As math classes for the Fall 2025 semester at TMCC were posted this month for sign ups, rooms, instruction methods and meeting dates were indicated but the rows for instructors were all listed as “To Be Announced.”
This worried multiple students trying to avoid two instructors who rate very low on the ratemyprofessors website.
An email sent by Mike Peyerl on April 14th to District 35 Assembly member Rebecca Edgeworth and shown to Our Town Reno with the Subject Re: FW: TMCC Policy Undermines Student Rights and Transparency - Legislative Oversight Urgently Needed, indicates: “We have fixed the issue. We had a member of our team take an inappropriate action with the Math registration classes for the upcoming registration cycle. This individual has been causing numerous problems and he decided to do this even though he knew it was against NSHE policy. We are addressing this on the academic side with him.”
“The good news is that it is now fixed in our system and was only for Math classes. None of our other courses had this issue because all of our other Department Chairs follow the rules,” the TMCC Vice President of Finance and Government Relations concluded in that email.
Our Town Reno was previously sent a response by TMCC’s Director of Marketing and Communications Kate Kirkpatrick indicating: “TMCC's practice is to publish class schedules that list the names of available instructors, starting with full-time faculty, and later the part-time instructors, as they are hired. After registration opened last week, the math courses you mentioned were mistakenly hidden to students temporarily, which may have disrupted the registration process for some students. All the affected courses have now been made visible to students once again by the admissions office, as our catalog states that they are to be offered every semester. They are now available for registration.”
We asked for a follow up after seeing Peyerl’s email if the mistake was inappropriate and intentional but have not heard back by the time of this report.
An email from Alejandro Rodriguez, the NSHE director of government relations on April 14th, to another assembly member, Erica Mosca from District 14, indicated the TMCC Vice President had the community college working on restoring instructor names, with an attributed quote that “the chair was not authorized to remove the instructor names from the schedule, which he had built and the dean had already approved.”
NSHE, the Nevada System of Higher Education, is the state government entity which oversees all public colleges and universities in the state.
TMCC has been mired in legal disputes for years with faculty member and current math department chair Lars Jensen.
In March, Jensen earned a courtroom victory in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals after it overruled the U.S. District Court of Nevada and determined TMCC administrators had violated his First Amendment rights and retaliated against him.
In a case that received national attention, in 2019, Jensen had raised concerns that the TMCC math curriculum standards were being lowered both during a meeting and in writing, even though he was told he could not do that, which then led to a reprimand, negative evaluations from higher ups and proceedings since abandoned to fire him.
Jensen has a 2.2 rating on ratemyprofessors where many students tend to give low ratings to professors who many view as too difficult.
In terms of rating distribution, he has five in the awesome category, four in the great, three in the good, two in the OK and 38 in awful.
Prior to the professors being listed, a TMCC student Jennifer Hancock had been posting graphics on social media, as well as contacting officials, about the situation of not being able to see who was teaching which math class.
One graphic from Jennifer indicated: “To All TMCC Students, past, present and future. I am writing to you today not just as a fellow student, but as someone who believes in transparency, accountability, and your right to make informed decisions about your education. Last year, I enrolled in a math class at TMCC and was assigned to an instructor with a historically low student success rate. The class environment was anything but supportive, and I felt like I couldn’t learn math.”
After indicating the instructor names were not available, she concluded: “Let’s protect future students from being blindsided by the very system that’s supposed to support them.”
In another she gave her full name Jennifer Hancock with in one section in capital letters: “You deserve to know who’s teaching your class before you commit to it.”
Hancock had also expressed these concerns via email to the NSHE Board of Regents and to multiple people in the math department, with a conclusion there that “hiding instructor names does not foster equity or academic excellence — it merely forces students into courses they have valid reasons to avoid.”
In another message on social media for TMCC students Hancock wrote: “I ended up in a math class with a professor whose teaching style made it nearly impossible for me to succeed. I wasn’t alone—many students struggled in that class, and it shook my confidence in learning math at all. I decided to speak up for those who come after me.”
Another math professor students have told us they avoid is Jeff Olsen, who has a 2.9 overall score on ratemyprofessors but with 28 awesomes being more than his 25 awfuls there.