The chemistry student’s defense of this professor may be an interesting perspective (the professor sounds so sincerely contrite that I do feel sorry for him) but it remains the clueless defense by a clueless kid of a clueless middle aged man. The kid may be excused. The middle aged man should have known better.
I am honestly, truly happy that a Jewish kid having grown up in the US in the 21st century feels so safe in his environment that being asked to calculate the amount of gas needed for the industrialised murder of Jews in a Nazi gas chambers does not give him pause and merely makes him think “historical relevance”. It means some things have been going right since World War II. Things to be proud of.
However, it SHOULD have given him pause. The only people for whom doing this calculation was ever historically relevant were the Nazi mass murderers. No kid should be asked to dispassionately replicate their thought processes.
More historical relevance: the people who actually made these calculations, dispassionately, were not the vicious Nazi monsters that come to mind first, the ones spitting about their visceral hatred of Jews. For every Joseph Goebbels whipping up the masses, for every Amon Goeth like figure running a concentration camp, there was a lowly chemical engineer who made these calculations, dispassionately, in order to murder the maximum amount of Jews. And it didn’t give them pause. It was this mindset, civil servants just doing their murderous duty, for which Hannah Ahrend coined the phrase: “the banality of evil.” Being asked to do this, even as a purely disconnected theoretical exercise, SHOULD give students pause, whichever their background. (Not to mention the professor formulating the question). It doesn’t make them snow flakes.
More historical relevance: the only people who have tried to replicate these calculations since have been historical revisionists, who have been trying to show, very dispassionately, that the holocaust couldn’t have happened the way it’s commonly accepted because war time Germany would have been unable to come up with enough cyanide/enough gas chamber capacity/whatever reason under the sun they could come up with. The implication being of course, that the holocaust must be a monstrous conspiracy designed to keep the hard working non Jews down and swindle them out of their hard earned money. A calculation intimately connected to an age old anti Semitic trope.
I’d expect a professor and the students at a premier liberal arts college to be able to make these connections, or, in the students case, to be open minded and historically woke enough to learn how to make them. I think that a professor who could not do this should not be teaching young people. I do not know enough about the disciplinary procedures at liberal arts colleges to say whether he should be reinstated after sensitivity training or something similar. But I would not frame it so much about whether particular students, Jewish or not, were offended, but about the capability of teaching critical thinking and ethical thinking throughout the curriculum, even in science classes.