The University of Colorado at Boulder has lately lost its leading position as a ‘party school’. The matters appear to be so serious that some older professors even suggest a revival of the authentic academic values.

The old professor-student relationship was built on a compact that the professor would challenge the students and the students would work hard to meet the challenge. Now both students and professors are held hostage to students’ self-esteem, Faculty Course Questionnaires that measure popularity and not teaching skill, and an era of low sweat but high expectations by students. Against this backdrop, two ‘old school’ faculty members say students and faculty need to take back the classroom experience and rebuild it upon a foundation of high standards and accurate evaluations of both teaching and learning.

Bronson Hilliard: Restoring the pact, Colorado Daily, Sunday, Sep.4, 2005.

... when patients evaluate a surgeon, they typically consider how quickly and how fully they’ve recovered from surgery. By analogy, when students evaluate a teacher, they might be expected to consider what they’ve learned. And yet many of the same students who rave about their professors have learned preciously little. [...] As patients, these students are virtually dead. To be sure, few if any of them complain that they’re the victims of malpractice. But why would they? They’ve been placated with soothing words, easy assignments, and high grades. As a result, they fail to care, or even to notice, that they’re suffering from metastatic ineptitude. [...] Fact: on international tests, American students rank first for self-confidence, and mediocre for accomplishment.

Paul Levitt: Judge teaching on its true outcomes, Colorado Daily, Sunday, Sep.4, 2005.

My heresy, of course, was violating the student-faculty covenant that one former college president in the recent National Student Engagement Survey describes as a ‘mutual non-aggression pact’. In this pact "professors see teaching as a requirement they have to fulfill to do the research they prefer ... so the professor ... doesn’t ask much of the students, who in turn don’t ask much of the professor. The professor gives out reasonably high grades ... his evaluations will be satisfactory, and students don’t complain about grades or about whether they’ve learned much". [...] The ‘non-aggression’ pact results, of course, in universal grade inflation.

Stanley M. Guralnick: Students must stop the debasement of academic standards, Colorado Daily, Sunday, Sep.4, 2005.