From The Chronicle of Higher Education.

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Wednesday, October 15, 2003

Do Good Looks Equal Good Evaluations?

By GABRIELA MONTELL

Professors aren't known for fussing about their looks, but the

results of a new study suggest they may have to if they want

better teaching evaluations.

Daniel Hamermesh, a professor of economics at the University

of Texas at Austin, and Amy Parker, one of his students, found

that attractive professors consistently outscore their less

comely colleagues by a significant margin on student

evaluations of teaching. The findings, they say, raise serious

questions about the use of student evaluations as a valid

measure of teaching quality.

In their study, Mr. Hamermesh and Ms. Parker asked students to

look at photographs of 94 professors and rate their beauty.

Then they compared those ratings to the average student

evaluation scores for the courses taught by those professors.

The two found that the professors who had been rated among the

most beautiful scored a point higher than those rated least

beautiful (that's a substantial difference, since student

evaluations don't generally vary by much).

While it's not news that beauty trumps brains in many

quarters, you would think that the ivory tower would be

relatively exempt from such shallowness.

Not so, says Rocky Kolb, a professor of astronomy and

astrophysics at the University of Chicago, who notes that

teaching, like acting, is a kind of performance art in which

looks play a part. Besides, even nerds must answer to beauty

standards (albeit lower ones), says Mr. Kolb, who posed in

1996 for a calendar featuring hot scientists, called the

"Studmuffins of Science."

He added: "It's a little known fact that the Royal Swedish

Academy of Sciences has a swimsuit competition for the Nobel

Prize."

Anyone who thinks looks don't count in academe is foolish,

says Judith Waters, a psychology professor at Fairleigh

Dickinson University who studies the relationship of physical

beauty to aging, income, and work. "It's sad that they make

such a difference, and I'm sure there are many people who are

going to read this and say, 'Well, they don't matter to me.'

But they matter to large numbers of other people, including

students," she says.

James M. Lang made that discovery. Mr. Lang has always earned

high marks from his students at Assumption College, but he

doesn't consider himself a "Baldwin" (for the clueless, that's

a term for a hot guy, popularized by the movie Clueless).

Apparently, though, some of his students do. More than one of

them has made comments about his "buns" on student

evaluations.

Now the assistant professor of English says he's

self-conscious about his looks and his teaching. "I work very

hard at my teaching," he says, "and I am a little disturbed at

the possibility that students are evaluating my courses based

on such a superficial criterion." He wonders if he's as good a

teacher as he thought he was, and he's afraid to turn his back

to his classes to write on the chalkboard.

Kate Antonovics says she can relate. The 33-year-old assistant

professor of economics is a "Betty" (that's slang for a

gorgeous woman, also from Clueless) in her students' eyes. She

has gotten e-mail messages from her students at the University

of California at San Diego that include remarks such as,

"Where do you shop? My friends and I can't get over how cute

your outfits always are (I suppose because of the usual

professor clothing-style stereotype ... which I apologize

for)," and "I think you are very very hot." (One student even

asked her on a date in the middle of the semester. She

declined.)

Despite some awkward moments, Ms. Antonovics (who also gets

high ratings from students on her teaching evaluations) says

she's not bothered by all the remarks. "I mostly think they're

hysterical," she says. "I've never felt like I'm getting good

evaluations just because they think I'm attractive." And if

students like her, and her teaching, then maybe they're paying

better attention in class, she says.

Mr. Hamermesh says his student ratings are above average, but

his looks are average -- though he adds, "Hopefully, I'm being

too harsh on myself." Twenty years ago a young woman wrote on

one of the professor's evalutions, "Snacks in bed with you

would be exciting and economically beneficial," but besides

that, the only comments he's gotten related to his appearance

have been about his neckties (generally favorable) and his

cowboy hats (also generally favorable, though one student once

wrote, "All hat, no cattle").

The big question, he says, is: Do students discriminate

against homely professors, or are attractive professors better

teachers?

Unfortunately, the study is inconclusive on that count. But if

the answer is that students discriminate, "and if you think

this beauty variable really shouldn't matter, and yet it does,

then maybe we should discount teaching evaluations somewhat,"

Mr. Hamermesh says, "because clearly they are affected by

something which most of us would argue should not be something

that we should be accounting for."

Some male professors also may be dismayed about another

finding of the study: "Good looks generated more of a premium,

and bad looks more of a penalty, for male instructors," say

Mr. Hamermesh and Ms. Parker in a paper about their findings,

"Beauty in the Classroom: Professors' Pulchritude and Putative

Pedagogical Productivity." According to their data, the effect

of beauty (or lack thereof) on teaching evaluations for men

was three times as great as it was for women.

The two also found that both female and minority professors

earned lower overall ratings for their teaching than their

white, male peers. That finding is worrisome, but hardly

astonishing, says Susan Basow, a professor of psychology at

Lafayette College. "It just shows that white, native-speaking

males are still the norm for professors in students' eyes.

When they think of a professor, they think of a Mr. Chips

type." More surprising, she says, was the finding that the

teaching ratings for men were more affected by their looks.

Dina Ibrahim, who is herself no stranger to objectification by

students, says she can't help being amused by the notion that

men are being judged on their looks more than women are. "It's

nice to have the males objectified for a change," says the

assistant professor of broadcast journalism at San Francisco

State University. Every semester, Ms. Ibrahim, who is from

Egypt, must put up with student comments like, "She can be my

Egyptian queen any day."

Of course, not all student comments are flattering. A glance

at Web sites such as ProfessorPerformance.com and

RateMyProfessors.com -- where students rate their instructors

on criteria such as coolness, clarity, easiness, helpfulness,

and hotness (on RateMyProfessors.com, hot professors get chili

peppers beside their names) -- leaves little doubt about the

viciousness of some students. Petty comments abound: "Someone

fire this fat bastard" and "Looks like a hobbit, is not a nice

person!"

Harold Glasser has been a victim of such comments. One of his

students posted the following remarks on

ProfessorPerformance.com: "Glasser where's (sic) the same blue

fleece sweatercoat thing, and this awful matching blue fleece

hat that looks like the one Elmer Fudd wore. If this wasn't

enough, he has some of the same mannerisms as Dr. Evil," from

the Austin Powers movies.

Mr. Glasser, an assistant professor of environmental studies

at Western Michigan University, says he doesn't take such

remarks seriously. "I care more about my teaching than what I

wear. I think my appearance is irrelevant." Besides, he adds,

"I don't even have a blue fleece sweatercoat."

Students are not the only ones in the academy biased by looks,

says Ms. Waters, the psychology professor at Fairleigh

Dickinson. When she first started teaching, she says, she was

a little on the chubby side. "But after I went on a crash

diet, my faculty evaluations went up," she recalls. "I wanted

to laugh. I'm the same person, yet suddenly I'm a genius?"

Unfortunately, professors who look more like Gollum and less

like Aragorn (aka Viggo Mortensen) may have their work cut out

for them. "Looks shouldn't count, but clearly they do," Ms.

Ibrahim says. "That means ugly professors have to really,

really know what they're talking about if they want to get

good evaluations, as horrible as that sounds. They have to

work harder."

Short of botox injections and plastic surgery, there's not a

lot professors can do about the looks they were born with, so

most of them should focus on improving the things they can

control -- like dress, grooming and, above all, their

teaching, says Ms. Basow of Lafayette College.

The good news is that looks are just one of many factors that

affect student evaluations. In addition, the bar for beauty is

probably low for academics (beautiful professors are about as

rare as genius members of the World Wrestling Federation, says

the University of Chicago's Mr. Kolb), so clearing it may be

easier.

Upon hearing about the study's findings, one anthropology

professor (who asked for anonymity), said, "Given this

information, I'm wondering if I'm better looking than I

thought I was because my evaluations have been so good."