By Juliet Leyba
Xpress Correspondent

It was only two years ago that 26-year-old SF State student Ryan Lathouwers purchased his first computer. Last week he was sued, along with City College of San Francisco, over teacherreview.com, his popular web site that lets students review teachers performance, make comments and then gives them an overall grade.

When Lathouwers discovered the World Wide Web in July 1997 he never expected it would lead to so much controversy.

"It came out of the blue," he said of the lawsuit. "I found out because a reporter called me."

Before becoming a Web Master, Lathouwers, who is a long-time music fan, decided to try his hand at piano. He enrolled in a beginning class at City College of San Francisco and eagerly looked forward to learning how to tap out a few simple tunes.

But he didn't learn how to play the piano.

"I love piano and I've always wanted to learn but the instructor was horrendously terrible and so rude to the students," said Lathouwers. "I felt like I was wasting my time."

That experience set in motion a chain of events that have forever altered the method by which many students at City College and SF State go about choosing their classes and instructors. It has sparked a class-action lawsuit that is receiving national coverage.

"I started talking with a friend about how we could make education better and I came up with the idea of a teacher review web site," said Lathouwers.

He spent the next two weeks figuring out what technology he wanted to use to build the site and another two weeks making it a reality.

"I didn't know anything about how to do it so I just taught myself," said Lathouwers.

By early September 1998, all the kinks had been worked out and the site was up and running. Lathouwers printed out numerous flyers and began posting them around the City College campus.

"When I came home I was pretty excited, there were already about 20 reviews," he said. Since then the site has taken off and according to Lathouwers, to date, the site includes 7,397 anonymous reviews of 1,131 instructors from City College and SF State combined.

The interactive site, which is accessible through various City College club web pages or by typing www.teacherreview.com into a search engine, includes a place where students can rate their instructors with a letter grade. That grade is automatically calculated with the grades other reviewers give and issues the teacher a grade point average (GPA).

"The majority of instructors, about 51 percent, have really good GPA's then there are a percentage with average GPA's but it's the handful who have really lousy ones that are doing all the grumbling," said Lathouwers.

The handful of teachers at City College are doing more than grumble about their lousy reviews and poor GPA's.

A special board of trustees meeting was held at City College's Phelan Campus last Thursday where faculty and students heard from a panel of experts on First Amendment issues and student rights and had an opportunity to voice their opinions.

The two main problems the disgruntled instructors have with the site are that the reviews are anonymous and that the site is accessible through web sites found on the City College web pages.

"We support the rights of students including criticism, however, they should be made responsibly and we demand that the board of trustees does its duty in protecting the faculty from this kind of harassment," said Susan Conrad president of the teachers' union 2121.

"They [the instructors] would be so embarrassed if they knew how little traffic the site gets from those links. It's laughable," said Lathouwers who feels confident that he and his site are operating well within rights outlined under the First Amendment and the Communications Decency Act.p>"I don't think the case will stand-up in court," said Lathouwers.

I'm not going to take the site down and as long as people use it will stay up in one form or another. It's based in expression on opinion," he added.

For now he is just going to continue with his usual routine. Vegetarian cuisine, no television and every Tuesday and Thursday he will hop on his red Gary Fisher bicycle and ride the eight miles from his cozy one bedroom apartment in Lower Haight to SF State campus and take his classes.

"I constructed the web site to run itself so I don't have to do a lot to maintain it," said Lathouwers.

His spare time will be spent working on personal projects, spending time with his girlfriend and enjoying life.

"I don't know what I'm going to do," said the young entrepreneur. "I never wanted a 'career,' there are so many other things to do with time."