THE university generally professes to have two main functions: teaching, that is, the imparting of knowl edge, skills, and critical tools; and research, ordinarily defined in some variation of the cliche "advancing the frontiers of knowledge." At certain points in the career of every faculty member, it becomes necessary to assess that person's performance and make decisions on his or her future. We all know how one goes about evaluating a faculty member's research when it comes time for promotion or a merit increase, and I need not talk about this aspect. Usually, however, and increasingly, evidence must also be submitted to deans and review committees on the person's teaching effectiveness. This need seems basically to have developed in the past ten to fifteen years, since students came to be more assertive of their right to receive competent instruction. It used to be assumed, more or less, that an effective researcher is also an effective teacher, and scholarship was the chief evidence adduced to demonstrate a person's worthiness of a faculty position. This is in fact still the assumption when we seek to appoint those who are recognized as "stars" in their disciplines?Nobel Prize winners, for example. In a system such as the University of California's, where assistant professors and associate professors must be considered for increases every two years and full professors every three years, the only way to get a raise comparable to the rise in the cost of living is to receive a merit increase in the base scale (this require ment will become even more rigid in the post Proposition 13 climate). As a result, pressure has grown for evidence of the quality of teaching in every course offered, and each time it is offered. There are signs that even the students, who were such avid course evaluators in the beginning, are bored with the process and feel put upon when asked to express their opinions. We tend to assume, as a point of ideology, that the purpose of this evaluation is both to pass judgment on the teacher's effort and to provide an incentive and an input for improving it in the future. But whereas our judgment of a faculty member's scholarly efforts can, at least for purposes of argument and review, be based on objectified grounds, judgment of the teaching effort remains elusively subjective. The masses of material compiled on each faculty member do not always speak for themselves. In fact, we have tended in practice to abandon the evaluation of teaching to the immediate consumers of the product, the students, while remaining reluctant to intrude our own supposedly expert opinions in the matter. Since the evaluation of teaching became a hot issue during the 1960s, it has remained more a student than a faculty Thomas P. Saine