Student evaluations of teaching: phrenology in the 21st century?

We argue that student evaluations of teaching (SETs) are a key tactic for justifying and maintaining white male dominance in US higher education. As such, tenure and promotion processes that rely on SETs as a measure of 'teaching quality' reproduce racial and gender inequality. We situate the contemporary use of SETs amidst a long history of technologies of power that deploy measurements to justify racial and gender inequality, including phrenology and the removal of children of color from their parents' custody. The technologies of power we explore each gain force through institutional contexts and the use of 'scientific' measurements, the production of data, and the use of statistics or numbers to 'measure' social differences. We argue that these technologies of power never simply measure existing differences but produce them and that each has a prior content that deploys a norm of white male privilege.