Earlier this week, the Princeton Review released a book in conjunction with ratemyprofessors.com titled The Best 300 Professors, compiling a carefully culled and unranked list of the professors they have determined to be the finest educators in the United States. Three of Conn’s own, English professor John Gordon, anthropology professor John W. Burton, and chemistry professor Marc Zimmer, were honored with places on the list, with each instructor commended for his unique and engaging teaching style.
Connecticut College was one of only two Connecticut schools to have professors on the list (the other being Yale), and fell behind schools like Colgate and Mount Holyoke College, the latter of which tops the list with a record fourteen professors recognized.
Still, Conn professors make up 1% of the list, more significant than the contributions of Harvard (.67%), Yale (.67%), Dartmouth (.3%), or MIT (.3%).
Professor Gordon attributes this achievement to the capacity for close student-professor relationships that small liberal arts colleges allow. “I do think that small liberal arts college do a better job of teaching than big ‘megaversities’ do. I’ve seen both,” Gordon said, contrasting his time as a graduate student at Harvard with his undergraduate education at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, and his tenure at Connecticut College.
Ratemyprofessors.com is the world’s largest compiled database of professor reviews, enjoying over four million visitors a month. Students rate professors on clarity, easiness, helpfulness, and strictness of attendance policy. A small chili pepper icon marks the corner of each profile and is shaded red to indicate a professor’s quotient of “hotness”. The user comments section is littered with everything from honest evaluations of teaching methods (“He never talks down to students, can’t recommend him enough!“), to less helpful comments regarding personal style (“Love [this professor’s] tight jeans and boots!!!”).
The site’s entries are generally extreme in their positivity or negativity – very few people log on to ratemyprofessors.com to deliver middling reports of mediocre professors.
The website’s goal of placing power in students’ hands by opening a free forum for discussion has ultimately turned the site into an invaluable preregistration resource, and though the total anonymity of users combined with their tremendous influence on the Princeton Review’s book may at first cast a shade of uncertainty over the list’s validity, representatives from the Princeton Review stand by their selection process, which involved trimming the 42,000 professors identified on the website into “a base list” of one thousand professors. After the input garnered from school administrators, students, and varied surveys was considered, the Review made the final cuts to produce their list of three hundred.
Chemistry professor Marc Zimmer, who was singled out by The Huffington Post as one of thirteen superstar professors on the Review’s list, looks at the honor as “cool but not very important to me,” citing the achievement as “enough to warrant a new line in my resume and [hopefully enough] to get my wife to take me out for dinner as a reward.” Zimmer, the Jean C. Tempel ’65 Professor of Physical Science and recipient of 2007’s Connecticut Professor of the Year award, has been at Connecticut College for twenty-two years and is currently teaching a course called “Lighting Up Disease” while on sabbatical at sea.
“Though my lack of clothing style was as prominent in the ratemyprofessor.com comments as my chemistry teaching ability, I snuck my way into the list,” Zimmer stated in a post on his travel blog this week.
Professor of English John Gordon, on staff at Connecticut College since 1980, is an expert in modern British literature, especially James Joyce, the subject of most of his published work. Gordon is known for handing out copies of his own Summa Contra Boring, a writing guide containing essay formulating strategies and suggested publications to follow, at the beginning of courses as a strategy for ultimately cutting out lectures in favor of getting to the root of lessons. Gordon’s passion for English stems from the subject’s “bottomless” nature and his 2007 Convocation speech, remembered fondly by alumni and faculty members alike, features a perfect summation of the spirited professor in the line, “Just ‘cause there’s snow on the roof don’t mean there’s no fire underneath.”
Director of Africana Studies and Professor of Anthropology John W. Burton, one of four anthropology professors in the United States to be named, specializes in the broad fields of ethnicity, social change and history of anthropological thought as well as the incredibly specific studies of Nilotic-speaking peoples of eastern Africa and interface of tradition and modernity in the African social experience. Burton is driven to anthropology by his “underlying personal fascination with language, imagination, and systems of symbolic representation.” Burton’s teaching style is process driven and emphasizes raising questions rather than trying to provide answers. “In some ways,” Burton said, “teaching is impossible; the best you can is try to inspire someone to learn. Once a student trusts you, the rest will follow.”
The professors find the most touching part of the achievement to be the positive and honest input contributed by the students. That, Zimmer says, “is the most rewarding aspect of all of this.” Gordon adds that “[the students’ involvement] gives one a warm glow. Students here are nice, that’s just a categorical statement.”
It remains to be seen how much stock should be placed in college guidebooks. There are countless worthy and inspirational professors on Conn’s campus who have gone unnoted by the Princeton Review but creating a guidebook comprehensive enough to detail the virtues of every brilliant, dedicated and praiseworthy educator in America is an impractical and unfeasible task. This is not to detract from the accomplishments of the extraordinary sample of professors who were profiled – by all accounts, Zimmer, Burton, and Gordon are all exemplary instructors well deserving of the designation as “the nation’s best.”
Gordon’s best piece of advice to offer Connecticut College students is the same bit of guidance he gave his daughter before she left for college. “Think for yourself,” he said, and his honest commitment to this creed, which could be a vacant statement in less dedicated hands, is what sets him and his fellow honorees apart. •
