Over the weekend, news broke that a well-regarded professor who taught chemistry at New York University had been fired after students complained about their grades, his teaching, and the support they received during the pandemic. The story has garnered wide attention because it seems to have a little something for everyone—students taking over the education system, the chaos of our not-quite-post-COVID world, and more.
Largely left out of the discussion is the role of the subject matter of the course at issue: organic chemistry, which has an almost mythical status as one of the most difficult classes in undergraduate science education. For those willing to wade past all the other issues raised, the events raise awkward questions about what we expect from science education and how best to deliver it.
But to get to those questions, we'll first have to wade through all the additional issues raised by the firing.
Higher ed issues
Maitland Jones, Jr., the fired professor, taught at NYU after semi-retiring from an earlier academic career at Princeton University. Jones is widely credited for rethinking how organic chemistry is taught and has written an organic chem textbook centered on his teaching ideas. But, at 84 years old, he told The New York Times that he was thinking of retiring soon.
His schedule got accelerated after students ran into issues during the 2021-2022 teaching year, which culminated in about a quarter of his class of 350 students signing a petition that does not seem to be publicly available. According to the Times, some complaints were simply about grades, with students having only a few midterms, one with a mean grade in the 30 percent range. But it also reportedly mentioned that the students weren't given sufficient resources to succeed and that Jones wasn't always supportive when students asked him for help.
The petition did not call for Jones' firing. But that's the action that NYU administrators took in response. That decision has been criticized by other faculty at NYU, teaching assistants, and some of Jones' students. In a statement given to Reason, an NYU spokesman defended the firing by also noting high student withdrawals and bad course evaluations.
These events are probably attracting some attention because they fit nicely with a couple of popular narratives about failings in the modern university system. As tuitions have skyrocketed, there's been a temptation to treat degrees as products and students as customers that need to be drawn in and kept satisfied. Attracting more students also boosts tuition income, but having 350 students in a chemistry class can tend to limit student satisfaction, which may have been a factor in the complaints.
Some takes on the modern university system suggest that the desire to keep students happy has left administrators caving to their demands, essentially placing the inmates in control of the asylum. The degree to which these narratives are accurate is hotly debated. But it's easy to see how Jones' firing after student complaints lines up nicely with them. That means a lot of people are going to interpret it strictly through that lens. But there's a lot more going on here, including when Jones ran afoul of his students.
Post-pandemic teaching?
The class that had issues with Jones' performance was held at the end of the 2021-2022 school year when many campuses attempted to have their first "normal" academic year since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the pandemic hasn't ended, students and faculty are still dealing with waves of infections that sweep through campuses, disrupting almost every aspect of education. But some of the problems mentioned by Jones' students suggest that they were a hangover from the even more pronounced chaos of the year prior.
Organic chemistry is normally a sophomore-year class, meaning the students would have spent their first year of college having it turned upside-down by a pandemic that was most decidedly not over. The arrival of vaccines and the Delta wave led to rapidly shifting policies, sporadic campus closures, and frequent student absences.
That could be a significant contributor to some of the problems this cohort of students is experiencing. One of the underrated aspects of the first year of college is that students are compelled to figure out how to process the firehose of information that college throws at people—students figure out how to learn in some ways. And that process was completely disrupted by the chaos of mid-pandemic schooling.
It's not clear how best to support the students who find themselves thrown into higher-level classes without the skills developed in intro-level courses. But two things should be clear: 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.
What's science education for?
Looming in the background of all of this is that this happened in organic chemistry, a famously difficult class that often convinces pre-meds that they're willing to give up on what may have been their (and their family's) life-long dream of becoming a doctor, and switch over to an English major. There are some who take organic chemistry to get into a Ph.D. program or prepare for a career in chemistry, but they're relatively rare. Most of the students are pre-med, and for a lot of them, organic chemistry is a dream-shattering experience.
That experience almost certainly influenced some of the unhappy students who signed the petition.
We've ended up in that situation because being a doctor is hard, and some of the people who want to be doctors don't really have the needed aptitude. Meanwhile, organic chemistry is also hard, but a deep understanding of the topic underlies everything from drugs to the factors that drive our bodies' biochemical imbalances. We have, perhaps accidentally, used organic chemistry classes as a filter that helps us limit who gets to continue in medicine.
It's not just that professors like Jones teach a class that routinely crushes childhood dreams; doing so seems to serve a useful societal-level function. But it seems worth considering whether that's either inevitable or the best way of achieving the sort of filtering we need to do. Or have we set Jones up when there are better ways of handling things?
As for the inevitability, organic chemistry, at least as it's currently taught, is hard, involving a mix of memorization and problem solving (see today's Nobel Prize coverage if you want a greater sense of why). The memorization can be compared to committing dozens of flow charts to your brain, as each type of reaction will need different conditions and catalysts depending on the precise nature of the starting materials. Armed with that memorization, people are then ready for problem-solving: figuring out which combinations of reactions will build simple raw materials into a complex chemical like an antibiotic or polymer.
Figuring out how to test that knowledge is also difficult. During one of my semesters in the class, the mean results from the four mid-term exams alternated between 30 and 70 percent as the professors struggled to find the right level of challenge.
It's notable that Jones' teaching approach is credited with shifting the focus away from the drudgery of memorization and toward the more entertaining problem-solving aspects. But even that couldn't keep all his students happy.
Again, however, that's all relevant to how organic chemistry is currently taught. The education described above is general enough that it works for both pre-meds and those who want to go on to a career in chemistry or related sciences. The two have overlapping needs, but they're distinct enough that an "organic chemistry for medicine" class could potentially be designed to avoid some of the difficulties associated with current teaching methods. But then we'd have to come up with some other way of limiting medical degrees to the people with the best aptitude for them.
All of this means that some of Jones' unpopularity with his students is a product of using science education to perform a society-level function that has little to do with education.
Where does that leave us?
The first thing I'd argue is that the least interesting thing here is the culture war aspects of Jones' firing. There seems to have been a steady stream of stories about students demanding the firing of faculty for perceived offenses, but the students here didn't even call for Jones' firing.
At least some of them are probably responding to real issues about how the university was re-integrating students into the campus environment after the widespread disruptions that occurred earlier in the pandemic, and NYU is unlikely to be alone in having problems there. That reintegration should sort itself out over the next couple of years purely through graduation, if nothing else, but schools should be thinking about how best to handle the inevitable disruptions that will come as cases sporadically surge on campuses.
As for non-pandemic issues, any problems with the campus environment or Jones' teaching were critically enhanced by the fact that he was teaching a course that our education system uses as a barrier to keep some people out of the medical field. Organic chemistry is not just one of "lots of hard courses," as the NYU spokesperson put it; it's a class that poses perhaps the largest barrier that stands between some students and their dreams. Given that, anyone in Jones' position is always going to be very unpopular with some students.
That should make NYU especially careful about how it responds to student complaints in this area. The university noted that Jones was an adjunct on a one-year contract, and thus could be replaced at will. But it's a safe bet that any adjunct hired as a replacement wouldn't have authored a prominent textbook on the topic they would teach. So any problems significant enough to warrant firing should have been documented and shared with the department that will now have to find Jones' replacement. Given that members of the chemistry department protested the firing, that clearly wasn't done.
Finally, there's the issue of why organic chemistry is a high-stakes class. That basically comes down to the fact that the education system is using it to perform a function that has little to do with an education in the relevant subject. While the difficulty was just one of the factors that contributed to Jones' firing, it affects undergraduate education throughout the US, so it might be the most significant issue here.
