What They Did and Why it Sucks: RateMyProfessor Cuts Down on Spice.

What They Did and Why it Sucks: RateMyProfessor Cuts Down on Spice.

What They Did:

RateMyProfessor.com removed the optional Hotness rating that had all ways spiced up this idiosyncratic, student-focused website, allowing students to recount not only their academic, intellectual but their affective, romantic experiences under a given instructor’s tutelage. In addition to praising, blaming, and slandering one’s teachers, a premise so subversive to the Ideals of Academia that the site was frighteningly gauche (that’s French for “Left”, as in Leftist, meaning traditionally antiauthoritarian) to begin with, students could warn you whether or not the man or woman in question was an eyesore. Given recent criticism by female professors, the site subtly removed the Hotness Rating option, as well as the red chili pepper that had tokenized it.

WHY IT SUCKS:

1.       The entire premise for RateMyProfessor.com was to empower the student voice, not to restrain it. Supposing that any one of the variety of personal attributes that are considered attractive to the mid-brain would have no consequence upon the psyche of the student is not only naïve, but Totalitarian in an Orwellian way.

2.     It was a Professor that spearheaded the act of censorship, not a student.

3.      The entire premise for RateMyProfessor.com was subversive TO BEGIN WITH. No idealistic scholar would dare besmirch the name of any educator, loth to blame others for his or her own scholastic shortcomings. To try to introduce some sort of MORAL AUTHORITY to this website is RIDICULOUS, because that would suggest that RATING our PROFESSORS is NOT a subversive act of Will, but rather an Objective Account that we are ENTITLED TO within certain CONSTRAINTS. Will any educated man or woman believe this lie?

4.     Hotness IS A JOKE. It’s ridiculous to suggest that:

a.     It could be objective.

b.     It needs to be objective.

c.      It would be a criterion for serious scholastic decisions.

d.     It ought ONLY to be a criterion for serious scholastic decisions.

e.     It would affect one gender group moreso than others.

f.       Claims that it would have such an effect could be substantiated objectively, especially in the ABSENCE of the censored information.

g.     Students would NOT be entitled to this censored information in revisiting the site’s decision.

h.      Professors should feel self-conscious about it based upon the irrational fear that being “unattractive” would lose them worthy students in desperate need of Learning.

i.       All of these facts would somehow IMPLY the ethical grounds for censorship, a violation of the Is-Ought Problem. (That facts alone do not dictate ethics.)

5.     The greatest psychoanalytic shortcoming of the last hundred years is the undervaluation of Eros, which finds its expression in perverse ways. See Marie-Louise von Franz and the entire history of Romance and Chivalry, as well as the threats against it posed by barbarically one-sided special interest and “rights” groups.

6.     RateMyProfessor.com is supposed to be an independent company rather than an academic institution. Do “checks and balances” mean anything to you? How about “Corporate Fascism”?? Perhaps you need to go back to school. But then again: perhaps that will not help.

7.      If none of this matters, not even from the perspective of a long-time student, what motive would remain to salvage a professor’s students other than money?

8.      There is no teleological progress made by this decision; people simply cannot TAKE A JOKE, and they supplement their own ethical shortcomings with emotive political complaints: a step BACKWARDS.

Honestly, it never affected me much. It was just funny and curious. I all so was in love with someone who became a Professor. I was hoping to know she would be remembered as much for her beauty as for her intelligence, since the former is a power that gives life whereas the latter led to her untimely death. You can be beautiful and make the most of it, even when others hate or take advantage of it. What truly kills people is academic intellect, for its very nature is so cutting, incisive, and impersonal that, to quote Jung, it “fears and rejects with horror any sign of living sympathy, and partly because a sympathetic understanding might permit contact with an alien spirit to become a serious experience.”

Dm.A.A.