I guess I've been fortunate to have not encountered these particular pathologies. Certainly student evaluations are important, but every chair/dean I've dealt with has known enough to know how to read evaluations to weed out the honest feedback from the merely disgruntled or those just happy to not have to work too hard.
My complaints are generally that teaching evaluations don't matter enough. I like teaching, and I'm good at it, but you can only afford to be as good as you can be in the 20% of your time you can carve out of the grant-writing budget to devote to students. Spend too much time teaching and it won't matter how much the students learn.
Comments
I guess I've been fortunate to have not encountered these particular pathologies. Certainly student evaluations are important, but every chair/dean I've dealt with has known enough to know how to read evaluations to weed out the honest feedback from the merely disgruntled or those just happy to not have to work too hard.
My complaints are generally that teaching evaluations don't matter enough. I like teaching, and I'm good at it, but you can only afford to be as good as you can be in the 20% of your time you can carve out of the grant-writing budget to devote to students. Spend too much time teaching and it won't matter how much the students learn.