The Student as Godfather? The Impact of Student Ratings on Academia1

T are some who fear that the college student, by virtue of the apparent increasing emphasis on student ratings of professors, could become the "Godfather" of the academic community. More exactly, they fear that too much emphasis could be put on these ratings and that, generally speaking, the power that students might acquire would not be in the best interest of the academic community. One can, in fact, point to the medieval universities as an example of unreasonable student influence over teachers. As Rashdall (1936) notes in his writings about the medieval European universities, students at the University of Bologna not only paid teachers a "collecta" or fee (which apparently was determined by a teacher's ability to haggle), but they also could report teacher irregularities to the rector. For example, law texts were divided into segments, and each instructor was required to cover a particular segment by a specific date; to enforce this statute, the rector appointed a committee of students to report on dilatory professors, who were then required to pay a fine for each day that they had fallen behind.