Your professor's estimations of Alexander II represents the mainstream historiographical assessment of the Great Reforms. Most of the available evidence supports the idea that Alexander II was a very reluctant reformer and the Great Reforms were structured in such a way to be quite limited in scope and impact. The abolition of serfdom, for instance, did eliminate this institution but also hobbled it with a confusing patchwork of redistribution and repayment of the landowners for the land. Emancipation created only small changes land ownership for the serf-turned peasant. Few serfs could afford to make the payment for the land outright and the Russian state lacked the resources implement emancipation in a consistent manner. The peasant commune, the mir or obshchina, negotiated with the landlords and ended up owning land and parceled it out collectively. Peasants were still subject to restricted movements and social status. Other aspects of the Great Reforms tended to be less liberal than they appeared on first approximation. The zemstava may have imparted some degree of local control, but they still operated in a very mediated and structures social order that was ill-suited to adapt to modernity. By the same token, the state only trusted ceding local control to selected parts of the empire. The state would not extend its trust to non-Russians such as the Western Provinces or Central Asia. Extension of the Zemstava to these areas would become to later Russian politicians as a contentious an issue as that of serfdom a generation before.

Alexander II's private sentiments also support he was a very reluctant reformer. He dismissed his uncle, King Frederick William IV's acceptance of a very conservative constitution in Prussia. He also explained to the Prussian ambassador Otto von Bismarck that liberal ideas were antithetical to his conceptualization of the ideal relationship between the monarch and his people. Alexander II had imbibed much of these ideas on constitutionalism from Speranskii, who himself had started out a constitutionalist and then rejected this form of government for a type of neo-absolutism.

Nonetheless, there was some evidence that Alexander II was toying with the idea of a constitution. He did give his consent to his Council of Ministers the day of his assassination to discuss a constitution. Karakozov's deed did create somehting of a legend among subsequent generations of liberal Kadets (constitutional democrats) that things would have gone better for liberalism had Alexander II lived. There is a certain veracity to these claims; Alexander II for all his reluctant reformism was certainly more liberal than his successor Alexander III.

Yet this image of the "Tsar Liberator" needs to be properly contextualized. The political struggles liberals had with both Alexander III and Nicholas II added a gloss to Alexander II which the historical record does not quite support. Discussing a draft of a constitution is not the same as adapting one. The proposed Alexandrian constitution, suggested by Mikhail Loris-Melikov, also bore more than a cosmetic resemblance to the eventual 1905 constitution. The latter document was far from a success and a number of its problems, such having the tsar retain a great deal of autonomy independent of the Duma, proved to be quite unworkable in the post-1905 milieu. While is is arguable that Alexander II had more political capital than his grandson, he was not really floating a genuine constitutional order before his death. His private remarks and the patchwork nature of the Great Reforms show that Alexander II was a very reluctant reformer and transforming the tsar into a constitutional monarch was a step too far for him.

Sources

Eklof, Ben. Russia's Great Reforms, 1855-1881. Bloomington : Indiana Univ. Press, 1994.

Hosking, Geoffrey A. The Russian Constitutional Experiment: Government and Duma, 1907-1914. Cambridge: University Press, 1997.