College Rigor and the Firing of an NYU Professor

There seems to be a growing divide among students in how they view their education. Many are happy to take the easiest road, with little consideration of how that may later affect them. The case of

Maitland Jones,

the New York University professor who was fired after a student petition alleged his organic-chemistry course was too hard, is a great loss for the university—and all of academia, since he is the man who wrote the standard textbook on organic chemistry. Mr. Jones tried to keep students engaged, spending $5,000 to record lectures and reducing the number of exams. What kind of precedent does this set? Will other professors pre-emptively capitulate to students who are trying to take the easy way out?

This has wider implications for medicine. Organic chemistry forms the backbone of the pharmaceutical industry, and people’s lives are affected by graduates in this field on a daily basis. Why wouldn’t NYU want to produce the best graduates possible? Today’s students have it far easier than most in the past, yet it never seems to be enough. The fruit of this appeasement will be rotten.

—Declan Botwinick, University of Rhode Island, business

Let Us Fail

Students have come to expect relaxed course standards and eased grading, and they have reasons for that expectation. As a college education becomes more common and no longer guarantees a lucrative career, students feel the pressure to perform and differentiate themselves from their classmates and future rivals in the job market. Even more so, admissions to top-tier law, medical and graduate programs have become ridiculously competitive, encouraging students to take courses that will maximize their grade-point average instead of courses that challenge or engage them intellectually. A rigorous course load is no longer seen as the path to a premiere education but as an obstacle to a needed 4.0 GPA.

While it’s easy to point fingers at lazy students or hypercritical professors, the problem lies with the system itself. As students, we should want to push ourselves academically and take classes that challenge us. It’s often said that we learn best from our failures, but the current system penalizes us for such failures. Poor grades now mean that our law-school application is denied in favor of students who maximized their GPAs with easy electives. This system needs a rework if we are to value intellectual curiosity and genuine learning.

—Alex Blecker, Oglethorpe University, economics and politics

Wait Until Med School

I am a graduate student in chemistry now because I had a challenging organic-chemistry instructor. I hadn’t had a class that difficult before, and it was definitely a struggle. The course needs to be demanding since there’s so much detail and nuance involved. Once I began to get it, however, I found the feeling of accomplishment addictive.

While I empathize with the students’ frustration, it isn’t this particular professor’s fault that the course is required for medical school. Mr. Jones designed the course and determined the appropriate level of rigor with the entire class in mind, not just premeds. Will NYU also fire its physics and calculus faculty for being too demanding? Mr. Jones created video resources for his students, and on its website NYU has tutoring for organic chemistry listed seven days a week. NYU should never have fired this man, but instead should have responded by telling the students about the available help as well as met with the professor to resolve any tech issues in his classroom.

I once received some advice from a professor that puts the problem in perspective: “If you come to class and understand 30% to 40% of the lecture, that’s normal. Understanding comes from filling in the rest with tutoring, reading the book, study groups and homework.” That advice has served me well in my education. If these students found managing the demands of organic chemistry hard, wait until med school.

—Bronwyn Horton, California Polytechnic University, Pomona, chemistry

Doctors Don’t Need Organic Chemistry

Having observed my premed classmates and attended a few weeks of organic chemistry out of curiosity, I’d say the larger issue here is that the subject probably shouldn’t be a prerequisite for medical school. It is a pure science course, suited for students who want to become professional chemists or researchers, not doctors. Organic chemistry is widely viewed as a weed-out course, used to push students off the premed track.

To be sure, some form of weeding-out is necessary, since not everyone who wants to become a doctor should be one, and there are limited seats in medical school. The problem is that performance in an organic-chemistry course might not be a much better indicator than performance in Latin or Greek. Understanding the subject in depth simply isn’t useful in medical school or practice. Other, more relevant areas of basic science, such as human anatomy and physiology, if taught rigorously, would better serve as undergraduate premed requirements. Future doctors should study topics such as human organs, hormones, bones, cells, genes, electrolytes and viruses—not esoteric chemical reactions that happen only in labs.

Chemistry majors shouldn’t complain about a rigorous organic-chemistry course like the one at NYU. Yet those who need it only for medical school have a point. The fault here lies not with chemistry departments, which rightly want to maintain standards, but rather with the medical schools, which should find a better, more relevant way to identify students with an intellectual aptitude for medical diagnosis and treatment.

—Sanat Mehta, Stanford University, law

A Box to Check

Students’ well-being should be a priority, but the answer isn’t to reduce the rigor of their courses. Not everyone deserves an A in organic chemistry, and the students who earn one should feel proud they did. Professors can teach challenging courses with compassion, however, acknowledging that students take multiple classes.

Still, even though I hesitate to say today’s students have a problem, there is a sense of entitlement surrounding them that seems new. As undergraduate degrees have become less about knowledge and more about a piece of paper, students are inclined to put less effort into learning and more effort into gaming the system. I sense that the students at NYU think of organic chemistry as merely a box they need to check to get into med school, and so they view a professor who grades harshly as an impediment to that goal.

—Patrick Jackson, Rutgers University, finance

NYU Is to Blame

NYU’s administration has gone too far. Faculty determine the grading, not the administration. Overweening oversight of grading derives from a consumerization of the university. Instead of the acquisition of skills, formation of character and the pursuit of knowledge as the primary motivators of the university, consumerization has led to a focus on student acquisition and retention.

This should be a concern to all faculty. It represents a gross overreach of the administration into decisions that can only be made by the faculty. Whether they collectively agree on a universitywide grading standard or leave it up to instructors to decide for each class individually, it is ultimately the right and responsibility of the faculty to evaluate student progress. If the shared governance of the university is to survive, it will only be by active response from the faculty. One hopes they will defend their prerogatives before it is too late and we end up with an all-administrative university.

—Kevin Hoffman, Yale University, history Ph.D.

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