Why did the student body have a better opinion of Ben Ross than did many of his fellow teachers?

They were interested in his classes. Ben Ross was a charasmatic teacher.

Ben was a charismatic, enthusiastic, passionate and highly engaging and interactive teacher. He was very young and also friendly towards the students thus the students naturally thought of him as a role model or leader and genuinely enjoyed his classes. The other teachers however, most probably, envied his liveliness and passion. After they evident failure of the wave movement to them, their outlook of his ways of teaching was further degraded as they thought he was a young, inexperienced man who let the feel of power get to his head and lost control of a classroom experiment.