Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/07/10/professor-rating-site-finally.html
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Creepy and completely inappropriate, unless a school wants to actually encourage ill-advised sexual relationships between students and teachers.
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Less about relationships, more about rape culture, IMHO. Teaching young men to treat female academics as sexual objects.
'Nuff said. Shut it down.
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Excellent point; my thinking was that the ONLY time what someone else looks like is actually relevant is when one is contemplating sexual relations with that person. In any educational or professional setting, such considerations are not at all appropriate.
Consent and consensuality are a whole other ball of wax.
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Well now part of me wishes I looked up my own profile before they dropped that feature. Probably for the best not to know.
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There’s always ‘the Wayback Machine…’
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Nah. I can’t imagine any good would come of reading my own profile anyway.
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Hehe, poor Megan:
But this week’s news really baffled me, not because I fail to understand how sexism works, but because until this week I thought that “hotness” referred to how exciting a particular class was. Throughout my college years, I used RateMyProfessors.com to choose undergrad classes, all the while thinking a professor with a chili pepper gave… invigorating lectures. (I promise, that’s not a euphemism.) I mean, you’re rating professors with chili peppers! Chili peppers mean spiciness and excitement, not sex appeal! Right?! Right, guys? Back me up here!
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Is that supposed to be satire? She can’t be serious…
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Sweet, naive millennials.
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I certainly agree with the sentiment, but chili peppers are clearly fruits, not vegetables.
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Time to go back to analog ratings. /s
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Could be, actually.
My SO is a professor and an attractive lady. After a while I gave into temptation and looked her up–one pepper. Not that “hot” of a rating, compared to her department head who is a middle aged guy and not a particularly handsome one at that–he has (or had, at least) a near-perfect “hot” rating.
Now, it’s possible that her university has a massively high number of women STEM students and the department head’s humor, wit and sensitivity makes him very bangable.
But instead, I suspect there’s a material difference in the student body and that some universities for whatever reason use the “hot” rating for the purpose the Ars Technica thought it was for. In my SO’s case, she mostly teaches immigrant students with a large percentage coming from Asia and Latin America.
Needless to say, if she taught at a party school like UW-Madison I’m sure I’d be completely disgusted with her entry on RateMyProfessor. The world is a better place with that feature gone. If there’s legitimate utility in it, bring it back in a form where it won’t be used for sexist purposes.
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Never put any in a fruit salad, though; just like tomatoes.
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My brother actually “earned” a chilli pepper on that site as a visiting professor at a couple of different universities. He was not only pretty embarrassed about it, he was worried that it would work against him in his search for a tenure-track position. No idea if it did, but he’s now a very happy and tenured professor, albeit not at his 1st choice university.
And if that’s how the chilli pepper affects a privileged straight white guy, I can only imagine how it affects others.
All of that said, everybody who rated my brother as “hot” also left comments about his dress and his physical attributes, so killing the hotness rating won’t completely stop this sort of thing.
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Nononononono! Tomato-watermelon salad is delicious! Not only that, my wife just said to me earlier tonight, “You know what would make that salad even better? A Thai chilli or two.”
Honestly, I’m not making this up.
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While I would have no problem with someone who looks like a “man” teaching me while wearing a dress, I’m not surprised that your brother’s doing so provoked some student commentary.
ba dum TISH!
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Not that the schools had any input on this, I’m sure - this was all 3rd party tech-bros, doing their tech-bro thing unconnected to the schools and therefore also without having to deal with the consequences.
Mango-chili salad is a classic.
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