NYU professor says was fired after students complained class was too hard
Maitland Jones Jr. says that, despite decades of experience, the $80K-a-year school catered to students who were failing his organic chemistry class and canned him, according an interview in the New York Times.
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.
“Students were misreading exam questions at an astonishing rate,” Jones, who authored the 1,300-page textbook “Organic Chemistry,” wrote in a grievance to NYU obtained by the Times.
“In the last two years, they fell off a cliff,” the 84-year-old professor said of the college kids’ pandemic performance. “We now see single digit scores and even zeros.”
“They weren’t coming to class, that’s for sure, because I can count the house,” Jones added, defending himself and saying the kids simply were not studying hard enough. “They weren’t watching the videos, and they weren’t able to answer the questions.”
In their petition, students said that “a class with such a high percentage of withdrawals and low grades has failed to make students’ learning and well-being a priority.”
The students claimed Jones’ class “reflects poorly on the chemistry department as well as the institution as a whole” and said the prof addressed kids in a “condescending and demanding” tone.
The students notably did not call for his firing, and were surprised he was terminated, according to the Times. Jones appeared to be teaching at NYU on a contract after retiring from Princeton, where he was a professor.
One of Jones’ teaching assistants, Zacharia Benslimane, defended his former boss: “I think this petition was written more out of unhappiness with exam scores than an actual feeling of being treated unfairly.”
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.”
Jones told the Times his firing sets a scary precedent.
“I don’t want my job back … I just want to make sure this doesn’t happen to anyone else,” he said.
See more here nypost.com
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Carbon Bigfoot
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Easiest chemistry course I ever took. All you need is a Grignard Reaction and you can even synthesize Jerry Krause’s PhD.
Sorry I couldn’t resist—have a great day Jerry!!
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Jerry Krause
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Hi Carbon,
Thank you for the compliment by joking about my degree which is the result of six years of graduate study as a major in physical chemistry wminors in physics and advanced mathematics.. If I were actually intelligent it should have taken only three, or four years as is typical for organic chemistry majors. Carbon, I had never understood organic chemistry until I began teaching organic chemistry using the very popular organic textbook, Organic Chemistry (1959 to 1992 6th Ed.) by Robert Thornton Morrison and Robert Neilson Boyd (New York University).
Which is interesting for I now see Maitland Jones Jr., while at Princeton University, must had written a competitor of Morrison and Boyd’s ‘Organic Chemistry’ textbook. I have to ask: why did the NYU administration hire an 84-year-old professor, who had written his organic textbook while at Princeton? They should have been aware of the widespread popularity of Morrison & Boyd’s textbook relative to that of Jones Jr’s textbook at Princeton.
However, the central purpose of this comment is the fact I was dismissed, by my-administration, for reasons only known to them, from a 20+ year community college chemistry instructor position. Which dismissal, we, faculty association and I, challenged and was given a golden parachute to retire. However, a fact was that a student, without a high school diploma, had previously, in an introductory chemistry course, charged me with sexual harassment and racial discrimination in Federal District Court and appealed the decision there to the Federal Court of Appeals and lost her case there also.
What had I done? I had given this student a D, which she earned, in the course when she needed a C to continue her effort to gain possible admission to the college’s register-nursing program.
Have a good day, Jerry
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Jerry Krause
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Hi Carbon,
You have given me an opportunity (excuse) to ramble on about my teaching experiences.
While I was a chemistry instructor for 20+ years, the Minnesota State Community College System funded great faculty development activities to help faculty become better teachers. And if one has ever taken the generally required chemistry courses for multiple majors, one is maybe of the opinion that chemistry professors and instructors needed the most help. And I could generally see (understand) the value of this new information to which we were being exposed. So I generally tried to incorporate these different methods into my courses while it seems other faculty and the administration ignored them.
I will ignore the details which lead to the fact that I, in a one person ‘chemistry department’ 4 of the 5 weekly class meetings which had for decades generally existed. For my experience and that of my graduate school colleagues was that we learned very little in our chemistry courses’ lectures. We learned because our professor chose a textbook of chemistry information and assigned problems and question that the author (s) included in their textbooks. We learned by doing this ‘homework’ and were tested to provide evidence of what we had learned at home. At the time I did this the reaction was this was too much like a correspondence course. Except a fact I was available, in my office which had a floor to nearly ceiling window so I could observe my students working independently on their laboratory assignments more than 40 hours a week. So if my students had any questions I was available if I was not lecturing to other classes where I answered various students’ questions. For I never tried to lecture (give students information) which was in their assigned textbook and assigned textbook questions and problems.
So because one could not teach a required chemistry course this way could have something to do with my administration’s attempt to dismiss me.
Today, college level correspondent education is quite popular and economical. And I will comment upon the history of chemistry education which occurred while I was an instructor.
Have a good day, Jerry
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schutzhund
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As Harvard professor Paul Peterson writes in The Heritage Foundation’s new book “The Not-So-Great Society”:
The achievement gap in the United States is as wide today as it was in 1971.The performances on math, reading, and science tests between the most advantaged and the most disadvantaged students differ by approximately four years’ worth of learning, a disparity that has remained essentially unchanged for nearly half a century.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2019/12/10/students-test-scores-unchanged-after-decades-of-federal-intervention-in-education/?
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schutzhund
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“We tracked staff contributions to political campaigns in a sample of 73 education-reform organizations funded by the Gates Foundation, including Achieve, Teach For America, the New Schools Venture Fund, Alliance for Excellent Education, Jobs for the Future, Turnaround for Children, and Bellwether Education Partners. In total, we found 2,625 political campaign contributions from the staff of Gates grantees. Of those contributions, more than 99% supported Democratic candidates or the Democratic Party. Only eight (that’s eight, not 8%) of the 2,625 campaign contributions went to Republicans.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/democrats-have-taken-over-education-reform-11552002719?
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