Did an NYU professor get fired because students hate organic chem?

The chemistry professor at New York University was fired after students complained about their grades and the support they received during the Pandemic. Students taking over the education system, the chaos of our not-quite-post-COVID world, and more are just some of the things the story has to offer.

One of the most difficult classes in undergraduate science education is organic chemistry, but it's not part of the discussion. The events raise questions about what we expect from science education and how to deliver it.

We have to wade through all the issues raised by the firing to get to those questions.

Higher ed issues

The fired professor, Maitland Jones, Jr., was a professor at NYU for a short time. Jones has written an organic CHEM textbook that is centered on his teaching ideas. He told The New York Times that he was about to retire.

A quarter of his class of 350 students signed a petition that doesn't seem to be publicly available after they ran into issues during the teaching year. Students with a mean grade in the 30 percent range were the only ones complaining about grades. Students weren't given enough resources to succeed and Jones wasn't always supportive when they asked for help, according to the report.

The petition didn't call for Jones to be fired. NYU administrators responded by taking that action. Some of Jones' students and other faculty at NYU have criticized the decision. An NYU spokesman defended the firing by mentioning high student withdrawals and bad course evaluations.

The events fit nicely with two popular narratives about the failures of the modern university system. As tuitions have gone up, there has been a temptation to treat students as customers that need to be kept satisfied. Having too many students in a chemistry class can limit student satisfaction, which may be a factor in the complaints.

The degree to which these narratives are accurate is debatable. It's easy to see how the student complaints line up with Jones. A lot of people are going to look at it in a certain way. Jones ran afoul of his students and there is more going on here.

Post-pandemic teaching?

The class that had issues with Jones' performance was held at the end of the school year when many campuses tried to have a normal academic year. Almost every aspect of education has been disrupted by waves of infections that have swept through campuses since the Pandemic hasn't ended. Some of the problems mentioned by Jones' students seem to be a result of the chaos of the previous year.

The students in organic chemistry would have spent their first year of college having it turned upside-down because of the swine flu. The arrival of vaccines and the Delta wave led to rapid policy changes.

Some of the problems this group of students is experiencing could be a result of that. The first year of college is a time when students are forced to figure out how to learn from the information they are given. The process was disrupted by mid-pandemic school.

It's not clear how best to support the students who find themselves thrown into higher-level classes without the skills they've learned in the first place. NYU's organic chemistry students aren't the only ones experiencing this problem and any solutions should involve a lot more than just firing any professors who aren't helping the students get up to speed.