NYU’s firing of Professor Maitland Jones Jr. should frighten every American
nypost.com
nypost.com
> Dr. Gabadadze declined to be interviewed. But Mr. Beckman defended the decision, saying that Dr. Jones had been the target of multiple student complaints about his “dismissiveness, unresponsiveness, condescension and opacity about grading.”
> Dr. Jones’s course evaluations, he added, “were by far the worst, not only among members of the chemistry department, but among all the university’s undergraduate science courses.”
So of course the New York Post echoes the professor's side of the story as truth and blames lazy students, critical race theory, and diversity quotas.
Calling the New York Post a rag is an insult to rags.
To quote the brilliant Judge Smails: “The world needs ditch diggers too”
I also think wish someone would report on whether the claims of the students are true. This NY Post article brushes the claims aside because they're bad journalists. The only slightly better Guardian article includes this gem:
> An NYU spokesperson defended the firing, emphasizing high student withdrawals and bad course evaluations. The statement said the decision was also based on complaints about dismissiveness, unresponsiveness, condescension and lack of transparency about grading.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/06/nyu-professo...
I don't necessarily believe NYU, but I think a good journalist could investigate if this guy was actually just a bad teacher rather than parroting the complaints of second or third hand accounts. Are people dropping the class and failing at a higher than expected rate?
I also think there's a "labor rights" issue here. The students did not call for the professor to be fired, but NYU did because it was the easy way out. There was no union or tenure to protect him, he was a "contract" teacher.
On its face, any claim that "kids today are lazy" deserves serious scrutiny because old people have made that claim since antiquity. There are lots of serious and interesting issues at play here beyond that lazy trope.
The document: https://nyunews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Organic-Chemi...
A NY Post journalist didn't write this, this is an op-ed by a former dean of UPenn's medical school.
https://www.reddit.com/r/nyu/comments/xvsgk0/comment/ir32j0t...
I understand that perhaps that was more acceptable years ago, but as depicted here it comes across as callous, opaque, and unfair.
> We are a national association of medical professionals combating the attack on our healthcare system from woke activists.
As a rule, posting an article from NY Post is rarely a good idea if there's an alternative. This one was written by a person that has a direct interest in the case.
The NYTimes piece on the same subject[1] is _also_ on the opinion page. It's not a journalistic reporting of fact either, as some here seem to think.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/05/opinion/nyu-chemistry-fir...
Ok, I'm thinking about it. The first thing I think is: do admissions standards and test performance correlate to shitty appendectomies? And if so, why?
The class in question was organic chemistry. I'm not a doctor, but I don't think doctors use organic chemistry very much in regards to surgery. So if the admissions standards were lowered around the organic chemistry requirement, I don't think it would affect appendectomies. So I would not mind the change in that instance.
I also know that medical school is tough, and that many branches of medicine often deviate so far from the bulk of the knowledge they learn, that much of it may become irrelevant.
I also know that much of medicine is a guessing game. The outcomes are already often not very good, while the costs are very high. So I would not discount the possibility that changing the curriculum might lead to spending less time and money, and specializing more, and getting perhaps the same or even better outcomes.
It might even turn out that having shittier doctors isn't a bad thing if we just had more of them. If access to a doctor was cheaper, and we got more of their attention, perhaps we would not be given antibiotics and aspirin every time we go in for a checkup.
No, because then the folks who would have been the unshitty doctors will go get JDs to take advantage of the exponential increase in the number of malpractice cases.
Personally, I’d rather not go see Dr Lexus…
Yes, the author has certain interests (not neutral), but the overall message in the article stands firm: Stop lowering the bar to appease students who don't put in the work. I know for a fact this professor didn't have a 100% fail rate. So it is possible to pass his class, and those who can pass, will.
As an example in this case, when you look at other articles, plus the comments of the students themselves, it seems as though it's more than just "the class was too hard", it was that this teacher was largely uninterested in consistency and clear rules and requirements, and that he repeatedly refused to take feedback and make adjustments.
But that doesn't fit the "stop lowering the bar" narrative in the post, so the Post just avoids putting that in there.
The NY Post can lean whichever way it likes, but journalism does have some standards.
When I read articles like this I feel there must be more to the story if both sides are so dug in that they cannot find an amicable solution.
It should be noted too that this an opinion piece and the author seems quick to blame this on racial diversity quotas.
It's interesting to read the perspective of the students as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/nyu/comments/xvsgk0/the_professor_j...
And there is nothing wrong with that. Doctors are held to higher intellectual standards than plumbers, and paid accordingly too. The education level of the critic is entirely irrelevant to the question of whether doctors-in-training are more or less competent than before.
That said, the firing of this teacher seems to have mostly been triggered by the public outcry, which is becoming a worrying trend at Western institutions.
[1]: https://twitter.com/leslie_bern/status/1577017996123336704?t...
If that's the case, it's not difficult at all to restructure the course to make attendance mandatory, possibly with the use of softball questions answered with clickers during lecture (or just an attendance sheet). Videos can be shown during lectures and questions can be forced as part of mandatory homework.
I know that motivating students is perhaps harder these days than in previous decades but I have no sympathy for professors who refuse to get creative with their class/grading structure.
There are two seeming possibilities :
(1) The more probable one, where students are resorting to cancel culture when they feel the outcomes are not to their desires. This is a harmful trend. The road only leads to diluted standards. Professional education isn't feel-happy. It sets you up to face real challenges. I can't expect my doctor to post a TikTok video canceling me if I complained the treatment wasn't working well.
Edit: Professional education not being feel-happy is not about the stress but rigors compared to non-STEM streams.
Edit 2: (Personal anecdote) My undergrad computer vision was taught by a Chinese American professor, who did a rather fine job at setting test & gradings. No one failed his course though the grades were distributed A through C. He was similarly "voted out" from teaching that course by the feedback system simply because the assigned readings were long, & had expository papers which some kids did not want to put efforts into. A few including me, benefitted greatly by the course though - and feel sorry this happened anyway.
(2) There is a smaller chance the course is unimaginably hard compared to similar courses elsewhere. I don't know that very well. But I would give some benefit of doubt to the professor still, to know how to teach the fundamentals well. If the course is not geared towards med school entrances only, its not on the professor to keep the rigors. For example, a CS course for CS grad students should be expected to have considerable programming. It should not be crosslisted with Arts & Languages, who need computing credits. A different course better serves the purpose. Maybe the med school requisite course should have been different from the standard Organic Chemistry I.
Treating degree as a commodity will lead to grade inflation & lot of people finding their degrees of less value. They will have the qualifications but not the deep skills & insights to solve the practical problems. And that makes the vicious cycle complete where we are skeptical of the costly education. College is necessary - but not grad school. Not always. And those who chose the second, should be prepared to endure some rigors of the learning path.
This is not the only possibility. So much of the way we used to view education was top-down and memorization of facts. I don't think that a medical school education is that different from something like CS than the old guard would like you to believe. Can a Dr self-teach just like a CS engineer? Maybe not, but the ability to memorize organic chemistry facts is likely a much smaller part of being a doctor than ever before.
We know the university system is a mess, we know the medical system is a mess, and yet we say any attempt to change it must be a lowering of standards. Something has to give.
> Professional education isn't feel-happy. It sets you up to face real challenges
This is horrifically untrue. I think people are really bad at understanding how to "impose productive stress" or whatever you want to call it on people. Nothing I've faced in my professional environment, talking to angry customers, Hours long product wide outages, coordinating 30 teams, troubleshooting complex systems was as artificially stressful as education. Maybe because in the real world for the most part your peers and bosses are on your side.
> This is horrifically untrue [...]
Again, you're misunderstanding me. I am against people inducing work stress. But STEM does have higher rigors to clear than literature or fine arts. Grad school was a fast paced, and challenging experience. I enjoyed it. But I wouldn't say they were relaxing and feel good. Its not fair to pick that one sentence and quote me out of context. I am not talking of undergrad education which should be holistic & enable exposing students to a wide array of topics without risks of adverse outcomes by low grades. Grad school specialization is more geared to push you to the bleeding edge - and going there needs out of the ordinary efforts. If NYUs current course is not suited for med school but suitable for e.g chemical engineering or chemistry majors, NYU should be revisiting the course planning carefully
Fair enough, I apologize.
Anything about the spring 2022 class being experimental, with an increased workload? How about Dr. Jones receiving significantly worse evaluations than other instructors teaching the same class? For many years?
("Cancel culture" is pretty much a meaningless attack at this point.)
> Since the firing, I have been reading opinions here. I have collected a set of thoughts:
> There is a smaller chance the course is unimaginably hard compared to similar courses elsewhere. I don't know that very well.
Not specific to this instance, but students do voice their displeasure at course difficulty by semester-end feedback. And I have shared my own personal anecdote of ECE4584 at Virginia Tech. The challenge is finding how much of that complaint is legit vs. good old fashioned whining. Cancel culture used by students is not a meaningless attack on the discussion.
Edit: I skimmed the article quickly and it seems it is vocally defensive of the students & their feelings, having a lot of he-say-she-say type of quotes. I am yet to see reference which solidly explains the viewpoint of other faculty members at what went wrong in this instance. We are no better than seeing the same side of the story. Also, It would be nice to not resort to veiled sarcasm. I am not defending Mr. Jones but pointing out the dynamics of an uncalibrated system which is to detriment of every stakeholder.
Edit2: What I however learned in the follow up article on NYU magazine doesn't portray a rosy picture for any faculty member either:
> “What happened to Maitland Jones is the thing that has made me the most frightened I have ever been as an NYU professor,” said Jacob Remes, a clinical associate professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and an organizer with CFU-UAW Local 7902, the yet-unrecognized union of contracted faculty members at NYU. “What it tells me is, I can be fired. Not when my colleagues want to fire me, not even when my students want to fire me, but when a dean decides that I am more trouble than I am worth.”
That student newspaper editorial is the only source I've seen for important parts of the story, including the nature of the spring 2022 class, the increased class load, and Dr. Jones' previous evaluations.
I, too, have anecdotes; I spent many years around UTAustin's CS dept and had several friends in the dept undergrad office. I take as dim a view of faculty evaluations as anyone, but one of the things my friends always told me was that something is seriously wrong if any significant proportion of a class comes in to make official complaints. From the start, this story doesn't smell right.
In fact, I know of one instance where an adjunct faculty was asked not to come back for another semester: he was in the process of failing almost everyone in a required computer architecture course because they weren't the EE grad students he was familiar with.
(The growth of non-tenured and non-tenure-track faculty is a wildly concerning trend that has quite a few faculty, particularly adjuncts, upset. If you're familiar with Bret Devereaux (https://acoup.blog), he is currently looking for a new position because his current contract has not been extended.)
I don't buy it.
I used to work for a large computer science department at a large university, and I have friends who were part of the department's undergraduate office. It's quite rare to hear official complaints from any significant number of students about a professor's teaching, much less a petition signed by a quarter of the class.
Here are some other interesting features of the rest of the story:
Spring 2022 had "experimental" changes to the class, including required video lectures (that were apparently released on Friday nights) that were primary to interactive sessions, and a significant increase in course workload.
Jones' teaching evaluations had been lower than other instructors teaching the same course for many years.
Jones wasn't "fired"; he was working on year-by-year contracts and his contract was not renewed. A technicality, perhaps, but talk of "firing a professor" is simply excessive.
"Eighty-two of Jones’ 350 students signed a petition against him last spring, saying Jones had made his class too difficult and was at fault for their failing grades. ... An NYU spokesperson said multiple students had complained about Jones’ “dismissiveness, unresponsiveness, condescension and opacity about grading.” ... His course evaluation was also “by far the worst, not only among members of the chemistry department but among all the university’s undergraduate science courses.”" (https://nypost.com/2022/10/04/nyu-professor-allegedly-fired-...)
"Jones’ student-submitted course evaluations “were by far the worst, not only among members of the chemistry department, but among all the university’s undergraduate science courses.” ... dozens of comments across social media warning students about taking Jones’ class dating back more than a decade ... In the past five years, Jones’ co-professors teaching the same course typically had [student evaluation] scores around or above 4.0 on a 5.0 scale, while Jones averaged around 3.3. In his final semester, his evaluation score dropped to 2.4.
"They were part of an experimental semester, one that was forced to combine the in-person with the online, and Jones was not considerate of the need for change. The document explains that more work is not equivalent to more learning, and provides an estimate of how much time an average student spends on the class per week. Students said they spent 11 to 19 hours per week on the course — a course that traditionally takes up 10 to 15 hours per week.
"“He was teaching and writing the book like he expected you to be just as receptive to organic chemistry as he was and to take it in just as easily without breaking it down,” Paschal said. “He was not receptive to questions, and I didn’t want to open myself up for him to be rude to me.”
"In an email Jones sent to his students after he was fired, he apologized to those who did well in the course. “I send … an apology to those of you who cruised through this course with a relentless stream of 100s,” he wrote in the email. “I didn’t stretch you, and thus deprived you of the chance to improve beyond an already formidable baseline.”*" (https://nyunews.com/opinion/2022/10/05/maitland-jones-nytime...)