The quote from the student newspaper, which apparently does have access to the petition, says it contained “student concerns about limiting access to online lectures, concealing grade averages and talking down to students”. So by what has so far been revealed, the students appear in very poor light to me.
Remarkably, it appears neither the student signatories nor NYU provided a copy of the petition to Prof. Jones. Another strike in my book.
Agreed.
We all know that medical school admissions is a game that has gotten progressively harder over the years. I’ve been told the current goal of medical student applicants necessary to have a decent chance of being accepted by an allopathic medical school is to have a 3.7 GPA in both science and non-science courses and a MCAT score > 80th percentile. With standards that high, a couple of bad grades “Bs” during your 1st 3 years of college could ruin your chances of becoming a doctor.
Your scholastic performance in any of these pre-requisite courses (biology, organic chemistry, chemistry, physics, calculus) has little correlation on whether you will become a good or bad physician. Other countries in the world view medical education as more of an apprenticeship akin to learning a craft, and the US pre-requisite classes aren’t even part of the curriculum.
A recent study found that the MCAT was no better at predicting future performance either.
https://academic.oup.com/milmed/article/180/suppl_4/4/4210177
I’m not sure who is more to blame for this mess: the students, the professor, the university, or the national education system.
To the contrary, the article clarified quite a few things in NYU’s favor. Here are a few:
Jones was not fired. He worked pursuant to a series of annual contracts. NYU chose not to reappoint him, and appears to be well within its rights in so doing.
Jones was not a tenured or full-time professor, so he did not have the job security that full time and tenured professors have. For example, Jones was not eligible to file a grievance when he was not reappointed.
NYU indicated to Jones that it may have been amenable to bringing him back in a “reduced role”, Jones refused to even discuss it. As explained in the article (my emphasis):
(The Admin) said that he advocated for Jones to return for one more year in a reduced role because he felt it would be difficult to hire a new professor on short notice. The deans were open to the idea.
Jones, however, was not satisfied with the way that the administration had handled the situation, and did not wish to continue the conversation. The deans, having heard that Jones did not want to speak, decided to stop considering the alternate teaching position, and instead made a final decision to terminate his contract.
So he wasn’t blindsided at the last minute, and he wasn’t fired. He may have been able to continue to teach a different course if he hadn’t refused to even to discuss the possibility.
In the rest of the article, Jones seems to think, without basis, that he was entitled to much more consideration than his contract provided him. He even dramatically (and ridiculously, IMO) compares himself to a person who has been hung without due process! Yet he is is the one who wouldn’t even consider a reduced role.
Interesting that a professor so unwilling to consider to the needs of his students would demand that he be given special treatment in terms of his employment status.
One thing that’s unclear to me is the timing of the Spring 2022 petition. Given the op-ed was published on May 13 (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/13/opinion/college-university-remote-pandemic.html) and is openly critical of his students, it seems very possible that the petition was organized in retaliation. It appears likely that the petition would have been submitted in late May given that an email was sent out to students by the administration on May 31 offering “grade adjustments and a retroactive withdrawal date for his course”.
Of course the fact that this professor has enough contacts at the NYT to get his op-ed published makes NYU’s actions all the more foolish, since it should have been obvious that firing him would blow up in their faces.
I do not have access to it, but it doesn’t appear that the op-ed you linked to was written by Prof Maitland Jones. Is he quoted in it, or something?
The last day of classes that semester was May 9th, with exams shortly thereafter. It is likely the petition occurred while class was in session, as students scatter afterwards. As noted above, the May op-ed by the SMU professor notes many of the same issues of nonattendance and student apathy.
According to the article, this is in controversy. NYU administrators had classified him as “other faculty” when in fact other full time contract faculty are entitled to file a grievance and go through the grievance process.
"The administrators tasked with passing Jones’ grievance letter on to a faculty-led grievance committee refused to allow the document to even reach the committee, instead determining that Jones was not allowed to appeal his dismissal. Heidi White, a faculty member with a senior role in the dispute review process said that the administrators’ decision was wrong, and that Jones’ grievance should have been allowed…
Contract faculty members, who by definition are not tenured or on a tenure track, are eligible to file a grievance with the committee if a review of their employment concludes in recommending the termination of their contract…
White — the faculty member with a senior role in the dispute review process — said that NYU administrators did not provide justification in classifying Jones as “other faculty.”…“I confess, I’m baffled as to how the administration could have reached that conclusion,” White said. “To me, it looks like a blunder.”
Based on this, I believe that at a minimum that Prof Jones has a claim that NYU violated its termination procedure policy if he is found not to have been properly classified as “other faculty”.
This is probably fairly common for a large class with many TAs.
Blame grade inflation.
NYU is a private school with a rep for filling their classes with rich, full pay, reasonably smart but nowhere-near-brilliant international kids who enjoy the NYC nightlife. Mommy and Daddy gonna be very upset when their darling son or daughter, whose attendance at NYU they quite proudly proclaim to their friends, flunks out of pre-med. Not to mention how upset the kids will be when their Amex black card gets pulled…
I’m sure grade inflation was a factor.
The NY Times article said the average for his 2nd midterm exam was around 30% and that for some assignments students were receiving “single digit scores or even zeros.” Overall, those are very low scores. The article doesn’t reveal whether Dr. Jones curved any of the final grades in the class, but it seems to imply that a lot of students in his class may have ended up with very low grades or even failing grades.
If the organic chemistry classes taught by the other NYU instructors fared a lot better than his class did, I think the students could have a valid complaint that his class was unfairly hard. Maybe, Xavier University’s system of teaching and assessing performance is a better system.
Often repeated on CC is that the plural of anecdote is not data but apparently now we can just cut to the most expedient of conclusions in the form of “rep”. I have no horse in this race but talk about extrapolating pejorative terms and generalizations….
How would any of us feel if someone were to say based on rep CC attracts “reasonably smart but no where near brilliant posters”. While likely accurate that would be hurtful😀
From CNBC:
" Even with this financial aid, the average net price to attend NYU is above the average net price for students at private colleges. Roughly 30% of NYU students take on federal student loans to pay for these high prices, but that means the vast majority, approximately 70% of students, don’t.
Many NYU students don’t take on federal loans for one simple reason: They can’t. NYU has the highest number of international students of any college in the U.S. In September of 2018, 28% of NYU’s first-year students were international students, hailing from more than 100 countries. International students are not eligible for federal financial aid, federal student loans or institutional aid. This means that these international students pay full price." https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/02/it-costs-76614-to-go-to-nyuheres-how-much-students-actually-pay.html
Again no horse in the race but I don’t see a mention of “mommy and daddy”, Amex Black cards, “proclamation to friends”, NY night life, or “reasonably bright”. I stand on the fact that those are a bit pejorative and generalizations in nature on your part.
You said it, apparently you believe it, own it but be aware of how it sounds.
I am sure there is school culture at play here. I have one kid at a public and one in a private, and I can’t imagine a student petition of this kind going anywhere at each of these places. At the public the university just doesn’t care. At the private, I can’t imagine any student saying the grading is too hard – that is embarrassing to say. They just drop out of the course mid-semester. They do say though, that the teaching is bad for some profs, and I haven’t heard of profs getting fired for that – the percentage of adjuncts is very low at this place (maybe <5%), and profs are evaluated on research than on teaching.
The perception of NYU at our HS is that it is a rich kid school. There is irony in this. Our HS is considered a rich kid school :-).
Yup, clearly the full pay international students are hard working orphans just scraping by… Guess I have to defer to your superior skills at interpreting facts.
Yes and clearly they are all as you describe Amex black card carrying, children of braggart parents of limited intelligence who are only attending NYU for the party scene. Glad you are not as I suggest generalizing or using pejoratives.
Ah, @Catcherinthetoast, we all know that the plural should be “anecdata.”
That being said, the post I cited above from the NYU online student publication/paper clearly stands for the proposition that the fault lies with NYU admin, and not the students and not Dr. Jones. Some may argue about that, but that’s exactly what the article says.
As a lawyer, particularly one who has spent some time in-house, this is not necessarily a legal issue. There would have been myriad ways to keep this issue below the radar. Where possible, this is always what in-house counsel would recommend. Colleges are not in the business of fighting with their academic faculty. Instead, NYU effectively made this a students v. Dr. Jones issue.
At the very least, this is also (and maybe exclusively) an NYU issue.
I think there is plenty of blame to go around. While we don’t have all the facts, it does not appear (IMO) that NYU handled the situation as well as it could have.