NYU Chemistry Professor Fired
Now Everybody Wants to Scapegoat His Students
If you’re 84 years old and 23% of your students sign a petition saying you should be fired, you should probably just leave. Yes?
Not so Maitland Jones Jr. This professor has been teaching at NYU for decades, a fact mentioned in the New York Times.
The reality that Covid has perhaps changed what students need from professors and what students have a right to expect seems to have escaped both the NYT and Professor Jones Jr. So, for that matter, has the idea that between Jones’ writing of the first edition of the seminal textbook Organic Chemistry, currently in its fifth edition, and today, the accepted pedagogy of teaching itself at the college level might have changed.
Articles like the Times’ position Gen Z students as interlopers in the University system. They are implied to be oversensitive worrywarts, desperate to succeed at all costs yet unwilling to do the work. The fact that courses like Organic Chemistry have caused serious hardship and emotional struggle for years, even pushing some students into emotional breakdown or suicidality, has escaped the writer of this article. I myself have watched students wrestle with this material. It is not a pretty picture in the best of circumstances.
