Well-Known Black Scholars Who Get High Marks From Their Students

RateMyProfessors.com is an irreverent Internet site that enables college students to post comments about their teachers. Online since 1999, RateMyProfessors now has posted more than 6.3 million ratings for more than 770,000 professors at 6,000 different institutions of higher education.

Students are asked to rate their professors’ clarity and helpfulness on a scale of 1 to 5 with 5 being the highest rating for each professor. These scores are averaged to produce an overall quality rating.

JBHE checked the ratings at the Web site for all the well-known black scholars we routinely measure each year for academic citation counts, press mentions, and references in various Google and Amazon.com search engines. Of the dozens of black scholars for whom we found ratings at the site, only four professors received perfect overall quality scores. They are:

• Clayborne Carson, professor of history at Stanford
• Manning Marable, professor of history at Columbia University
• Michael Eric Dyson, professor of the humanities at the University of Pennsylvania
• Sylvester James Gates Jr., professor of physics at the University of Maryland

Copyright © 2007. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. All rights reserved.