I am surprised such a basic question is on a college chem exam.
@Massmomm if the guy was Antisemitic, it wouldn’t have taken 30 years for it to appear, and if he had ever expressed any antisemitism in the past, people from his entire life would be bringing out examples.
Seriously, though, I cannot imagine what was going through his mind. In what universe is he living that he thought that this was appropriate?
Just a unique personal observation - When I visited Midd with my D19 last fall, we sat in his organic chemistry class. It was a group discussion class and we got to interact with him during the class. He seemed like a wonderful, enthusiastic teacher. The class was very diverse and he seemed to help all the students and made sure everyone got the concept of Grignard chemistry, the topic of the day. After the class, he spent about an hour talking to me and my daughter about opportunities at Middlebury. He is good friends with one of my current colleagues and they were post docs together at Utah. My colleague was shocked about this as much as I was.
@EganAg That was the impression I got from the responses at the college itself. Usually, when something like this comes out, you discover that there is a long history of similar incidents that were either ignored or weren’t egregious enough for a response. In this case it seems to have come out of absolutely nowhere. There is no history of inappropriate questions of any type, no history of antisemitism or provocative questions, nothing.
I’m wondering whether he had a TA working for him, who was given responsibility to write the questions, and he did not review the TAs questions. If he is the way you describe him, he may well take full responsibility for this. Alternatively, he may have downloaded some questions from a somewhere else without looking to closely at them. That would indeed explain his comment about “carelessness and hubris”.
Actually there was another inappropriate question: http://www.middlebury.edu/newsroom/campus-notes/node/617673
What is going on at Middlebury? Aside from their financial problems there is one controversy after another on that campus. The “Wall Street Journal” criticized the administration for the latest speaker controversy this week in an editorial. Maybe it is time for a new president?
A case of amazingly bad judgment.
You say that like there is an alternative to taking responsibility;he is (or was) the instructor of record, so he is ultimately responsible for exam construction, grading, etc whether he did the actual work or not.
Unless things have changed a lot at liberal arts colleges, there are few TAs, and for those that are TAs, its not likely they would have that level of responsibility. Theses are undergrads.
@skieurope Oh, he was responsible, all right, and that was what he needed to do. However, I have seen many cases in which a person in charge will make sure that everybody knows that the mess up was the fault of a subordinate, and then, very “valiantly”, say “but it was, ultimately, my responsibility, etc”.
Who was responsible?? There are no grad students at Middlebury- very unlikely any undergrad wrote test questions.
@jym626 Many colleges have undergraduate TAs, and Middlebury is one of them.
I repeat, @MWolf I would be very, VERY surprised (as someone who was a TA at an LAC) if any undergrad TA would be given that level of responsibility.
@jym626 On the other hand, as somebody who has written dozens of exams, I am just as surprised that a professor with 33 years of teaching experience would write a question like that on an exam.
I do not think this is how a hidden neo nazi would suddenly show their stripes after 30 years. (Real neo nazis don’t hide that well - they don’t feel they should have to).
I would think this is how a person with personal problems bursts out with the equivalent of f*** you. The onset of dementia or mental illness can sometimes look like this - or maybe an impending divorce.
He certainly shouldn’t be teaching until his need to provoke such upset in his students is gotten to the bottom of.
Edited to add that I think naming, specifically, hubris as a reason shows a very personal claim of responsibility. He could have left that one out without throwing a (hypothetical) TA under a bus. But he didn’t.
https://middleburycampus.com/44462/opinion/in-defense-of-jeff-byers/
Interesting student opinion.
And if there is no evidence of a TA, dementia or divorce, perhaps it’s better to dispense with the unsubstantiated hypotheses.
And @MWolf, if you’ve been writing exams at whatever level of academia you have for decades, hopefully you wouldn’t fob off the responsibility of writing exams on anyone below perhaps a grad student and especially if you even considered it, without review. Let’s drop this already.
Middlebury has not been without controversy lately https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/04/19/middlebury-faces-questions-about-speaker-whose-appearance-it-called-unusual-month?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=ced74c6288-DNU_2019_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-ced74c6288-228265881&mc_cid=ced74c6288&mc_eid=3f3aa17c1c
Here is link to the speaker that was cancelled ay Middlebury, if anyone else is curious.
https://newbostonpost.com/2019/04/22/middlebury-college-strikes-out-on-conservative-speaker-again
It’s certainly distasteful. However, I don’t think the man should lose his job or that his academic career should be sabotaged as a result of one act of bad judgement, unless there’s a history of racism and anti-semitism here. And I certainly don’t see that.
Remember, professors have extensive protections for academic freedom and speech. This was clearly a rather poorly-thought out attempt at historical relevancy–note the following quote from a Middlebury student.
“I am Jewish. Both my uncles are rabbis. I did not mind the question because, frankly, the Holocaust happened, and the gas was used. I took it at face value as an attempt at historical relevance — if he had never said what HCN was, I would not need to write this today and we would all have simply calculated some meaningless jumble of letters. Should he instead have had us calculate rat poison? The lethality of bathroom ammonium? Yes. Should he lose his teaching position? No.”
See post #24. There were, at least, two bad acts. That said, I’m not sure how much this should matter in the scheme of things. But if he loses his tenure, then he definitely brought this on himself.
Right. Without seeing the specific question, though, I really can’t say whether there was incontrovertible evidence of racism or anti-semitism here, though. I see poor judgement, and the professor certainly ought to apologize to his students and Middlebury at large. But I don’t think it’s fair for the man to lose his job over a poor, gratuitous attempt at historical relevancy in a chemistry exam.