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My thoughts are based on what I have gleaned here. I was very upfront with that disclosure > Since the firing, I have been reading opinions here. I have collec

My thoughts are based on what I have gleaned here. I was very upfront with that disclosure > Since the firing, I have been reading opinions here. I have collected a set of thoughts: > There is a smaller chance the course is unimaginably hard compared to similar courses elsewhere. I don't know that very well. Not specific to this instance, but students do voice their displeasure at course difficulty by semester-end feedback. And I have shared my own personal anecdote of ECE4584 at Virginia Tech. The challenge is finding how much of that complaint is legit vs. good old fashioned whining. Cancel culture used by students is not a meaningless attack on the discussion. Edit: I skimmed the article quickly and it seems it is vocally defensive of the students & their feelings, having a lot of he-say-she-say type of quotes. I am yet to see reference which solidly explains the viewpoint of other faculty members at what went wrong in this instance. We are no better than seeing the same side of the story. Also, It would be nice to not resort to veiled sarcasm. I am not defending Mr. Jones but pointing out the dynamics of an uncalibrated system which is to detriment of every stakeholder. Edit2: What I however learned in the follow up article on NYU magazine doesn't portray a rosy picture for any faculty member either: > “What happened to Maitland Jones is the thing that has made me the most frightened I have ever been as an NYU professor,” said Jacob Remes, a clinical associate professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and an organizer with CFU-UAW Local 7902, the yet-unrecognized union of contracted faculty members at NYU. “What it tells me is, I can be fired. Not when my colleagues want to fire me, not even when my students want to fire me, but when a dean decides that I am more trouble than I am worth.”

mcguire 4y ago
I was asking seriously. Other than that student newspaper editorial, I have not found any other coverage except news articles blindly restating Dr. Jones' comments and outraged editorials predicting the end of university standards. And naturally, most of the online comments follow the lead of those editorials. That student newspaper editorial is the only source I've seen for important parts of the story, including the nature of the spring 2022 class, the increased class load, and Dr. Jones' previous evaluations. I, too, have anecdotes; I spent many years around UTAustin's CS dept and had several friends in the dept undergrad office. I take as dim a view of faculty evaluations as anyone, but one of the things my friends always told me was that something is seriously wrong if any significant proportion of a class comes in to make official complaints. From the start, this story doesn't smell right. In fact, I know of one instance where an adjunct faculty was asked not to come back for another semester: he was in the process of failing almost everyone in a required computer architecture course because they weren't the EE grad students he was familiar with. (The growth of non-tenured and non-tenure-track faculty is a wildly concerning trend that has quite a few faculty, particularly adjuncts, upset. If you're familiar with Bret Devereaux (https://acoup.blog https://acoup.blog), he is currently looking for a new position because his current contract has not been extended.)

mcguire 4y ago

I was asking seriously. Other than that student newspaper editorial, I have not found any other coverage except news articles blindly restating Dr. Jones' comments and outraged editorials predicting the end of university standards. And naturally, most of the online comments follow the lead of those editorials. That student newspaper editorial is the only source I've seen for important parts of the story, including the nature of the spring 2022 class, the increased class load, and Dr. Jones' previous evaluations. I, too, have anecdotes; I spent many years around UTAustin's CS dept and had several friends in the dept undergrad office. I take as dim a view of faculty evaluations as anyone, but one of the things my friends always told me was that something is seriously wrong if any significant proportion of a class comes in to make official complaints. From the start, this story doesn't smell right. In fact, I know of one instance where an adjunct faculty was asked not to come back for another semester: he was in the process of failing almost everyone in a required computer architecture course because they weren't the EE grad students he was familiar with. (The growth of non-tenured and non-tenure-track faculty is a wildly concerning trend that has quite a few faculty, particularly adjuncts, upset. If you're familiar with Bret Devereaux (https://acoup.blog https://acoup.blog), he is currently looking for a new position because his current contract has not been extended.)