I can’t imagine any counsel authorizing either that termination letter or the NYU spokesman statements. If they did, they should be fired. Otherwise the spokesman should be fired. In any event, it will be interesting to watch the shakeups.
I see NYT is now recruiting sources for follow on stories at other colleges. This should be fun.
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This professor has been teaching at NYU for 15 years. His teaching style and grading should have been well known to the NYU administration and the students. NYU had renewed his contract in the last 14 years. Students presumably had other options but chose to take his class. It should be pretty clear who are primarily responsible for this mess.
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It’s a problem because medical school admissions think they can compare students from some 3000 colleges and 10,000 chemistry professors as apples to apples. If we try to nationalize OChem and other classes, we’ll end up with the same mediocre academics we have in K-12. Part of the strength of our universities is professors teaching to their research strengths. Everyone wants their kids to go to top ranked schools and be taught by Nobel winners, but never by a grad student. I hope they don’t want those Nobel winners teaching cookbook curriculum.
These professors aren’t just teaching pre-med students either. They are teaching students that will need a deep understanding of the material. Some universities offer a more rigorous majors track version of the course, but universities and professors shouldn’t have to worry about what medical admissions departments are doing. A professor’s grading practices shouldn’t make or break a student’s application to medical school.
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NYU should offer a written public apology and a hefty donation to a charity of Prof. Jones’ choice soon; the price tag on this mess continues to rise.
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Part of the problem is that where this Prof comes from, at Princeton, a decent part of the class is going to grad school in Chemistry. The class is taught for that audience. The pre-med crowd tags along, and is not thought of as the primary consumer of that class, even if they are greater in number. The university has little sympathy for the pre-med cohort. In fact if you called yourself a pre-med, your admission to the university becomes genuinely hard. There is even a pejorative term for that for – “yet another boring pre-med” that I heard AOs at colleges use when describing applicants. For good or bad, this is how things have become. So the Prof is from that milieu – i.e., targeting the class at prospective grad students. Many classes at Princeton are taught to the top 10-20% of the class, especially in math, the sciences etc. Others cope with this. This is one of the criticisms of the place.
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Not without a petition. Or an 11 page document. 
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And NYU refused to provide clarification about how Jones’ contract was different upon direct questioning.
“Jones was classified under a category called “other faculty” — faculty who are not tenured or full-time contract faculty — meaning that he would not be eligible to file a grievance, according to an NYU spokesperson, John Beckman. 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.
Beckman did not respond to repeated questions about what parts of Jones’ contract led him to be classified as “other faculty” and not contract faculty, making him ineligible for a grievance claim.
Chemistry department chair Mark Tuckerman said that he was unsure of what made Jones’ contract different from those of other contract faculty members, and said that Jones had negotiated his own contract with the university when he began in 2007.”
There is only 'controversy" if the terms of his contract indicate that Jones was what NYU refers to as “Full-Time Continuing Contract Faculty.” Without seeing his contract, many of those interviewed in the article think Jones ought to be given the protections of full time contract faculty. But they don’t know whether, under the terms of his contract, he was hired as such.
And according to NYU, he wasn’t. As a party to the contract, NYU should know. This stuff isn’t an afterthought to be determined at the end of the term. It is negotiated and included in the contract from the beginning. He was either hired as “Full-Time Continuing Contract Faculty,” or he wasn’t.
As for the “controversy,” I suppose it is possible that NYU is lying about his classification. Or NYU didn’t bother to read the contract before denying him access the grievance procedure. But these seem pretty unlikely given NYU has the contract and knows the classification. So I am inclined to believe NYU, especially because hiring Jones as other faculty may have made the most sense for both parties.
More is required of full time contract faculty. Such faculty may be required to advise students, research, publish, and/or perform other departmental and professional obligations beyond just teaching a class. In contrast, other faculty are often hired just to teach a class with no further obligations. This can be pretty appealing to a professor (like Jones) who has already retired but wants to keep teaching without all usual hassles of academia.
I can’t blame NYU for refusing to discuss the details of any employee’s contract, for the protection of their employees, past and current.
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Interesting that some are now demanding, without even having seen the terms of Jones’ employment, that NYU administrators and lawyers “should be fired.” I guess that while Jones is entitled to every benefit of the doubt and procedural protection, the lowly administrators . . . not so much.
You take the administration position as “fact” when clearly other people who are in a position to have familiarity with this issue believe the administration to be wrong (Prof White) or are unsure (Prof Tuckerman). My point is that the issue is in controversy. I don’t know and neither do you. I suspect it is not as simple as a clear declaration of status in the contract but a question of fact and an interpretation of rules, which may themselves be somewhat ambiguous. It may take a neutral third party or a court to make that determination based on Prof Jones’ contract, his actual duties and NYU’s internal rules regarding how faculty status is determined.
You think that the Admin would never make this kind of mistake. School administrators make mistakes out of expediency all the time. Oberlin College just made a $36 million dollar mistake assuming they could push a local business around and that somehow they ultimately could hide behind the First Amendment.
To me, it is just as plausible that the NYU administration thought going through grievance would stir the pot unnecessarily, especially with faculty. Prof Jones, on the verge of retirement, would just “go away”. Even if he complained, NYU probably anticipated the controversy being limited to the confines of the NYU community and not being blown up nationally the way it has been.
We will just have to let the matter play out. I am sure this is not over.
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I appreciated Dr. Calarco’s NYT opinion, and her suggestion that, “… universities rethink their attachment to gatekeeping and focus more on the social benefits of building knowledge.”
I’m seeing a lot of that gatekeeping attachment in the comments here, and look forward to a shift in focus to building knowledge, not only by universities, but also by consumers of their direct and indirect products.
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How do you know that the students have absorbed that knowledge? How do you differentiate students who have absorbed that knowledge at different levels of depth? A deeper level of knowledge may allow someone to perform better in more difficult situations or solve more complicated problems.
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These are great questions, certainly in keeping with such focus! Did you read the article? I am neither an educator, nor an administrator in an academic institution; I don’t have the answer to those questions.
What I am is privileged consumer of elite education, both in my own experience and now as my daughter seeks the same. Over the interim time period between these experiences, I’ve recognized that privilege, and seen the way it plays out in inequity that harms us all, both in obvious ways and less so. I believe our institutions have a responsibility to respond to these inequities by examining them, and determining how they impact education delivery and relate to measurements of academic accomplishment.
I think it’s reasonable to at least consider that such measures rooted in past practice may not have the level of accuracy we’d hope for in current circumstances. (And as an aside, I think it’s reasonable to consider that an 80+ year old professor may not be delivering educational outcomes optimally during an unprecedented pandemic that pressure-tested delivery systems.)
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Yes, I did read the article. However, this mess at NYU isn’t the result of inequality IMO, so I don’t think this opinion piece in the NYTimes shed any new insight.
Whatever their background, people (not just students) do perform differently, even for some of most basic tasks. For example, do you ever wonder why checkout lines at Costco move much faster than those at your regular supermarkets? Costco makes sure that their employees can perform to their higher standards. Universities (and their classes) similarly need to set high standards for students to meet and to challenge them.
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I agree completely. But as a doctor myself, I doubt the best test of high standards for future doctors is “can you take small molecules and envision how to make them into big 3-D molecules, and show your plan on a piece of paper?” I just don’t think it’s relevant (and I am someone who did very well in O-Chem at an elite school that prides itself on sending many chem majors on to PhD programs, so this is not sour grapes.)
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Yes, I did read the article. However, this mess at [NYU] isn’t the result of inequality IMO, so I don’t think this opinion piece in the NYTimes shed any new insight.
OK! The article resonated with me, and it didn’t to you. Perhaps a more fruitful discussion would follow from your laying out your disagreements with the article, rather than simply reiterating assertions.
I don’t wonder about the disparity in checkout line time; as someone with a privileged education AND time working in box stores, I know the answer. The difference in that outcome is indeed due to training, largely on scanning UPC codes swiftly. Is cash register scan time the best metric to use for a quality grocery shopping experience though? For me personally, that answer is no. And I don’t think box stores provide an optimal shopping option for community development, either. Your analogy is a good one.
And this difference can be rendered moot by 1) making scan codes bigger (like the ones at Aldi) 2) Moving to self checkout.
My point being that gatekeeping tests that worked “well enough” in the past might be unimportant or even counterproductive as circumstances change with time. I feel this is the case with O-Chem and premed.
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Agreed. Biochemistry major from SLAC here, loved and did well in orgo there, went on to PhD in molecular biology.
Times have changed since then. It seems reasonable to consider those changes rather than insist on keeping ye olde gates of yore.
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It is entirely possible that med school admissions and training should be overhauled, but that is not within the scope of the current controversy. Jones did not admit or deny anyone to med school; others made the determination as to what courses and grades were required for that. He was hired just to teach a course similar in nature and subject to that taught all over the country, which he had historically taught, and then did so for 14 years at NYU. NYU knew what the course entailed, and from quotes from faculty there, knew it was similar to the course he had taught for 30 years before NYU.
If NYU wanted a different type of course or grading, perhaps Jones should have been so advised and he might have declined. It is not up to Jones to determine if a C grade is adequate for med school, or if socio-economic factors should figure more highly in med school admissions. He just teaches the course, evaluates the student performance in that course only, and lets others determine what to do with that evaluation.
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FWIW, 70% of the class getting grades of A and B seems pretty good to me. Would it be ok if 90% got those grades? Do we need everyone to pass?
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I didn’t “take the administration position as ‘fact.’” I wrote “I am inclined to believe NYU . . .” and explained in detail why. Please don’t use quotes to refer to things I didn’t write.
Likewise I did not indicate that “the Admin would never make this kind of mistake.” Rather I wrote that such a mistake seems “pretty unlikely.”
IMO, it seems like the “controversy” (to the extent there is one) hinges on whether Jones’ was hired as other faculty or as Full-Time Continuing Contract Faculty. White and Tuckerman are not privy to the contract. NYU presumably has the contract.
I suspect that his classification is explicit. Below is a link to NYU’s Bylaws, which give an idea of the importance these classifications play in the day-to-day operation of the university.
One example . . . Bylaw 82e (Faculty Membership):
The roster of Tenured/Tenure Track Faculty and of Full-Time Continuing Contract Faculty will be prepared and maintained on a current basis by the dean of the faculty, will be submitted to the Secretary and General Counsel for verification and filing in the official records, and will be available for reference at each faculty meeting.
For further reference, here are the “UNIVERSITY GUIDELINES FOR FULL-TIME CONTINUING CONTRACT FACULTY 1 APPOINTMENTS, GRIEVANCE PROCEDURES, AND DISCIPLINARY REGULATIONS”