6 ms·

NYU’s firing of Professor Maitland Jones Jr. should frighten every American

47 points by dmitrygr 4y ago

mc32 4y ago
This is so backward. Professors can say all they want as long as it aligns with current ideology (you can say barbarous things about a dead queen, for example) but god-forbid you actually grade students and don't let them cheat or slide on assignments.... no, that is one bridge too far. I don't know what we're degenerating into, but definitely not into more competitiveness vis a vis our global competition.
- pirate787 4y ago
  A major part of the current cultural moment (on both the left and the right) is a war against merit, and objective fact.
geephroh 4y ago
And the NY Post's headline writers do know a lot about how to frighten every American.
- deleted 4y ago
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- xhrpost 4y ago
  Yup, I imagine most people living outside NY/NYC probably don't know to read NYPost articles with a heavy grain of salt.
  - qzx_pierri 4y ago
    People in NY/NYC likely view the NYPost in such a critical way because the NYPost leans to the right. The NYPost often calls out a lot of NY/NYC's hyper liberal shenanigans. Yes, the author has certain interests (not neutral), but the overall message in the article stands firm: Stop lowering the bar to appease students who don't put in the work. I know for a fact this professor didn't have a 100% fail rate. So it is possible to pass his class, and those who can pass, will.
    - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
      No, it's because 90% of the NYPost stories have a source of "This guy I met made something up and it might be true"
    - xhrpost 4y ago
      I'm sure that's part of it but I've also directly observed their bias towards fear exaggeration at times. Claiming certain things are happening in a neighborhood I visit frequently and unable to confirm anything they are stating. They can lean right all they want, but political leaning shouldn't be an excuse to gloss over reasonable journalism.
      - qzx_pierri 4y ago
        Okay this changes my attitude a bit. +1
    - mattzito 4y ago
      Ha, one way to put it is "hyper liberal shenanigans", the other way to put it is, "Presenting only one side of a highly complex situation requiring nuance". As an example in this case, when you look at other articles, plus the comments of the students themselves, it seems as though it's more than just "the class was too hard", it was that this teacher was largely uninterested in consistency and clear rules and requirements, and that he repeatedly refused to take feedback and make adjustments. But that doesn't fit the "stop lowering the bar" narrative in the post, so the Post just avoids putting that in there.
    - mcguire 4y ago
      How do you know the students did not put in the work? Were any students interviewed for the Post's coverage (https://nypost.com/2022/10/04/nyu-professor-allegedly-fired-after-students-say-class-was-too-hard/ https://nypost.com/2022/10/04/nyu-professor-allegedly-fired-...)? Were previous classes compared? How did Jones' course evaluations compare with other instructors teaching the same course? Was there anything different about the spring 2022 semester? The NY Post can lean whichever way it likes, but journalism does have some standards.
    - 4y ago
spamizbad 4y ago
Everyone wants to make this out to be some sort of ideological matter but this is exactly what happens when schools treat students like "customers". There's already WAAAY too much tolerance for grade-grubbing behavior all over academia, not to mention various grade inflation.
- xwdv 4y ago
  I never understood grade grubbers. Even in elementary or middle school I would encounter kids who would fight the teacher over a couple points on a test because of some badly worded question or technicalities about why they’re right. Usually they were Asian or Indian. I learned from one of these kids one day that if they got any kind of bad grade their dad would beat the shit out of them.
  - tomcam 4y ago
    C’mon, you’re making them all sound like child abusers. Very often all it comes with is a heaping helping of humiliation and multi-generational shame!
- drewrv 4y ago
  I think this is an important angle to the story: if the students are "customers" spending tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars there's an incentive to try to make them happy. I also think wish someone would report on whether the claims of the students are true. This NY Post article brushes the claims aside because they're bad journalists. The only slightly better Guardian article includes this gem: > An NYU spokesperson defended the firing, emphasizing high student withdrawals and bad course evaluations. The statement said the decision was also based on complaints about dismissiveness, unresponsiveness, condescension and lack of transparency about grading. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/06/nyu-professor-fired-maitland-jones-jr-student-petition https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/06/nyu-professo... I don't necessarily believe NYU, but I think a good journalist could investigate if this guy was actually just a bad teacher rather than parroting the complaints of second or third hand accounts. Are people dropping the class and failing at a higher than expected rate? I also think there's a "labor rights" issue here. The students did not call for the professor to be fired, but NYU did because it was the easy way out. There was no union or tenure to protect him, he was a "contract" teacher. On its face, any claim that "kids today are lazy" deserves serious scrutiny because old people have made that claim since antiquity. There are lots of serious and interesting issues at play here beyond that lazy trope.
rospaya 4y ago
> Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, a former associate dean of curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, is chairman of Do No Harm. > We are a national association of medical professionals combating the attack on our healthcare system from woke activists. As a rule, posting an article from NY Post is rarely a good idea if there's an alternative. This one was written by a person that has a direct interest in the case.
- joemi 4y ago
  I too am always skeptical of NY Post articles, but are you proposing that it's better to have such a warning written by someone who doesn't have direct knowledge and experience about medical schools? It could be argued that the reason he has a direct interest in the case is because he understands it better than the layperson, and cares about it more than the layperson.
- GameOfFrowns 4y ago
  Now there's a dilemma for reporting on NY, as the New York Times on the other hand usually throws their lot in with the woke camp.
  - mcguire 4y ago
    Not lately.
- stvswn 4y ago
  It's -- it's an op-ed. Not an article. Of course the person has an interest in it, that's why they wrote an op-ed. All of the papers have a similar section with opinionated pieces. The NYTimes piece on the same subject[1] is _also_ on the opinion page. It's not a journalistic reporting of fact either, as some here seem to think. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/05/opinion/nyu-chemistry-fired.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/05/opinion/nyu-chemistry-fir...
dfgasdgsd 4y ago
(disclaimer: have no actual context and have just skimmed the various articles) It's interesting to read the perspective of the students as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/nyu/comments/xvsgk0/the_professor_jones_situation_is_complicated_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nyu/comments/xvsgk0/the_professor_j...
- cafard 4y ago
  Don't know about the whole of it, but "Now that this article has been published, so many people who never went to college and could hardly do middle school algebra are complaining and moaning that they will never trust an NYU degree and that this generation is soft." seems not unfair as applied to the NY Post. Papers a bit more upscale than the NY Post employ reporters who are pretty shaky on math and I suppose science.
  - jmeister 4y ago
    >Now that this article has been published, so many people who never went to college and could hardly do middle school algebra are complaining and moaning that they will never trust an NYU degree and that this generation is soft And there is nothing wrong with that. Doctors are held to higher intellectual standards than plumbers, and paid accordingly too. The education level of the critic is entirely irrelevant to the question of whether doctors-in-training are more or less competent than before.
neaden 4y ago
Already being discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33108206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33108206
a_shovel 4y ago
The New York Times story says: > Dr. Gabadadze declined to be interviewed. But Mr. Beckman defended the decision, saying that Dr. Jones had been the target of multiple student complaints about his “dismissiveness, unresponsiveness, condescension and opacity about grading.” > Dr. Jones’s course evaluations, he added, “were by far the worst, not only among members of the chemistry department, but among all the university’s undergraduate science courses.” So of course the New York Post echoes the professor's side of the story as truth and blames lazy students, critical race theory, and diversity quotas. Calling the New York Post a rag is an insult to rags.
- deleted 4y ago
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- greenhearth 4y ago
  "America's oldest continuously published daily piece of bullshit"
- kcplate 4y ago
  Well, I don’t give a shit about the political leanings of the source or whatever spin they put on it, but I damn sure would prefer that my doctor managed to get accepted into medical school based on their intellectual capabilities and not how effective they were about complaining about their teachers. To quote the brilliant Judge Smails: “The world needs ditch diggers too”
Toxide 4y ago
There was a quite a difficult math course at my university, the solution they found was to split the course into two courses. Seemed liked a sensible solution. When I read articles like this I feel there must be more to the story if both sides are so dug in that they cannot find an amicable solution. It should be noted too that this an opinion piece and the author seems quick to blame this on racial diversity quotas.
- taylodl 4y ago
  It doesn't appear to be the course. There are other professors teaching this same course yet they don't have the abysmal professor reviews. Sometimes professors need to be shown the door.
jimbob45 4y ago
The professor, meanwhile, saw a different problem: “They weren’t coming to class. … They weren’t watching the videos, and they weren’t able to answer the questions.” If that's the case, it's not difficult at all to restructure the course to make attendance mandatory, possibly with the use of softball questions answered with clickers during lecture (or just an attendance sheet). Videos can be shown during lectures and questions can be forced as part of mandatory homework. I know that motivating students is perhaps harder these days than in previous decades but I have no sympathy for professors who refuse to get creative with their class/grading structure.
thrwway092178 4y ago
I took Orgo 1 from Jones 15 years ago. He was a terrible teacher then and I doubt he has gotten any better. The students' complaints echo my own from the time. He cannot teach and when it becomes apparent to him that he is not imparting knowledge he switches to exasperation and ridicule. In the end I ended up with a C+ in his course. For reference, I got A's in Orgo 2, PChem, Stat Mech, and Quantum Chem; all courses that ought to be harder that Orgo 1 but aren't if the Orgo 1 prof is simply incapable of teaching the subject.
- mc32 4y ago
  I've had terrible professors as well. However, there are many. Let them start firing all the bad ones, not just the ones they don't like.
- mcguire 4y ago
  Editorial: The New York Times article on Maitland Jones was incomplete. (https://nyunews.com/opinion/2022/10/05/maitland-jones-nytimes-response/ https://nyunews.com/opinion/2022/10/05/maitland-jones-nytime...)
srvmshr 4y ago
Since the firing, I have been reading opinions here. I have collected a set of thoughts: There are two seeming possibilities : (1) The more probable one, where students are resorting to cancel culture when they feel the outcomes are not to their desires. This is a harmful trend. The road only leads to diluted standards. Professional education isn't feel-happy. It sets you up to face real challenges. I can't expect my doctor to post a TikTok video canceling me if I complained the treatment wasn't working well. Edit: Professional education not being feel-happy is not about the stress but rigors compared to non-STEM streams. Edit 2: (Personal anecdote) My undergrad computer vision was taught by a Chinese American professor, who did a rather fine job at setting test & gradings. No one failed his course though the grades were distributed A through C. He was similarly "voted out" from teaching that course by the feedback system simply because the assigned readings were long, & had expository papers which some kids did not want to put efforts into. A few including me, benefitted greatly by the course though - and feel sorry this happened anyway. (2) There is a smaller chance the course is unimaginably hard compared to similar courses elsewhere. I don't know that very well. But I would give some benefit of doubt to the professor still, to know how to teach the fundamentals well. If the course is not geared towards med school entrances only, its not on the professor to keep the rigors. For example, a CS course for CS grad students should be expected to have considerable programming. It should not be crosslisted with Arts & Languages, who need computing credits. A different course better serves the purpose. Maybe the med school requisite course should have been different from the standard Organic Chemistry I. Treating degree as a commodity will lead to grade inflation & lot of people finding their degrees of less value. They will have the qualifications but not the deep skills & insights to solve the practical problems. And that makes the vicious cycle complete where we are skeptical of the costly education. College is necessary - but not grad school. Not always. And those who chose the second, should be prepared to endure some rigors of the learning path.
- mikkergp 4y ago
  > The road only leads to diluted standards This is not the only possibility. So much of the way we used to view education was top-down and memorization of facts. I don't think that a medical school education is that different from something like CS than the old guard would like you to believe. Can a Dr self-teach just like a CS engineer? Maybe not, but the ability to memorize organic chemistry facts is likely a much smaller part of being a doctor than ever before. We know the university system is a mess, we know the medical system is a mess, and yet we say any attempt to change it must be a lowering of standards. Something has to give. > Professional education isn't feel-happy. It sets you up to face real challenges This is horrifically untrue. I think people are really bad at understanding how to "impose productive stress" or whatever you want to call it on people. Nothing I've faced in my professional environment, talking to angry customers, Hours long product wide outages, coordinating 30 teams, troubleshooting complex systems was as artificially stressful as education. Maybe because in the real world for the most part your peers and bosses are on your side.
0xbadcafebee 4y ago
> Think about it: Would you want a surgeon doing your appendectomy who had admissions standards lowered and poor test performance disregarded to diversify his or her medical school class? Ok, I'm thinking about it. The first thing I think is: do admissions standards and test performance correlate to shitty appendectomies? And if so, why? The class in question was organic chemistry. I'm not a doctor, but I don't think doctors use organic chemistry very much in regards to surgery. So if the admissions standards were lowered around the organic chemistry requirement, I don't think it would affect appendectomies. So I would not mind the change in that instance. I also know that medical school is tough, and that many branches of medicine often deviate so far from the bulk of the knowledge they learn, that much of it may become irrelevant. I also know that much of medicine is a guessing game. The outcomes are already often not very good, while the costs are very high. So I would not discount the possibility that changing the curriculum might lead to spending less time and money, and specializing more, and getting perhaps the same or even better outcomes. It might even turn out that having shittier doctors isn't a bad thing if we just had more of them. If access to a doctor was cheaper, and we got more of their attention, perhaps we would not be given antibiotics and aspirin every time we go in for a checkup.
- deleted 4y ago
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- kcplate 4y ago
  > It might even turn out that having shittier doctors isn't a bad thing if we just had more of them. If access to a doctor was cheaper, and we got more of their attention, perhaps we would not be given antibiotics and aspirin every time we go in for a checkup. No, because then the folks who would have been the unshitty doctors will go get JDs to take advantage of the exponential increase in the number of malpractice cases. Personally, I’d rather not go see Dr Lexus…
deleted 4y ago
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aubanel 4y ago
For me, a teacher's goals should not be restricted to enacting a lecture in front of a whiteboard, but also amongst others, to be able to provide feedback in a motivating manner, which seems not to have always been great here [1], and also to grade students with a grade distribution not too far away from the university's goal, which he also didn't seem to do at all. That said, the firing of this teacher seems to have mostly been triggered by the public outcry, which is becoming a worrying trend at Western institutions. [1]: https://twitter.com/leslie_bern/status/1577017996123336704?t=BP09nfumoCOSraIJvMGK6w&s=19 https://twitter.com/leslie_bern/status/1577017996123336704?t...
- mcguire 4y ago
  Is there a difference between firing and not offering a new contract to someone who was on year-by-year contracts? Particularly someone with, as you say, a history of non-excellence?
mcguire 4y ago
All of the coverage of this issue has been from the point of view of Jones with no pushback against the story that lazy students were demanding that the course be easier. I don't buy it. I used to work for a large computer science department at a large university, and I have friends who were part of the department's undergraduate office. It's quite rare to hear official complaints from any significant number of students about a professor's teaching, much less a petition signed by a quarter of the class. Here are some other interesting features of the rest of the story: Spring 2022 had "experimental" changes to the class, including required video lectures (that were apparently released on Friday nights) that were primary to interactive sessions, and a significant increase in course workload. Jones' teaching evaluations had been lower than other instructors teaching the same course for many years. Jones wasn't "fired"; he was working on year-by-year contracts and his contract was not renewed. A technicality, perhaps, but talk of "firing a professor" is simply excessive. "Eighty-two of Jones’ 350 students signed a petition against him last spring, saying Jones had made his class too difficult and was at fault for their failing grades. ... An NYU spokesperson said multiple students had complained about Jones’ “dismissiveness, unresponsiveness, condescension and opacity about grading.” ... His course evaluation was also “by far the worst, not only among members of the chemistry department but among all the university’s undergraduate science courses.”" (https://nypost.com/2022/10/04/nyu-professor-allegedly-fired-after-students-say-class-was-too-hard/ https://nypost.com/2022/10/04/nyu-professor-allegedly-fired-...) "Jones’ student-submitted course evaluations “were by far the worst, not only among members of the chemistry department, but among all the university’s undergraduate science courses.” ... dozens of comments across social media warning students about taking Jones’ class dating back more than a decade ... In the past five years, Jones’ co-professors teaching the same course typically had [student evaluation] scores around or above 4.0 on a 5.0 scale, while Jones averaged around 3.3. In his final semester, his evaluation score dropped to 2.4. "They were part of an experimental semester, one that was forced to combine the in-person with the online, and Jones was not considerate of the need for change. The document explains that more work is not equivalent to more learning, and provides an estimate of how much time an average student spends on the class per week. Students said they spent 11 to 19 hours per week on the course — a course that traditionally takes up 10 to 15 hours per week. "“He was teaching and writing the book like he expected you to be just as receptive to organic chemistry as he was and to take it in just as easily without breaking it down,” Paschal said. “He was not receptive to questions, and I didn’t want to open myself up for him to be rude to me.” "In an email Jones sent to his students after he was fired, he apologized to those who did well in the course. “I send … an apology to those of you who cruised through this course with a relentless stream of 100s,” he wrote in the email. “I didn’t stretch you, and thus deprived you of the chance to improve beyond an already formidable baseline.”*" (https://nyunews.com/opinion/2022/10/05/maitland-jones-nytimes-response/ https://nyunews.com/opinion/2022/10/05/maitland-jones-nytime...)
Alendellone 4y ago
This is wrong, such a professor with so much experience, background and knowledge should have given an award to teach. This is a shame.
Alendellone 4y ago
This is scary, a professor with so much experience and knowledge should never be fired, actually they need to award him for teaching

47 points by dmitrygr 4y ago

mc32 4y ago

This is so backward. Professors can say all they want as long as it aligns with current ideology (you can say barbarous things about a dead queen, for example) but god-forbid you actually grade students and don't let them cheat or slide on assignments.... no, that is one bridge too far. I don't know what we're degenerating into, but definitely not into more competitiveness vis a vis our global competition.

pirate787 4y ago
A major part of the current cultural moment (on both the left and the right) is a war against merit, and objective fact.

geephroh 4y ago

And the NY Post's headline writers do know a lot about how to frighten every American.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
xhrpost 4y ago
Yup, I imagine most people living outside NY/NYC probably don't know to read NYPost articles with a heavy grain of salt.
- qzx_pierri 4y ago
  People in NY/NYC likely view the NYPost in such a critical way because the NYPost leans to the right. The NYPost often calls out a lot of NY/NYC's hyper liberal shenanigans. Yes, the author has certain interests (not neutral), but the overall message in the article stands firm: Stop lowering the bar to appease students who don't put in the work. I know for a fact this professor didn't have a 100% fail rate. So it is possible to pass his class, and those who can pass, will.
  - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
    No, it's because 90% of the NYPost stories have a source of "This guy I met made something up and it might be true"
  - xhrpost 4y ago
    I'm sure that's part of it but I've also directly observed their bias towards fear exaggeration at times. Claiming certain things are happening in a neighborhood I visit frequently and unable to confirm anything they are stating. They can lean right all they want, but political leaning shouldn't be an excuse to gloss over reasonable journalism.
    - qzx_pierri 4y ago
      Okay this changes my attitude a bit. +1
  - mattzito 4y ago
    Ha, one way to put it is "hyper liberal shenanigans", the other way to put it is, "Presenting only one side of a highly complex situation requiring nuance". As an example in this case, when you look at other articles, plus the comments of the students themselves, it seems as though it's more than just "the class was too hard", it was that this teacher was largely uninterested in consistency and clear rules and requirements, and that he repeatedly refused to take feedback and make adjustments. But that doesn't fit the "stop lowering the bar" narrative in the post, so the Post just avoids putting that in there.
  - mcguire 4y ago
    How do you know the students did not put in the work? Were any students interviewed for the Post's coverage (https://nypost.com/2022/10/04/nyu-professor-allegedly-fired-after-students-say-class-was-too-hard/ https://nypost.com/2022/10/04/nyu-professor-allegedly-fired-...)? Were previous classes compared? How did Jones' course evaluations compare with other instructors teaching the same course? Was there anything different about the spring 2022 semester? The NY Post can lean whichever way it likes, but journalism does have some standards.
  - 4y ago

spamizbad 4y ago

Everyone wants to make this out to be some sort of ideological matter but this is exactly what happens when schools treat students like "customers". There's already WAAAY too much tolerance for grade-grubbing behavior all over academia, not to mention various grade inflation.

xwdv 4y ago
I never understood grade grubbers. Even in elementary or middle school I would encounter kids who would fight the teacher over a couple points on a test because of some badly worded question or technicalities about why they’re right. Usually they were Asian or Indian. I learned from one of these kids one day that if they got any kind of bad grade their dad would beat the shit out of them.
- tomcam 4y ago
  C’mon, you’re making them all sound like child abusers. Very often all it comes with is a heaping helping of humiliation and multi-generational shame!
drewrv 4y ago
I think this is an important angle to the story: if the students are "customers" spending tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars there's an incentive to try to make them happy. I also think wish someone would report on whether the claims of the students are true. This NY Post article brushes the claims aside because they're bad journalists. The only slightly better Guardian article includes this gem: > An NYU spokesperson defended the firing, emphasizing high student withdrawals and bad course evaluations. The statement said the decision was also based on complaints about dismissiveness, unresponsiveness, condescension and lack of transparency about grading. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/06/nyu-professor-fired-maitland-jones-jr-student-petition https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/06/nyu-professo... I don't necessarily believe NYU, but I think a good journalist could investigate if this guy was actually just a bad teacher rather than parroting the complaints of second or third hand accounts. Are people dropping the class and failing at a higher than expected rate? I also think there's a "labor rights" issue here. The students did not call for the professor to be fired, but NYU did because it was the easy way out. There was no union or tenure to protect him, he was a "contract" teacher. On its face, any claim that "kids today are lazy" deserves serious scrutiny because old people have made that claim since antiquity. There are lots of serious and interesting issues at play here beyond that lazy trope.

rospaya 4y ago

> Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, a former associate dean of curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, is chairman of Do No Harm. > We are a national association of medical professionals combating the attack on our healthcare system from woke activists. As a rule, posting an article from NY Post is rarely a good idea if there's an alternative. This one was written by a person that has a direct interest in the case.

joemi 4y ago
I too am always skeptical of NY Post articles, but are you proposing that it's better to have such a warning written by someone who doesn't have direct knowledge and experience about medical schools? It could be argued that the reason he has a direct interest in the case is because he understands it better than the layperson, and cares about it more than the layperson.
GameOfFrowns 4y ago
Now there's a dilemma for reporting on NY, as the New York Times on the other hand usually throws their lot in with the woke camp.
- mcguire 4y ago
  Not lately.
stvswn 4y ago
It's -- it's an op-ed. Not an article. Of course the person has an interest in it, that's why they wrote an op-ed. All of the papers have a similar section with opinionated pieces. The NYTimes piece on the same subject[1] is _also_ on the opinion page. It's not a journalistic reporting of fact either, as some here seem to think. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/05/opinion/nyu-chemistry-fired.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/05/opinion/nyu-chemistry-fir...

dfgasdgsd 4y ago

(disclaimer: have no actual context and have just skimmed the various articles) It's interesting to read the perspective of the students as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/nyu/comments/xvsgk0/the_professor_jones_situation_is_complicated_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nyu/comments/xvsgk0/the_professor_j...

cafard 4y ago
Don't know about the whole of it, but "Now that this article has been published, so many people who never went to college and could hardly do middle school algebra are complaining and moaning that they will never trust an NYU degree and that this generation is soft." seems not unfair as applied to the NY Post. Papers a bit more upscale than the NY Post employ reporters who are pretty shaky on math and I suppose science.
- jmeister 4y ago
  >Now that this article has been published, so many people who never went to college and could hardly do middle school algebra are complaining and moaning that they will never trust an NYU degree and that this generation is soft And there is nothing wrong with that. Doctors are held to higher intellectual standards than plumbers, and paid accordingly too. The education level of the critic is entirely irrelevant to the question of whether doctors-in-training are more or less competent than before.

neaden 4y ago

Already being discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33108206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33108206

a_shovel 4y ago

The New York Times story says: > Dr. Gabadadze declined to be interviewed. But Mr. Beckman defended the decision, saying that Dr. Jones had been the target of multiple student complaints about his “dismissiveness, unresponsiveness, condescension and opacity about grading.” > Dr. Jones’s course evaluations, he added, “were by far the worst, not only among members of the chemistry department, but among all the university’s undergraduate science courses.” So of course the New York Post echoes the professor's side of the story as truth and blames lazy students, critical race theory, and diversity quotas. Calling the New York Post a rag is an insult to rags.

deleted 4y ago
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greenhearth 4y ago
"America's oldest continuously published daily piece of bullshit"
kcplate 4y ago
Well, I don’t give a shit about the political leanings of the source or whatever spin they put on it, but I damn sure would prefer that my doctor managed to get accepted into medical school based on their intellectual capabilities and not how effective they were about complaining about their teachers. To quote the brilliant Judge Smails: “The world needs ditch diggers too”

Toxide 4y ago

There was a quite a difficult math course at my university, the solution they found was to split the course into two courses. Seemed liked a sensible solution. When I read articles like this I feel there must be more to the story if both sides are so dug in that they cannot find an amicable solution. It should be noted too that this an opinion piece and the author seems quick to blame this on racial diversity quotas.

taylodl 4y ago
It doesn't appear to be the course. There are other professors teaching this same course yet they don't have the abysmal professor reviews. Sometimes professors need to be shown the door.

jimbob45 4y ago

The professor, meanwhile, saw a different problem: “They weren’t coming to class. … They weren’t watching the videos, and they weren’t able to answer the questions.” If that's the case, it's not difficult at all to restructure the course to make attendance mandatory, possibly with the use of softball questions answered with clickers during lecture (or just an attendance sheet). Videos can be shown during lectures and questions can be forced as part of mandatory homework. I know that motivating students is perhaps harder these days than in previous decades but I have no sympathy for professors who refuse to get creative with their class/grading structure.

thrwway092178 4y ago

I took Orgo 1 from Jones 15 years ago. He was a terrible teacher then and I doubt he has gotten any better. The students' complaints echo my own from the time. He cannot teach and when it becomes apparent to him that he is not imparting knowledge he switches to exasperation and ridicule. In the end I ended up with a C+ in his course. For reference, I got A's in Orgo 2, PChem, Stat Mech, and Quantum Chem; all courses that ought to be harder that Orgo 1 but aren't if the Orgo 1 prof is simply incapable of teaching the subject.

mc32 4y ago
I've had terrible professors as well. However, there are many. Let them start firing all the bad ones, not just the ones they don't like.
mcguire 4y ago
Editorial: The New York Times article on Maitland Jones was incomplete. (https://nyunews.com/opinion/2022/10/05/maitland-jones-nytimes-response/ https://nyunews.com/opinion/2022/10/05/maitland-jones-nytime...)

srvmshr 4y ago

Since the firing, I have been reading opinions here. I have collected a set of thoughts: There are two seeming possibilities : (1) The more probable one, where students are resorting to cancel culture when they feel the outcomes are not to their desires. This is a harmful trend. The road only leads to diluted standards. Professional education isn't feel-happy. It sets you up to face real challenges. I can't expect my doctor to post a TikTok video canceling me if I complained the treatment wasn't working well. Edit: Professional education not being feel-happy is not about the stress but rigors compared to non-STEM streams. Edit 2: (Personal anecdote) My undergrad computer vision was taught by a Chinese American professor, who did a rather fine job at setting test & gradings. No one failed his course though the grades were distributed A through C. He was similarly "voted out" from teaching that course by the feedback system simply because the assigned readings were long, & had expository papers which some kids did not want to put efforts into. A few including me, benefitted greatly by the course though - and feel sorry this happened anyway. (2) There is a smaller chance the course is unimaginably hard compared to similar courses elsewhere. I don't know that very well. But I would give some benefit of doubt to the professor still, to know how to teach the fundamentals well. If the course is not geared towards med school entrances only, its not on the professor to keep the rigors. For example, a CS course for CS grad students should be expected to have considerable programming. It should not be crosslisted with Arts & Languages, who need computing credits. A different course better serves the purpose. Maybe the med school requisite course should have been different from the standard Organic Chemistry I. Treating degree as a commodity will lead to grade inflation & lot of people finding their degrees of less value. They will have the qualifications but not the deep skills & insights to solve the practical problems. And that makes the vicious cycle complete where we are skeptical of the costly education. College is necessary - but not grad school. Not always. And those who chose the second, should be prepared to endure some rigors of the learning path.

mikkergp 4y ago
> The road only leads to diluted standards This is not the only possibility. So much of the way we used to view education was top-down and memorization of facts. I don't think that a medical school education is that different from something like CS than the old guard would like you to believe. Can a Dr self-teach just like a CS engineer? Maybe not, but the ability to memorize organic chemistry facts is likely a much smaller part of being a doctor than ever before. We know the university system is a mess, we know the medical system is a mess, and yet we say any attempt to change it must be a lowering of standards. Something has to give. > Professional education isn't feel-happy. It sets you up to face real challenges This is horrifically untrue. I think people are really bad at understanding how to "impose productive stress" or whatever you want to call it on people. Nothing I've faced in my professional environment, talking to angry customers, Hours long product wide outages, coordinating 30 teams, troubleshooting complex systems was as artificially stressful as education. Maybe because in the real world for the most part your peers and bosses are on your side.

0xbadcafebee 4y ago

> Think about it: Would you want a surgeon doing your appendectomy who had admissions standards lowered and poor test performance disregarded to diversify his or her medical school class? Ok, I'm thinking about it. The first thing I think is: do admissions standards and test performance correlate to shitty appendectomies? And if so, why? The class in question was organic chemistry. I'm not a doctor, but I don't think doctors use organic chemistry very much in regards to surgery. So if the admissions standards were lowered around the organic chemistry requirement, I don't think it would affect appendectomies. So I would not mind the change in that instance. I also know that medical school is tough, and that many branches of medicine often deviate so far from the bulk of the knowledge they learn, that much of it may become irrelevant. I also know that much of medicine is a guessing game. The outcomes are already often not very good, while the costs are very high. So I would not discount the possibility that changing the curriculum might lead to spending less time and money, and specializing more, and getting perhaps the same or even better outcomes. It might even turn out that having shittier doctors isn't a bad thing if we just had more of them. If access to a doctor was cheaper, and we got more of their attention, perhaps we would not be given antibiotics and aspirin every time we go in for a checkup.

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kcplate 4y ago
> It might even turn out that having shittier doctors isn't a bad thing if we just had more of them. If access to a doctor was cheaper, and we got more of their attention, perhaps we would not be given antibiotics and aspirin every time we go in for a checkup. No, because then the folks who would have been the unshitty doctors will go get JDs to take advantage of the exponential increase in the number of malpractice cases. Personally, I’d rather not go see Dr Lexus…

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aubanel 4y ago

For me, a teacher's goals should not be restricted to enacting a lecture in front of a whiteboard, but also amongst others, to be able to provide feedback in a motivating manner, which seems not to have always been great here [1], and also to grade students with a grade distribution not too far away from the university's goal, which he also didn't seem to do at all. That said, the firing of this teacher seems to have mostly been triggered by the public outcry, which is becoming a worrying trend at Western institutions. [1]: https://twitter.com/leslie_bern/status/1577017996123336704?t=BP09nfumoCOSraIJvMGK6w&s=19 https://twitter.com/leslie_bern/status/1577017996123336704?t...

mcguire 4y ago
Is there a difference between firing and not offering a new contract to someone who was on year-by-year contracts? Particularly someone with, as you say, a history of non-excellence?

mcguire 4y ago

All of the coverage of this issue has been from the point of view of Jones with no pushback against the story that lazy students were demanding that the course be easier. I don't buy it. I used to work for a large computer science department at a large university, and I have friends who were part of the department's undergraduate office. It's quite rare to hear official complaints from any significant number of students about a professor's teaching, much less a petition signed by a quarter of the class. Here are some other interesting features of the rest of the story: Spring 2022 had "experimental" changes to the class, including required video lectures (that were apparently released on Friday nights) that were primary to interactive sessions, and a significant increase in course workload. Jones' teaching evaluations had been lower than other instructors teaching the same course for many years. Jones wasn't "fired"; he was working on year-by-year contracts and his contract was not renewed. A technicality, perhaps, but talk of "firing a professor" is simply excessive. "Eighty-two of Jones’ 350 students signed a petition against him last spring, saying Jones had made his class too difficult and was at fault for their failing grades. ... An NYU spokesperson said multiple students had complained about Jones’ “dismissiveness, unresponsiveness, condescension and opacity about grading.” ... His course evaluation was also “by far the worst, not only among members of the chemistry department but among all the university’s undergraduate science courses.”" (https://nypost.com/2022/10/04/nyu-professor-allegedly-fired-after-students-say-class-was-too-hard/ https://nypost.com/2022/10/04/nyu-professor-allegedly-fired-...) "Jones’ student-submitted course evaluations “were by far the worst, not only among members of the chemistry department, but among all the university’s undergraduate science courses.” ... dozens of comments across social media warning students about taking Jones’ class dating back more than a decade ... In the past five years, Jones’ co-professors teaching the same course typically had [student evaluation] scores around or above 4.0 on a 5.0 scale, while Jones averaged around 3.3. In his final semester, his evaluation score dropped to 2.4. "They were part of an experimental semester, one that was forced to combine the in-person with the online, and Jones was not considerate of the need for change. The document explains that more work is not equivalent to more learning, and provides an estimate of how much time an average student spends on the class per week. Students said they spent 11 to 19 hours per week on the course — a course that traditionally takes up 10 to 15 hours per week. "“He was teaching and writing the book like he expected you to be just as receptive to organic chemistry as he was and to take it in just as easily without breaking it down,” Paschal said. “He was not receptive to questions, and I didn’t want to open myself up for him to be rude to me.” "In an email Jones sent to his students after he was fired, he apologized to those who did well in the course. “I send … an apology to those of you who cruised through this course with a relentless stream of 100s,” he wrote in the email. “I didn’t stretch you, and thus deprived you of the chance to improve beyond an already formidable baseline.”*" (https://nyunews.com/opinion/2022/10/05/maitland-jones-nytimes-response/ https://nyunews.com/opinion/2022/10/05/maitland-jones-nytime...)

Alendellone 4y ago

This is wrong, such a professor with so much experience, background and knowledge should have given an award to teach. This is a shame.

Alendellone 4y ago

This is scary, a professor with so much experience and knowledge should never be fired, actually they need to award him for teaching