This story has set off a great deal of comment in the chemistry community, as well it should. In short, NYU has fired a longtime chemistry professor (Maitland Jones) because of student complaints that his organic chemistry course was too demanding, that grades and test scores were too low, and that the class was being taught in a such a way that these faults could apparently not be remedied. Jones himself is 84, and retired from Princeton fifteen years ago; he’s been teaching at NYU on a yearly contract basis. It appears from the news story that some of his students did not realize this situation and were surprised when their complaints to the university led to him being let go (which was not a request that they had made).
But Jones himself seems to have been ready to retire – he told NYU that he had been noticing a decline in the quality and work ethic of the students over the years, and that the pandemic really made this more clear (and more quickly) than ever. For its part, an NYU spokesperson said that the university had already been evaluating what they called “stumble courses”, which is what I would say have traditionally been called “weed-out” courses, and organic chemistry has a well-deserved reputation in that line. The article also reports suspicions on Jones’ part (and others) that the university is catering here to its students and to their parents who are footing a lot of the bills.
There are several parts to the discussion. The first is of course the firing of Prof. Jones. As is usual in these situations, going to former students is not as useful as you might expect at first, because with any professor anywhere you can find reactions ranging from “I owe this person my career and my life” to “This course ruined me forever”. If you could somehow quantify the ratio of those two bimodal responses it might tell you something, but there’s no way to do that – you end up like you do evaluating Amazon reviews, wondering if there really are more negative reviews of Gizmo A versus Gizmo B and if they somehow sound more heartfelt. Students come in all varieties, and there are a lot of subjects that can be taught in different ways. And some of those ways will resonate with some students while bouncing off others with a loud clanking noise, so reviews are always going to vary. Here, though, are some really good thoughts on these issue and others from a practicing organic chemistry professor (with experience of Jones’ own textbook from both sides).
You’d think that basic questions of fairness wouldn’t vary so much, but there’s a lot of room in there, too. Some students may feel that the personal attention they got from the professor made all the difference and will give a glowing review for that reason, while others might watch this and accuse the same professor of playing favorites, since obviously not everyone in a typically-sized class could expect that sort of experience. On the other end of the spectrum, there are always students with a tendency to attribute low grades to some fault of the professor rather than any fault of their own – but that said, it’s also beyond doubt that really poor teaching can very easily lead to poor grades, too. I myself have had one or two professors over the years for whom the key to success (at least for me) was to make sure not to pay attention to their lectures, which would only annoy me and leave me confused and vaguely sad. No, the textbook and the handouts and readings were the only way to go for those folks. It’s hard to give someone like that a good review (and believe me, I didn’t).
If Prof. Jones is behind the times in his teaching methods, has become too inflexible over the years, or is simply losing a few steps at the age of 84, then those are real factors to consider. But if NYU is firing him with an eye to placating the students (and their check-writing parents), that’s a bad idea. And I wouldn’t put it past them, to be honest – I’m still thinking about the damning Wall Street Journal article about the way the university seems to be skimping on undergraduate scholarship awards while using many of its graduate programs as student-loan-driven cash machines. God knows that there are plenty of other schools that do these things as well, but NYU may well be the richest and most well-known on the list, and it should be a source of shame to them. (Note: trying to get large well-funded institutions to feel shame may not be a good use of your time; choose your targets well). Note that these two possibilities (Jones and NYU) do not completely rule each other out, either.
Let’s thrown in the pandemic at this point. It has been a terrible disruption in education at all levels, and it hits a course like Organic Chemistry particularly hard. That’s partly because of the lab work (or lack of it under remote conditions), but also because of the difficulty of mastering the material solo. My daughter didn’t have the pleasure of taking the course herself, but one thing that stood out to her while listening to her fellow students who did was that they said that studying in groups was one of the main ways they got through it. And I can certainly see that, and see how trying to recreate that experience over texts and Zoom screens would not measure up. The meeting of Prof. Jones’ course with a cohort of students whose coursework had been disrupted in this way on and off for the last two years had little chance of going well to start with.
Organic chemistry is a hard course; there’s no getting around that, and that’s yet another part to all this. There’s a lot of material to cover and it’s material that most of the students will have never seen before. Indeed, there’s a case to be made that for some (many?) of them this might be one of the first really dense and coherent bodies of knowledge that they’ve had to master from a standing start. There are plenty of testimonies to the benefits of this, but there are plenty of testimonies in the reverse direction, too, of the “I thought I was going to major in Y/become an X until I ran into this stuff”). In case you’re wondering, I did well in the course (way back when, under Tom Goodwin at Hendrix), but neither did I find it all that easy. What helped was that I found it interesting, which is not a universal reaction by any means – interesting enough, in my case, that I made a career from it, and that fact probably severely skews a lot of my opinions on the subject. But most people who take Organic are not going to become chemists of any type – they are taking it because of degree requirements, and many of them are taking it because they need it for medical school.
That’s another argument right there: should this still be the case? You can find some pretty hard-to-ignore opinions on both sides of that issue. One that might surprise you is Jeffrey Flier, former dean of Harvard Medical School, who is not shy about stating his opinions that academic rigor has been undergoing a regrettable long-term decline in this country. But at the same time he thinks that Organic shouldn’t be the weed-out course that it is, and that it’s time to change all that. You can, he says, definitely become a good doctor without a good grade in Organic. Part of that is because the actual subject matter doesn’t come up very much in medical training – medicinal chemisty would have a better shot, but sophomore organic doesn’t delve into those issues much, if at all. And a bigger part of it is that perhaps the course isn’t as good an intellectual whetstone as we like to think.
In the end, we have a number of things that can all be true at the same time. Perhaps it is time for Maitland Jones to retire, perhaps this is a particularly ill-fitting (and ill-prepared?) cohort of students running into a hard course, perhaps NYU is too quick to try to make people happy about their grades and their college experience, and perhaps Organic Chemistry is not even the place to make your rigorous weed-out academic stand in the first place. There are not-easily-dismissed arguments to be made for all of these positions, and there are some strong ones to be made on all the opposing sides, too. I don’t have a big righteous wrap-up, unfortunately. There are some real educational issues at the bottom of all this that stand to get lost in the shouting.
