You've got that exactly backwards. Behaving professionally means turning off emotion and acting appropriately. Anyone whose job involves dealing with people has to do it, from grocery store cashiers and waitresses to doctors and lawyers.
It's expected, and literally millions of people do it successfully every day.
Unless their reason for cheating is "I don't care about my studies" and the way you extend your sympathies is by getting them kicked out, your argument is bullshit.
OK, the professor sucked. You know what? Some do, thats life, and you suck it up. The academic policy doesn't say "you have a right to a teacher you love a whole huggy bunch", but it does say "don't fucking cheat".
If they truly had no choice about cheating, then I'd show more sympathy. But they do. By contrast we truly don't get to choose how we as humans are emotionally wired.
What a lame excuse. He still had as much of a choice in being a dick as the students had in cheating.
Even under his own account of the office-hours incident, he was very inconsiderate and doesn't seem to understand it. If you have office hours, know there will be many students showing up on this particular day, and yet you aren't prepared with food, compound that by not bothering to explain that you need to eat now, that's a dick move, without excuse and explains the evaluations. His fault, not the students.
The fact that the professor remembered that specific incident strongly suggests that this was one of those moments that he'd like to have over. The fact that he has come up with a strategy to avoid the problem suggests that there will be future improvement. I see a lot to applaud here.
How can you possibly say that one case of leaving the office for maybe 20 minutes during office hours explains an overall 1 point drop in evaluation averages? Many here are so quick to pile on the prof, am I the only one that read this and was shocked at the amount of cheating going on??
Also I don't understand why the same emotional wiring that can explain the professor's behavior cannot potentially explain the cheating student's behavior?
You have known many professors who are going through reporting a fifth of their class to the deans for cheating? You know how they feel and act during that event? Really?
I firmly disbelieve. I spent 9 years in a university setting, knew a lot of professors, and I personally knew exactly nobody who went through that. And from what I know of human nature, and the likely emotions that someone in that position would feel, I very strongly suspect that your judgement of how they would react is completely wrong.
I've been through multiple stop-te-cheating lectures and each time, the professors went out of their way to appreciate the non-cheats and minimize negative impact on the innocent due to the actions of the guilty minority.
The first paints you as a helpless victim of circumstances. The second one takes responsibility for ones poor actions, and charts a course to do better in the future.
There is a world of difference between the two.
FYI professionals are humans first and professionals second. If think that professionals can easily turn off how they are feeling and always act properly, then I conclude that you have little understanding of humans and little experience of how professionals act.
Rather than see this as a flaw, I see this self-awareness as something to compliment the professor on. OF COURSE spending so much time dealing with unpleasantness towards students is going to affect any human's mood towards the class. That's human nature. But now that the professor is armed with an awareness of this fact, it will be easier to address the underlying cause.
I know that you do not agree with me. But hopefully after you have a few decades of experience in a professional environment, and possibly experience as a spouse and parent as well, you'll learn the truth of what I say.