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Comment by spamizbad | Hacker News Reader

Everyone wants to make this out to be some sort of ideological matter but this is exactly what happens when schools treat students like "customers". There's already WAAAY too much tolerance for grade-grubbing behavior all over academia, not to mention various grade inflation.

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I think this is an important angle to the story: if the students are "customers" spending tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars there's an incentive to try to make them happy.

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.

"Students of Jones’ fall 2020 class wrote an 11-page document outlining their grievances with his handling of the course — not the course content." from the NYU newspaper.

The document: https://nyunews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Organic-Chemi...

> because they're bad journalists

A NY Post journalist didn't write this, this is an op-ed by a former dean of UPenn's medical school.

If you look at some of the other comments on this thread, plus some reddit links, it seems like it's less about being a customer and more about wild inconsistency and unfairness:

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.

If you read the linked document of student complaints, https://nyunews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Organic-Chemi... many of the complaints, especially about the level of workload, are couched in ideological language. (Others, however, such as about the lack of feedback on assignments, are more presented in a non-ideological manner.)

I never understood grade grubbers. Even in elementary or middle school I would encounter kids who would fight the teacher over a couple points on a test because of some badly worded question or technicalities about why they’re right. Usually they were Asian or Indian. I learned from one of these kids one day that if they got any kind of bad grade their dad would beat the shit out of them.

C’mon, you’re making them all sound like child abusers. Very often all it comes with is a heaping helping of humiliation and multi-generational shame!

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