Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/54913
letters Like Having Your Own Research Team. Online. Need essential b-school data? Salary data on over 30,000 faculty and 6,000 administrators worldwide. Data on over 1,000 business school programs, budgets, applicant and enrollment numbers, teaching loads, class sizes, and more ... Custom reports. Comparison tools. Unlimited Data. Learn more and subscribe: www.aacsb.edu/datadirect Evaluating Faculty I READ WITH INTEREST Don Epley's Your Turn column in the January/February issue of BizEd. The article, "Reassessing Faculty Evaluations," addressed student evaluations and due process. I have conducted research on the topic and written an article with co-authors Susan M. Des Ros- iers and Amy B. Hietapelto. Our piece, "Evidentiary and Constitu- tional Due Process Constraints on the Uses by Colleges and Universi- ties of Student Evaluations," was published in The Journal of Col- lege and University Law in 2005. I would like to clarify two dif- ferent types of due process that are mentioned in the Your Turn column. Procedural due process essentially means that a person has a right to present his or her side of the story at a hearing— which might simply be a hear- ing, but might also go as far as a trial. Substantive due process allows the accused to challenge the accuser. The university setting does give a professor a chance to have a hearing (procedural due process), but not a chance to challenge accusers (substantive due process). Therefore, one of the problems with the university evaluation system is that there is no substantive due process because there is no opportunity to actually learn exactly why stu- dents said what they said. Let me provide an illustrative recent example. In an evaluation for one of my online classes, a student said that he was unhappy because I was "not available at his fingertips." He acknowl- edged that I had stated I would not always be available, but he thought that was wrong; he 8 May/June 2011 BizEd believed I should be responsive 24/7. This comment lets us know what was said and why the per- son said it, and anyone reading it can decide whether or not the criticism is warranted. However, let's assume the ques- tion on the evaluation had merely asked, "Was this professor avail- able enough?" If the student only had "yes" and "no" options, he would have said "no," because my hours did not conform to his idea of availability. On any evaluation where a faculty member cannot determine the reasons for the "no" answer, substantive due process has been violated. Of course, there is another issue with substantive due process—the question of whether the evalua- tions themselves are valid. I know there is much debate on this very question, which just confirms that there is a problem. If your readers are interested in more detail on this topic, I hope they will seek out the article my co-authors and I published a few years ago. Roger W. Reinsch Professor of Business Law College of Business and Management Northeastern Illinois University Chicago