DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: I was fired from NYU after students complained that the class was too hard. Who’s next? Maitland Jones Jr., who taught at New York University from 2007 to 2022, writes:
Organic chemistry is a difficult and important course, a rite of passage for future medical doctors, scientists, and many engineers, professions that require the ability to reason well from a set of new data. No longer is “orgo” a memorization course — those of us who teach it aim to produce critical thinkers, future diagnosticians, and scientists.
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All went well at first as students prospered in the problem-solving setting and younger faculty began to adopt it. But about 10 years ago, I noticed that students were increasingly misreading exam questions. My careful attention to the wording of problems did not help much. Exam scores began to decline, as did attendance in the traditional large lecture section of the course then COVID hit.
Coteaching with two excellent professors, Paramjit Arora and Keith Woerpel, I commissioned and paid for a series of 52 videos to substitute for canceled in-person lectures. Students rarely watched them. They performed abysmally on exams that would have seemed too easy only a few years ago. A few did attend the zoomed office hours, but they were the best students in the class, not the ones who needed help.
Exams that should have yielded a B average dropped to C- or worse. Single digit scores became common and we even had zeros on exams, something that had never happened before. Despite those declining scores, about 60 percent of my students still got As and Bs this past semester. At the same time the bottom was dropping out under the poorly performing members of the class; the top students, while still deserving their excellent grades, were no longer being stretched. Previously, they would be getting 90s, now they were routinely getting 100. Their A grades would not change of course, but they were not being challenged and thus not learning as much as they should. It wasn’t their fault, it was ours.
Student evaluations, once highly useful, have become just another social media opportunity to vent. Evaluations are now often personal and sometimes profane. The good ones swell your head, and the bad ones upset you. It’s a pity that their usefulness has disappeared.
My coteacher and I began to receive anonymous emails, often just short of threatening. In the fall of 2020, we were accused of being insufficiently sensitive to the stressful issues of the day. We were urged to make “accommodations,” such as online, multiple choice exams. This spring some students sent a petition to the NYU deans evidently complaining about procedures and grades in the course. The deans never revealed the contents of the petition to me so I was unable to refute it in any way. After several months of silence on their part, on Aug. 2 the deans fired me over the objections of the chemistry department. The administration summarily dismissed the grievance I filed.
The point is not that I was unjustly treated. My reputation as a chemist and educator has not been seriously damaged. NYU is still using the videos I had made and the approximately 200 problems I developed for the problem-solving version of the course. In any event, I had been teaching for many years and the time for me to step aside was probably upon me.
What is overwhelmingly important is the chilling effect of such intervention by administrators on teaching overall and especially on untenured professors. Can a young assistant professor, almost all of whom are not protected by tenure, teach demanding material? Dare they give real grades? Their entire careers are at the peril of complaining students and deans who seem willing to turn students into nothing more than tuition-paying clients.
More details on Jones’ firing from Reason’s Robby Soave: NYU Chemistry Professor Fired After Students Said His Class Was Too Hard.
But the question isn’t whether students deserve good teachers—of course, they do—but whether good teachers should feel compelled to pass students who fail to demonstrate mastery of an extraordinarily important and complex subject matter.
“Celebrated organic chemistry professor Maitland Jones Jr. had high standards, and we can’t have that in 2022,” writes the leftist author and teacher Freddie deBoer. “NYU students—who are, by any rational measure, some of the most privileged people on planet earth—organized a petition and got him fired. I hope you never get treated by one of the doctors who emerges from this mess.”
As deBoer adds, “NYU students: the world is a hard, tragic place, and its pains will catch up to you sooner or later. Experience its inevitable hardships so that you grow resilient against them, or don’t, and suffer more later. It’s up to you.”