This strikes me as a very whiny article, not worthy of publishing in the Chronicle. A lifetime of hurt feelings and resentments bubbling up into a rant full of straw men and frankly irresponsible misinformation about the role student evaluations play in instructor assessment.
It’s too bad, too, because there certainly are criticisms to be made, and this article hints at some of them. But a well designed evaluation instrument along with critical interpretation of the results and comments can be an invaluable tool for instructors who want to improve their teaching.
But unfortunately this article also spreads untruths about the weight given to student evaluations, and dismisses common-sense security protocols like having a student deliver the results instead of the instructor (not perfect of course, but the student has much less incentive to tamper) as demeaning rather than a sensible precaution.
If the author had presented any evidence whatsoever to support her claims linking student evals to grade inflation (possibly related, and I’m sure studies have been done, but evals are very far from the only obvious contributing factor), or even made a passing attempt to explain what percentage of weight is given to raw eval scores for actual tenure considerations (very little in the broad scheme of things), and cut the junk out about how universities seeing students as customers is a new thing (it’s not new at all as any skim of the history of universities as an institution will make clear, but someone at a US state university should realize that it’s skyrocketing tuition rates, and not whiny students, that give students a bigger sense of entitlement) the article would have been much better.