This article is pretty trash to be honest. Yes, organic chem is hard, yes it's a pre-requisite for med school, yes the pandemic has impacted teaching. Frankly, a huge amount of the writing about this boils down to old people writing "Kids these days are too darn lazy". Ok. Sure. The students didn't petition to get him fired, they didn't ask for that. The fact that NYUs response was to fire him, and his reponse was to go to the New York Times to bitch about his students being lazy, show that the problem here isn't the students and the students don't deserve to have their careers jeopardised by a clearly incompetent university.