New York University professor fired after students say his class was too hard | Hacker News Reader

New York University professor fired after students say his class was too hard

theguardian.com

87 pointsthrowaway743105 comments

I had a professor from hell while doing my BS in CS. I was generally a straight A student. I really tried to do my best and cared about my grades. It was the first and last time when I went and talked about a professor to a department head.

Said professor came to class often unprepared. Deviated from the syllabus. He talked to some students that he wants to build games and not teach. This was an AI class. Throughout the course he kept telling us to keep our quizzes as they will be helpful for the midterm and final. He hasn't graded or returned any quizzes by midterm, and returned quizzes like a class before the final.

His teaching style was pathetic. All our curses were in Java, on first day he told us to install Visual Studio and write this program just to warm up. Then he gave us a problem to solve. 90% of class was installing the IDE and figuring out how to write programs in C# and VS during the duration said class. Literally one guy was doing alright who was a professional game dev using c#.

He would read straight from a book, sometimes using visual aids. Then would give a problem to apply said algorithm to and say "GO, if you have problems ask for help". 30 people were asking for help and he could barely help one by end of class.

Handful of times we got an email that he won't make it to class. One time 15 minutes into the class.

That game dev scored below passing grade on midterm and final. Same as rest of the class. The curve was so high my total 60% got me to an A. Still majority of the class failed.

I wish never to have a professor like him again and from what I heard he moved to a private sector.

Most of my CS faculty in undergrad were great, but there were a couple like the guy you describe. And I wonder why in the world they took jobs as lecturers. If you don't have a passion for teaching, why take a job that pays substantially less than what you get in industry? CS isn't like, say, English where there aren't enough nonacademic jobs to go around.

In contrast, most of my faculty in medical school were terrible teachers. But there it made sense why. They were either there because they wanted to work at a large quartenary referral hospital or because they wanted to teach residents (not students).

You take a job that pays substantially less than what you can get in the industry because it either pays more than other industry-adjacent jobs you can get. Or, you take a job that pays substantially less because you are required to teach as part of your post-baccalaureate degree requirements.

Some people teach because they want to. They have a strong desire to instruct and mentor people. To help others get better. Some people teach because they have to.

Primary education has different requirements than secondary (at least in the US). Typically, in primary education, you need a degree in education specifically and to be certified to teach in the state you wish to teach. To teach in secondary education, you need whatever requirements are set forth by the institution. Typically, you'll need a post-baccalaureate degree or be working towards one.

But as far as being "good" at the thing you're teaching. That's not necessarily required.

> And I wonder why in the world they took jobs as lecturers. If you don't have a passion for teaching, why take a job that pays substantially less than what you get in industry?

I don't know about this specific situation, but many professors enjoy and are good at research and see teaching as necessary overhead in their jobs. Professors tend to have much more freedom than people doing research in industry and for some people that's worth it.

Yes, that is the standard bargain for tenure-track professors at U.S. research universities. You pay a little bit of teaching time (0-2 courses a semester) and get an abundance of research time. Tenure decisions are mostly based on research success. Teaching plays almost no role. Essentially, you're on a six-year clock to get X number of top journal publications. That provides a massive incentive for professors to focus almost exclusively on research over teaching.

PhD students face similar incentives. While they might have to teach a course in order to earn their stipend, their job market success is based almost entirely on their dissertation. Every hour teaching is an hour not writing.

Adjunct professors ("lecturers") are different. Just speculating but... some professional flaws might only be tolerated in a university environment. You can go years as a lecturer without returning class quizzes. You can't go a month as a SWE without returning your boss's emails.

Caveat: American economist with experience working for governments and universities. Other countries may be different.

For an assistant prof, sure, this makes sense. But the people I had mind were lecturers - non-tenure track, non-core faculty who didn't do research and had almost no room for upward mobility.

> why take a job that pays substantially less than what you get in industry?

This is really only the case in the last 15 years or so. The vast majority of programmers weren't making into the 6 figures. The pay might have been marginally worse at a univ, but the benefits, QOL were probably better.

For lecturers? BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Sniff. Sniff. Oh, I haven't laughed that much in a while. Sorry. I couldn't help myself. But, seriously, now ...

Please do be careful to separate "tenured professors" who earn a salary and do research from "lecturers" who get paid by the course and do not do research.

"Tenured professors" get paid ... oookay ... sorta. "Lecturers" get paid absolute garbage.

I know that Stanford, for example, paid $4000 per course in the CS department not that long ago. Yes, "nominally" that class was only 6 hours per week lecturing so it looks like that's $55/hr. In reality, if you want to do a good job teaching that class, it's a 40 hour per week commitment for 12 weeks--which means you earn below both minimum wage and McDonald's.

Alternatively, you can give that same course to professionals and get paid $4K per person for a one week course.

Being a good lecturer is more akin to social work than a job.

I'm a full-time CS "Instructor" at a state university and get paid decently with full benefits. 9-month contacts. Not tenure-track.

It doesn't pay nearly as well as industry, but I love teaching and I'm tired of industry at this point in my career.

As an adjunct, though, pay was below McDonald's, yes.

Had a Calc II course that was going well until the instructor left midway through for maternity leave. The replacement instructor was a young, attractive and buttoned-up Indian national who's English was borderline unintelligible. She took great personal offense when asked to repeat what she just said. I got A's in first year 5 hour Calc I, but I had to eat the C for first semester 3 hour Calc II.

> All our curses were in Java

Freudian slip?

Hah good catch and I definitely prefer C# over Java these days.

I had a professor from hell too and while I got good in his class it was a really bad and unnecessary experience. He was the kind of person that you'd need to ask a clarifying question and he wouldn't want to listen, he'd send you back to reread syllabus and other course documentation without wanting to listen to the full question. Whenever people were stressed out and confused he'd slightly smirk, the only time he'd show any expression on his face.

This professor was tough, wasn't teaching too well at all and often would route you to the materials without giving any further explanation. This was undergrad and as an experience it was really unnecessary in my opinion other than to show you that in life you'd run into arseholes and you'll have to deal with it.

I don't know the professor in this case but my understanding was that students didn't want him fired, they just wanted to clarify exam questions and/or the exam questions style, clarify materials for exams and all which seems quite reasoning to me. I read some vulgar spins in newspapers that students don't want to do their work, they're lazy and entitled and so on. That is most likely oversimplification

>I read some vulgar spins in newspapers that students don't want to do their work, they're lazy and entitled and so on. That is most likely oversimplification

Does nobody remember their schooling? Those students exist and are exactly what the wash out classes are for. The graduating class of my major was 1/6th the size of the freshman intro courses.

My wash-out classes weren't hard because the instructor/professor wasn't teaching the material. They were hard because the material was challenging. The prof and TAs were always there to help, not hinder ...

The headline generates that "students are lazy and entitled" response. It's similar to the headline "some lady sued McDonald's because her coffee was too hot."

We really should stop and think: "There are two sides to this story. Let's hear them out."

There are really three. There's the professor's side, the students' side, and the administration's side.

> There are really three. There's the professor's side, the students' side, and the administration's side.

Actually four: 1) professor's side, 2) the students' side, 3) the administration's side, 4) and society-as-a-whole's side.

And then there's HN's side, which is all about enumerating the sides.

HN side enumeration law: there are more sides to a story than you think, even after accounting for the HN side enumeration law.

From the earlier Reason article[0]:

"In one of his organic chemistry classes in the spring 2022 there were, among other troubling indicators, a very high rate of student withdrawals, a student petition signed by 82 students, course evaluations scores that were by far the worst not only among members of the Chemistry Department but among all the University's undergraduate science courses, and multiple student complaints about his dismissiveness, unresponsiveness, condescension, and opacity about grading."

[0] https://reason.com/2022/10/03/maitland-jones-jr-organic-chem...

It's hard to tell the real story from the various articles. Organic chemistry does tend to be a difficult class for various reasons--and not just because of weeding out pre-meds. And it's easy to see that layered with a semi-retired professor who is very set in his ways who, just because he has been a well-respected researcher doesn't mean he's the best person to teach a large lecture course in a difficult subject.

It weeded me out of pre-med and I never even spoke to the professor. It was like a 500 student class, there was no time. I didn't think it was taught very well. But I also thought it was taught in a normal fashion for the class/topic. It just required much more self-driven appetite for the material and self-study than I had ever experienced and more than I cared to give at the time. I suspect that's the case here as well and the "kids these days" felt the need to protest it instead of roll up their sleeves and do the work, or accept that they don't really have what is required to make it in med school level of rigor and commitment.

I'm not sure if that quote really captures the issue. I read NYT article about this a few days ago (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/us/nyu-organic-chemistry-...), and its seems one major aspect is a culture clash between expectations of "gen Z" students and expectations of students/professors in prior generations. The gist I got is that the "gen z" students expect the "system" to adapt to address their struggles, and when they fail they tend to blame that "system" or other factors outside their control. Focusing on the student evaluation results presumes the students' attitude is the correct one, when it may very well be unreasonable.

Ummm, yeah sounds about right!

Most of the time, systems fail, not people. People are extremely responsive and committed to their environments. Bad environments yield bad outcomes. If gen z has stopped blaming themselves for things outside their control, then they may be the wisest generation.

> systems fail, not people

Perhaps the system failed this person by letting too many students attend his class who lacked the requisite intellectual ability or work ethic.

Or the system failed by hiring him in the first place for a job he was unsuited for? Yes, I agree this was a systems issue that paired the wrong students with the wrong teacher. Maybe he should have been teaching an upper level course where the students could benefit from extra rigor or maybe he should have been release from teaching responsibility as a talented researcher.

> “They weren’t coming to class, that’s for sure, because I can count the house,” Dr. Jones said in an interview. “They weren’t watching the videos, and they weren’t able to answer the questions.”

> “I think this petition was written more out of unhappiness with exam scores than an actual feeling of being treated unfairly,” wrote Mr. Benslimane, now a Ph.D. student at Harvard. “I have noticed that many of the students who consistently complained about the class did not use the resources we afforded to them.”

sounds like the students had things within their control they could have done, like attend classes or watch lectures.

You’re assuming those videos and classes were worth watching.

Like the students, I haven't attended the classes or watched the videos so I would have no reason to think that they aren't worth watching. I'd guess it'd probably be worth a shot if you were struggling with the material and wanted a good grade though.

I believe every single shit teacher I’ve ever met used that excuse.

> I believe every single shit teacher I’ve ever met used that excuse.

What does that add to the discussion? I had a shit teacher once, so every time a student accuses a teacher of being shit, they're correct? There also exist students who make up dishonest excuses for their poor performance, too. We're talking about a specific situation, not vague generalities. At best we can consider the questions raised, because we aren't going to be able to successfully litigate which side is right and which is wrong.

It provides a counterpoint to the teacher's claims that you're repeated above. Think about it - why would this particular group of students, as opposed to other groups, with other teachers, decide not to learn?

Also, it's not "once". One the best things I've learned early in school was learning to recognise bad teachers and how to deal with them. There are _plenty_ of them everywhere.

> Think about it - why would this particular group of students, as opposed to other groups, with other teachers, decide not to learn?

That's where your logic breaks down. You're falling into the streetlight fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect). These people are in the news, but the news doesn't report everything. You can't infer this isn't happening elsewhere from this kind of media coverage.

> If gen z has stopped blaming themselves for things outside their control

The prevailing attitude I see in America these days is that people do not have agency. Their position in life is due to a combination of luck, privilege, oppression, somebody else, and government programs.

The system being an incompetent teacher... yes he should adapt, there are people who can teach organic chemistry better.

Why are the "Gen Z" students clashing with this one specific professor, if it's a generational thing?

Most professors have adapted and give students what they want?

We're to think every other professor has lowered standards so far that the only one refusing to do so is routinely handing out tests that garner 30% class averages?

It doesn't have to go as far as literally everybody else. It just has to be common enough that it's frustrating for the students when a professor does not behave this way.

> We're to think every other professor has lowered standards so far that the only one refusing to do so is routinely handing out tests that garner 30% class averages?

The only one who got into the news.

So most of the experts in the field think that a change in teaching methods is the optimal strategy? Maybe there's a good reason for that.

> Why are the "Gen Z" students clashing with this one specific professor, if it's a generational thing?

1. A lot of professors may take the easy way out, and lower their standards as demanded by their students. Especially those in contract positions like this.

2. This professor seems to actually be very highly esteemed (he literally wrote the widely-used textbook), and is only in this adjunct role because he's retired. Therefore he has a lot more power to get his side of the story out and the personal stakes are a lot lower for him.

If the system's default is to expect the combination of an intelligent student, three hours of instruction, and ~12 hours of hard work a week to produce a C grade or lower in a three-credit course, then the system's broken. Probably the instruction part of it, possibly the grading part.

If the material is difficult, it's the professor's job to teach it in a way that can be understood. If that can't be done in the credit-hours allotted to the class, the class should be worth more credit hours.

There's also a difference in co-ordination capacity and social dynamics more generally. In this case, there'll be some channel or chat group where the petition and complaints were arranged. It's pretty safe to say not only that the professor won't be on that channel but that students who aren't on it or aren't allowed to be on it will suffer some fairly significant social penalties.

> There's also a difference in co-ordination capacity and social dynamics more generally. In this case, there'll be some channel or chat group where the petition and complaints were arranged.

And cheating too (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/us/nyu-organic-chemistry-...):

> Many students were having other problems. Kent Kirshenbaum, another chemistry professor at N.Y.U., said he discovered cheating during online tests.

> When he pushed students’ grades down, noting the egregious misconduct, he said they protested that “they were not given grades that would allow them to get into medical school.”

> By spring 2022, the university was returning with fewer Covid restrictions, but the anxiety continued and students seemed disengaged.

There was a really interesting article I read a several months back about a professor who actually got invalided to his class's group chat. The students forgot he was a member, and he watched a lot of them cheat through half the semester. Then he dropped the hammer once he'd gotten it all documented. I think there was a tech-angle to it, and a lot of it was about how she did the data analysis on the chat history.

Edit: here's the article I was referring to: https://web.archive.org/web/20220529004005/https://crumplab.... (the original was taken down due to the attention it got, thank you Internet Archive!).

Dude's 84 years old. Far, far more likely he is (now) just a shitty teacher. Teaching is really hard and really demanding, and that's before you're a guy in your 8th decade facing a 60-year culture gap with your students. Folks need to know when to retire, sounds like this guy missed the memo.

> Dude's 84 years old. Far, far more likely he is (now) just a shitty teacher. Teaching is really hard and really demanding, and that's before you're a guy in your 8th decade facing a 60-year culture gap with your students. Folks need to know when to retire, sounds like this guy missed the memo.

He's old, therefore he must be doing a shitty job? Seriously? You're being ridiculously ageist.

Nah. He's 84 years old and got fired for being a shitty teacher. It's more likely that he's a shitty teacher than an entire generation of people are suddenly fundamentally different from all humans before them, as you claimed.

> Nah. He's 84 years old and got fired for being a shitty teacher. It's more likely that he's a shitty teacher than an entire generation of people are suddenly fundamentally different from all humans before them, as you claimed.

Come on. Having different expectations is not being "fundamentally different from all humans before them." It's actually pretty normal, as far as "generations" go.

And if there's anything recent history should have taught you, is that "getting fired" for reason X, doesn't necessarily mean that reason X is actually true. It's not uncommon for a fired person to have been on the receiving end of unfair evaluation criteria, a bad manager, various kinds of prejudice, etc.

Two things:

1) Humans decline mentally & physically as they age. Sucks, but it's true. This guy in his 30s was maybe a great teacher. That was in the 1970s. It's 2022. While I can't be certain, it's very likely he's not running on all cylinders. As mentioned, teaching is a really hard and demanding job. Statistically, it's very likely that he's just not up to the task anymore. People get old. Sorry.

2) Looking at it from a distance, if a group of students think your teaching style sucks so much that they put together a petition to get you to change it, that's just fundamentally a failure of your teaching style. He might want different students, but tough, these are the ones he's got. If he can't hack it with them then by definition he is a shitty teacher.

Combine the two and you get a pretty clear picture. Guy's not up to the job and the school and students will be better without him.

> Humans decline mentally & physically as they age. Sucks, but it's true. This guy in his 30s was maybe a great teacher. That was in the 1970s. It's 2022.

Sorry dude. In some ways that's true, in other ways that's not. IIRC, certain kinds of "mental agility" decrease as one ages, but that can be compensated for by increased experience and knowledge. Your comment also reads like classic techie ageism.

How much has undergrad organic chemistry changed since the 70s? My guess: not much. If the guy still knows his stuff (and he almost certainly does, given he wrote a widely used textbook), and he could teach well in the past, he can almost certainly teach it effectively now. IMHO, that can be hard to grasp for tech people, because so much of our knowledge is obsoleted quickly by various kinds of churn. I'm getting zero indication that the issue was that he was befuddled or anything like that.

> Looking at it from a distance, if a group of students think your teaching style sucks so much that they put together a petition to get you to change it, that's just fundamentally a failure of your teaching style. He might want different students, but tough, these are the ones he's got. If he can't hack it with them then by definition he is a shitty teacher.

That's bad reasoning, on the order of "he must be guilty, otherwise they wouldn't have arrested him." By your logic, it would be his failure as a teacher if he failed to teach a class of literal illiterates Organic Chemistry.

did you read the comment you wrote above? The one where you said that because they’re young they must be in the wrong? You’re the same tablespoon who wrote this comment, right? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33112591

> did you read the comment you wrote above? The one where you said that because they’re young they must be in the wrong? You’re the same tablespoon who wrote this comment, right? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33112591

You need to work on your reading comprehension. I never said the students were wrong, I said we shouldn't presume they're correct and therefore take their opinion as the whole story.

It would be ageist to say any old guy must be past it, but not ageist to say its a relevant consideration. I knew a few professors who were outstanding figures at their peak, but who continued teaching into their 80s. It was obvious to everyone around them that they needed to retire years before they actually did.

> "gen z" students expect the "system" to adapt to address their struggles

I hope Gen Z soldiers don't have this attitude.

[Mortar round blows off leg of Gen Z platoon grunt.]

"OMG! Mortar rounds are SO UNFAIR!" Let's sign a change.org petition demanding mortar rounds only emit harmless pink smoke. If we end up with pink smoke in our foxhole we can demand more time to dig a deeper, better concealed foxhole.

They could also be the type of people that get chemical/bioweapons/newer weapons banned from international war, as other pink smoke mortar loving people have done in the past.

Noble thought but unlikely. With the end of WWII and the formation of the UN it was hoped that the development of newer and more terrifying weapons would stop but it was a false and unrealistic hope. I'm of the Woodstock generation and we thought the world was in for a much better age but tragically that never eventuated, wars never stopped and they're now escalating again in serious ways.

One hardly needs to study history to realize that it's mainly the study of wars, weaponry and people killing each other. It's taught us that civilization has always cycled between a state of fragile peace that's constantly within a hair's trigger from ending and actual war itself and descent into barbarism—and the longer the cycles of peace last the more sensitive the hair-trigger becomes.

Few would be happier than me to see this or the next generation succeeding as you suggest, but on the evidence I'd reckon the odds of success are extremely slim—so slim in fact that I'd put substantial money on it. As success would mean a complete turnaround in what's happened throughout all of human history—and as the unprovoked war in Ukraine has shown, we are not yet even on the starting block!

I'd also suggest that come any serious global conflict, treaties outlawing chemical and bioweapons etc. will be violated on a whim and the evidence is that it's already happened in comparatively small conflicts—not to mention Putin's sabre-rattling threat of not ruling out the nuclear option (and he's done so in what is still just a local conflict, albeit a serious one). What would be worse, the nuclear option or the other big two?

(As I write this my conviction is being further strengthened—I've just watched back-to-back television footage of the latest bombing of an apartment building in Ukraine where people were killed and the killing of dozens of innocent children in Thailand by of all people a parent!)

One of the reasons chemical weapons were banned was because they were ineffective, and had the unfortunate tendency to blow the wrong way over the lines.

Bioweapons are also just as likely to kill your own side.

I've heard secondhand from people who took his class while at Princeton, decades ago, that his courses even then were notoriously and anomalously hard in comparison to organic chemistry courses at other Ivy League universities, and in comparison to other courses within the department. They're alarmed that this has become a "culture war" issue.

If there is a culture clash, it is that the "gen Z" students finally organized and collected evidence to back their claims that his teaching was having negative effects beyond those originally intended by the institution, and were not afraid to take it to the institution. That's a good thing, in my book.

Yes you fully picked up the gist of that article and have adopted its stance as your own. The article had a POV to push and you ate it up.

> “they were not given grades that would allow them to get into medical school.”

Herein lies the culture clash.

NYU is a ferociously expensive school, and both the students and the parents expect to be catered to for that amount of money--plain and simple.

A concrete example -- by more than one account, he had a standard practice of publicly naming and shaming the student with the lowest score on each exam. That's got no legitimate pedagogical purpose. Ideally, there'd be a way short of firing to deal with it -- but he'd have to go along with that.

Yeah, it looks like this was a combination of students not doing to work/putting in the time, and a teacher who got too old and bitter to treat students with respect. It's also likely that previous generations were less thin skinned, but really nobody needs a sarcastic and condescending teacher shaming them in class over their grades and even previous generations would have done better without it.

one person's "thin skin" is another's "courage to stand up for themselves".

Going from public high school into a high pressure university can be quite a shock (it was to me). Before firing a prof, I'd have consulted the majority of his students who did not sign the petition.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33100836 22 hours ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33093467 1 day ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33083095 2 days ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33070843 3 days ago

Looking at this guy's Rate My Professor reviews, seems like people have been complaining about his teaching style for years.

This was one of the more neutral reviews, coming from 2013:

> Professor Jones is often incomprehensible during lecture. The only time he is truly audible is when he yells at students for something that sparked his temper, which can be anything. Tests on material often outside the level of difficulty presented in the homework and class. I did well because of the hours I put in, not because of him.

[0] https://www.ratemyprofessors.com/professor?tid=1052652

When you have a school that charges astronomical prices, it is beholden to its customers: parents and students. Typically, the parents that pay these prices expect their children that want to do pre-med and become doctors to not be "weeded out" by the courses. So NYU, as a a profit-making business, listens to economic logic above all else. It's a shame. Merit must take precedence above all else. In fact, merit should be the only criterion.

That can cut both ways, though. Some professors simply aren't good at teaching.

The simply is like the husband that "simply" does not know how to clean the kitchen. Those professors never attended a pedagogy course.

I'd very much be in favor of having more separation between teachers and those who assess students. Is this teacher intellectually hazing students? I don't know, maybe. Are these students whining that a traditionally hard class is hard? I don't know, maybe. If some 3rd party is doing the evaluation, it makes it easier to understand if the professor is being too hard or not.

Yes, and after that, if the scores are too low, then you know the problem is the teacher.

I have heard professors glorifying themselves saying "I'm a good professor, I give a lot of material, and expect the students to learn a lot... and at the end, only a few pass the exam, because they do not study enough". I suspect those sucked at pedagogy.

>Are these students whining that a traditionally hard class is hard?

probably no:

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.

I taught at an academy where evaluators were different from the teachers and were anonymous. The system worked very well. It was originally implemented to get away from students trying to bribe teachers for grades, but it also made evaluation more objective, and gave better feedback to both students and teachers.

Never heard of this system. Please can you post a link/source?

There was no prepackaged system to follow. It was a pretty large academy, with I think close to 100 teachers. Teachers were grouped by the sections they taught. One group of teachers would be assigned test creation and grading for the classes of another group, that is, same subject but different section.

Wow are you advocating to hire people for teaching and for evaluating separately? Sounds both interesting and a cultural war ground.

I was in an introduction to c course with a prof who had a midterm where something like 7 of the ~120 students of the exam passed. The other cohort from a different instructor was pretty standard bell curve. It was a royal mess. Each prof. wrote their own exams but the 7/120 teacher was brand new and wasn't afraid of throwing in odd-balls. At least in his defence, he wasn't being malicious or callous but just wasn't supported enough to pick the right level of challenge.

I had one professor I thought was unfairly difficult. I remember him lecturing a girl about how she was failing his class because she spends too much time talking on the telephone. Note - I never once saw her use her phone during class. The tests didn't seem to be related to what was covered, or what was in the exercises, or even the test questions at the back of the chapter.

I think he left a few semesters after my class. If he was fired, it would say it was justly so.

I struggle with this as an instructor. There was a study that showed that students of low-rated instructors had better 10-year outcomes.

Clearly that doesn't mean you should be a crap instructor, but there's something to be said for a measure of student unhappiness.

And it makes sense; students who had to work harder with minimal support built up better mental models along the way as they struggled through it.

At the same time, sometimes being there to say a magic word or make an non-obvious connection is also really beneficial even if the student didn't have to work hard for it.

Part of me also feels that CS (my subject) doesn't _need_ to be impossibly hard, that a good instructor tunes the material like a spinning instructor so that it's a challenging uphill climb when it should be, and easy when it should be.

A student still has to work, but not so impossibly hard that they're destroyed.

To get to the top of the mountain, the three options are hike straight up, take the switchbacks, or take the gondola.

Straight up weeds out folks for sure. Only the best ones make it.

The gondola, well, they learn nothing.

I'm a fan of the guided switchbacks. I can make it steep when I want, and chill when I want. And hopefully tune that in a way that gets more people jobs at the end of the day.

Difficult is important when it comes to learning. But there can be too much of a good thing.

If there’s on average “ high percentage of withdrawals and low grades” compared to the course taught by other instructors, yeah I think that’s fair.

We all had that one professor who everyone was afraid to take. School is still a business, a lot of those guys are better off in research or writing textbooks.

Was there any serious discussion between the prof and the university management about students’ feedback? One hopes the dismissal letter didn’t come out of the blue.

Isn't every 70s/80s/90s movie about a group of ragtag underdogs successful because of the "if they hate me they won't have time to hate each other" heel-by-design coach?

Sounds like this teacher was just applying the Hollywood model. He's probably sitting at home right now like, "Well shit, that didn't work."

Sometimes students are lazy, and sometimes the teachers are shit. I've been the former at times and certainly had a few of the latter.

In this case though from what I read the teach was bad at his job. Maybe didn't need to be fired, but some action was warranted.

I happened to read about this case while I was in the middle of Barbara Erinreich’s book “Fear of Falling”, which is all about the American professional middle class. Part of one chapter talks about how the professions organized to create credentialing systems that kept anyone who couldn’t afford the expensive and time consuming education out. Organic Chemistry is specifically mentioned for its role in weeding out potential medical students who might very well turn out to be good doctors, while simultaneously being irrelevant to the day-to-day practice of medicine. All of this serves the purpose of making sure the supply of doctors is low, and that their wages are therefore kept high.

Since the 80s, American society has shifted towards a ruthless form of capitalism that leaves fewer and fewer occupations capable of providing their practitioners with a middle class lifestyle every year. To me, it’s no wonder that students have become ruthlessly mercenary in response. They’ll do what it takes to make a good living, and they won’t tolerate gatekeepers getting in their way without a fight. This is exactly the behavior we (as a society) have incentivized in them.

> Part of one chapter talks about how the professions organized to create credentialing systems that kept anyone who couldn’t afford the expensive and time consuming education out. Organic Chemistry is specifically mentioned for its role in weeding out potential medical students who might very well turn out to be good doctors, while simultaneously being irrelevant to the day-to-day practice of medicine.

Medical schools already have an easy way to affect the supply of doctors that's under their own direct control: their own admissions policies. Is the author hypothesizing that they are somehow controlling undergraduate chemistry classes in private and public institutions across the country, which seems very implausible?

> Is the author hypothesizing that they are somehow controlling undergraduate chemistry classes in private and public institutions across the country, which seems very implausible?

Isn't precisely what accreditation allows professional organisations to do?

It sounds plausible to me that the AMA could impose education requirements like organic chemistry as a requirement to joining their ranks. And indeed that keeping the supply of doctors limited would be in the interests of their members.

No, the author’s hypothesis is that the professional middle class carved out a space for itself between the working class and the rich, using their specialized knowledge as the differentiating factor, and that they use all kinds of gatekeeping mechanisms to make sure that anyone who wants to enter their professions has to be credentialed, which typically involves dedicating the first third of their lives to education. The purpose of this gatekeeping is to ensure that there is enough of a scarcity to ensure good wages for those who have the right credentials, and to make sure that self taught or informally taught amateurs can’t enter the field.

Within that context, Organic Chemistry is put forth as an example of one such gate that all aspiring doctors must clear, even though they promptly forget the material when the class is over. The admission policies you pointed out are another such gate.

The book was written in the 1980s, and in the later chapters the author explores how the events of 20th century have impacted the system described above. For example, the substantial cuts to government spending enacted during the Reagan administration, and worsening prospects for jobs like professors and social workers, caused students to switch the focus of their college education towards getting a degree that would enable them to enter a field that would allow them to make a lot of money, rather than one they may have been intrinsically interested in. The distillation of this effect is, in my opinion, what we’re seeing here with the NYU students.

> American society has shifted towards a ruthless form of capitalism that leaves fewer and fewer occupations capable of providing their practitioners with a middle class lifestyle

While technically true, this statement is misleading. It's true that the middle of income range has decreased. But most of the movement out of the middle has been upwards, only a fraction have been pushed down to a lower rung. Many more find themselves pushed up into the 4th quintile than down into the 2nd.

Today's students are consumers and they demand value for money, a safe environment and a good product.

These aims might sometimes have conflict with what education actually is, although in this case there seems to be alignment.

At Caltech organic chemistry had a reputation for being particularly difficult. Those that took it knew the situation, and accepted the challenge.

I see two extremes: one represented by this professor who IMHO cares too little about students --- still he deserves to keep his job. The other extreme is more dangerous and is about University professors actively accepting and facilitating immature behaviour by students. Where could a sweet spot be drawn along this gradient?

> The student petition protested that Jones’s class was too hard and that students lacked resources and help. It did not say the professor should be fired.

> “We urge you to realize that a class with such a high percentage of withdrawals and low grades has failed to make students’ learning and wellbeing a priority and reflects poorly on the chemistry department as well as the institution as a whole,” the petition read.

That doesn’t sound immature to me.

I doubt either of those extremes actually exist. News stories paint a sensational picture for clicks to try to get social media ablaze with "entitled gen z students want their grades handed to them" without actually digging into any details until a few thousand pixels below the fold.

It would seem, from reading the story, that this was a professor who did not actually do the leg work to be a professor. Namely, providing students with more than just written resources and giving exams. Why pay a prestigious do-nothing professor a salary when you can just offer an online course that has the same level of engagement?

It can simultaneously be true that:

- College students can be entitled and whiny

- Organic chemistry is especially difficult for a lot of people

- Semi-retired researcher may not be a great lecturer/teacher for a big hall full of freshmen

None of those things are especially newsworthy. They sound like Onion headlines on their own. But when one or more of them happen which could be framed in a way that incenses the public, it becomes a news story because that's how you make money in journalism in 2022.

I am a professor and have seen both extremes. I am worrying about how to keep high scholarly standards all the time --- also on teaching, and especially when supervising theses.

I'm glad. There really are problem teachers. I'm not informed enough to know if he/she was one of them, but the whole system needs to be more flexible and responsive to real feedback.

If you're not informed enough to know if this person was a problem teacher, why are you glad that he was fired?

I am glad that when enough students complain....something is done about it.

It's worth noting that this class was admitting with NYUs test optional admissions. (No SAT during COVID)

Is anyone able to pull the NYT article south of the wall by any chance?

1. Copy link address 2. load archive.is 3. search for snapshot -> paste

Here you go: https://archive.ph/uVvn1

It’s a common pattern in teaching - if your students find the subject too hard, it’s almost always because you’re shit at teaching. Previous generations were more inclined to tolerate this, younger people tend to have a more productive attitude - they understand that shitty sources of information can be easily replaced with better ones.

Good thing the students aren't in charge of hiring/firing the professors.

And if they are — enjoy your degree, I guess.

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