And you are maligning and blaming the professor for the students inability to put in the effort to succeed in a notoriously difficult course.
See how that can go both ways.
I have nothing to go off of other than The NY Times article which can be viewed as slanted (as are most articles in this day and age) so I’ve written that off.
The other document I have to go off of is the list of grievances from the students. I never said it was the actual petition. I still contend from the list of grievances, that while some are legitimate, a large portion of them are “whiny”
Jones retired from his employer Princeton 15 years ago, not from teaching. He then began employment with NYU, which he pursued since that time. He retains his emeritus appointment at Princeton, but has expressed that he now intends to retire from the teaching profession.
This seems to be a students vs. Dr. Jones debate. To me, that’s missing the real source of the problem, and that’s NYU’s admin. They are the ones that chose to go down this unnecessarily messy path, at least from what I can see.
As mentioned upthread, Dr. Jones was on an annual contract. I’ve obviously not seen the contract, and I/we don’t know its terms. However, an annual contract usually means that: it either terminates at the end of the year unless the parties agree otherwise, or it automatically renews (again, unless the parties agree otherwise).
NYU appears to have made a decision based perhaps in principal part on economics and academics. Ok, fine. But just let the contract naturally expire/not renew, give Dr. Jones sufficient notice about that (usually stipulated in the contract), and be done with it. Although it is not entirely clear from what I have read, NYU appears to have “terminated” the contract, which I take to mean earlier than a full year and perhaps “with cause.” If they did that, that made it even messier.
If NYU wanted to be really nice, they could have thrown in a farewell for Dr. Jones, given his distinguished career, generally and presumably at NYU specifically.
But NYU did none of those things, which is the proximate cause of this PR mess as best as I can tell.
Of course, this is all one gigantic speculation, but I suspect it’s near enough to the case.
Again, a key focus should be on NYU and how it handled this.
Above you wrote that he remains on the faculty at Princeton as a professor emeritus. But, as I indicated, he did retire “from teaching at Princeton” 15 years ago. Maybe if he’s still as great as many here believe Princeton will bring him back to teach Organic Chemistry?
@mynameiswhatever, I agree with much of what you wrote, but disagree to the extent that this professor should have received special treatment compared to the thousands of other more vulnerable contingent professors who have little or no job protections.
Plus, if this was an automatically renewing contract, then the only way for the university to get out of it was to opt out, pursuant to the terms of the contract, Given that there have been no suggestions that NYU’s refusal to bring him back was actionable, it seems likely that the university did this.
To your overall point, this professor is in some ways the exception that proves the rule. By the standards usually applied to contingent faculty he seems to have gotten much more leeway than most such faculty are ever given. IMO, universities have to be able to get rid of poor teachers (or if tenured at least limit the damage they do) but at the same time competent contingent faculty should have more job security than they currently do.
If this same thing happened to a young new continent faculty member few outside the department would care, even if by all accounts the teacher was excellent.
Lots of faculty at Princeton do not teach. Jones said he was done with teaching. I believe him.
Of course he was treated differently by NYU, and by the press, than 99% of contingent faculty. He had a storied reputation, and certainly did not need the NYU job for either money or professional development. Job terms do generally depend upon the leverage one brings to the table in negotiations over the contract. The vast majority of adjuncts have very little power; he had a lot. Public interest in the case is natural given his professional prominence.
That is why his treatment by NYU is so shocking. Universities do not often treat world-famous scholars this way, regardless of whether they hope to encourage someone’s retirement. NYU stating that he failed to teach effectively naturally causes many of his prior students and colleagues to defend him. It should have been handled very differently.
Announce his retirement, throw a great party, and move on, as a poster above stated. There was no reason to put in writing that his teaching was inadequate, or the subsequent comments from the spokesman regarding the student reviews . It is almost as if NYU wanted to send a very public message, to which his reaction is predictable.
Here’s an opinion piece on the topic that focuses on the nature of the course in general, and the high stakes for aspiring medical students.
Organic chemistry is difficult for lots of reasons: to do well and master the material requires a lot of study and practice time outside of class, students can’t fall behind or it will snowball, cramming for exams won’t work, there’s lots of memorization, but it also requires deep conceptual understanding of the material, it’s symbolic, there are lots of exceptions to the rules. It’s hard. In general, it has a high fail rate and withdrawal rate everywhere. It’s a gatekeeper class and it’s a dream crusher. There are a lot of people who hate the subject and the profs who taught/teach them, especially when they are in the middle of it all…
The factual basis is he had the lowest student ratings of any of the 137 instructors in any of the sciences at NYU. Full stop.
That reference includes professors in other organic chem sections who also had loads of hyper-whiny Gen Z slackers and professors of other difficult pre-med classes who surely had no choice but to fail the swath of kids whom they recognized would never make it in the sciences. Well, except for the deadbeat who was called out for having the lowest grade in the professor in question’s organic chem class a decade ago — yet is now a professor, herself, as linked above.
Perhaps, all knowledge of elementary statistics to the contrary, this single professor inexplicably attracted more “complaining” students who “couldn’t cut it” at NYU than any other professor in the sciences, and both his reviews and the administrators who fired him were allll mistaken?
Alternatively, we could accept Occam’s Razor as actually grounded in reality and admit that the simplest solution here is that a brilliant, accomplished man was no longer a good teacher for many in this generation of students. Of course, to get there, we’d have to look past the fact that these students expressed concerns about Covid, LBGTQ rights, and a host of other concerns which in no way bias some of us against their teaching complaints…
Finally, yes, anyone who was tenured at Princeton in the 1980s is still a professor emeritus/emerita at Princeton. That is evidence that he or she published two seminal books in his or her field in the 1980s — and it says literally nothing about the quality of their current instruction. So, I fail to see how the point is remotely relevant.
There’re lots of reasons for a professor’s poor rating. It doesn’t necessarily correlate with the quality of teaching. If you have a disproportionate number of students who aren’t ready for the class and you aren’t willing to give them high grades, you’re likely to get poor ratings from these students.
Seems like there are two diverging thoughts:
Not everyone will get an A in OChem, for whatever reason. The Professor had 30% with As, 40% with Bs, so 30% of the class had lower grades. And there were 20-something % who signed the petition. Probably most if not all were in the lower 30%, and I am betting are in the D-F range.
Let’s get a different Professor to teach the class.
Posters defending Professor Jones think no matter who the Professor is, the lower 30% will still be in the lower 30%. Posters defending the students who signed the petition think the new Professor gives them a chance to surpass their peers and supplant them.
I respect both sides but I just don’t see that a different Professor is going to magically help these students sufficiently enough to replace their peers. Because in order for this to happen, the 30% with the As and the 40% with the Bs would need to somehow falter and struggle in the class. These students understand what it takes to do well and have risen to the top, and will continue to do so. Unless the argument that I am missing is that everyone should get an A.
I don’t think anyone should assume that all the complaints came from the students doing the poorest (grade wise) in the class. That assumption doesn’t meet any of my priors about who complains when a grade is lower than they thought they should get.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a sizable minority of the students complaining weren’t actually in the 40% getting a B who were stressed that the B they were receiving was going to ding their chances for Med School. And it also wouldn’t surprise me to see students with a A in the class still complaining if the teaching methods and mode of delivery were substandard. You can master material and still think a teacher isn’t good.
Let us say for the moment for the sake of argument that his teaching indeed declined to the point of inadequacy. Jones’ contract was expiring at the end of the semester anyway. It was a simple matter not to renew it, particularly since Jones stated he wished to conclude soon anyway. No reason needs to be provided; indeed, when contract employees are not renewed, it is exceedingly rare for the employer to explain further.
NYU could attribute the non-renewal to administrative convenience. Or shifting priorities of the department. Or required by staff development needs. Or even better, say nothing, which is always the lawyers’ preference in employment cases. But no, NYU had an agenda, to show the students that it was responsive to their demands, and so came out with guns blazing by the school spokesman and in the letter to him accusing Jones of incompetence. That did not serve NYU or Prof. Jones well, but it certainly made the point that NYU acts on student complaints.
As I said a zillion posts ago, non-renewal might make sense, but this action by NYU was crazy
Was that in the NYT article or somewhere else? If Doctor Jones said this, that’s the ballgame for NYU itself being the reason this viralized into a PR disaster for the school, IMO.
If the Prof was fine with the contract expiring, it’s just amazing to me that NYU would terminate it, especially a yearly contract. It may very well be for the reason you state.
I wonder how the kids in other sections would fare if given the test from his section. And vice versa. Is the test inherently harder? Does it reflect differences in old standards of testing vs newer standards of testing. I wonder if there is a relation between the age of the professor and the difficulty of the test. Does it reflect differences of standards between what he is used to at Princeton vs NYU?
Incidentally at Princeton, for organic chemistry, if you get a 90 on any big exam during the semester, you are exempt from all other exams, and guaranteed an A.
This is to abstract from the quality of teaching issue that I don’t have the facts to think about.
Over the last several years, NYU Medical school has rapidly been rising in the rankings. Because they went tuition-free, they now attract very high quality candidates that in the past may have chosen the likes of Harvard Medical School.
I wonder how NYU Medical school is viewing the actions of this NYU undergrad department. Would it make it harder for NYU undergrads to get admitted to their own medical school?
@neela1 Interesting point. It wouldn’t surprise me kids these days are far better prepared than older generations. They face higher competition from all directions. They simply have to do better to survive. If they are not doing well according to a metric, it could be the metric they are measured against. The metric could be outdated.
Well said! I can see both sides of the argument. I hated Chemistry, so I would’ve struggled even if the teacher was great! A terrible teacher wouldn’t have helped either. I think there is a lot going on in the background here, that we don’t know about…
