There's an active debate going on in the blogosphere about this proposal to give $10,000 bonuses to college professors that get good evaluations. I think that this is a fantastic proposal.

Tenure requirements are back-assed. I see too much crap being published, just for the sake of publishing. Showing up prepared for class should be a basic requirement for getting tenure.

I don't buy the studies that show that student evaluations are worthless. A few months ago, I sat down with a retired professor and showed him Rate My Professor. We looked at the evaluations of the faculty in his old department, and he thought that the students had nearly always gotten it right. I'm sorry, but if you consistently get bad evaluations, you are probably a bad professor.

Of course, student evals alone shouldn't be the way of measuring teaching quality, but add in a few peer evals, and you've got a pretty good clue.

UPDATE: Stanley Fish discusses a new book and concludes the age of the professor is over. "The for-profit university is the logical end of a shift from a model of
education centered in an individual professor who delivers insight and
inspiration to a model that begins and ends with the imperative to
deliver the information and skills necessary to gain employment."