A lower division English course is still suffering from early-quarter enrollment fallout following the revelation that Professor Maya Bell, rated a full chili pepper on RateMyProfessor.com, was not particularly attractive.

The department was reportedly hoping to bank on Professor Bell’s outgoing personality and enthusiasm for the subject matter, but such qualities are not offering the returns on investment that they once did. Since the advent of online note-sharing services, the content of lectures has been increasingly one-upped by the off chance that an attractive lecturer might drop something and have to bend down to pick it up.

A recent survey in which local students and educators were questioned while leaving the men’s bathroom showed an overwhelming consensus that, while a woman’s ability to teach should certainly be judged first and foremost, her appearance should be taken into account in certain scenarios; these include a course that is really boring, or any course in which men are enrolled, as they might be adversely affected by being taught by someone worse-looking than any garden variety movie star.

This is not the first time that concerns have been raised regarding Rate My Professor’s standards for hotness. “Yeah, this same thing happened to me sophomore year,” said Brian Cohen, a third year Economics major. “I checked Rate My Professor beforehand and the lady had a full chili pepper. But when I showed up to the first day of class, it was like–” Cohen was visibly holding back tears here “–it was like I was looking at an average-looking woman in her early forties.” Cohen took a moment to collect himself before continuing. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s still hard to talk about it. Listen, all I know is I got out of there. But there are people who are taking classes from visually unappealing professors every day. And that should scare all of us.”

Other students echoed Cohen sentiments. “I went to the first lecture of a GE class a few quarters back, and I dropped it like a bad habit after seeing the professor,” said fourth year Physics major Aiden Shoemaker. “I still have no idea what ‘The Social Construction of Sexuality’ means, but I do know it’s not something I’m gonna be learning from a low six.”

Professor Bell was approached for comment, but when questioned only sighed, shook her head, and audibly muttered to herself that she “didn’t get a PhD from Yale for this shit.”

As a temporary solution, the department heads have announced a plan to bail out the English course in question with the addition of at least two attractive teaching assistants. In the long term, the Girvetz Graduate School of Education is workshopping an initiative to recruit contestants from past seasons of America’s Next Top Model as educators. “But only if they did pretty well,” said a researcher involved. “We can’t have any of that week-four-eliminated trash teaching here. This is a prestigious university, after all.”