaching or their ability to be a good teacher,” McLaughlin said.
Setbacks to getting the best professors to choose OU can include money, monetary support for research and traveling to conferences and teaching load, he said.
“One issue that we sometimes encounter is that people don’t want to live in a small town,” Fidler said. “They come here, they like the university, but they don’t want to live in a small town. And there’s not a lot we can do about that. … It’s not everyone’s cup of tea.”
Although OU’s professors are absent from the book, the institution is listed in some of Princeton Reviews’ other works, such as The Best 376 Colleges and The Princeton Review Guide to 322 Green Colleges, said Jeanne Krier, publicist for Princeton Review Books and Rankings.
bv111010@ohiou.edu
