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Notes -
Students get renowned NYU professor fired for giving low grades
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/us/nyu-organic-chemistry-petition.html
A quarter of students signed a petition that an organic chemistry class was too hard, and the professor teaching it was fired. The professor, Maitland Jones, had taught organic chemistry for decades, at NYU and Princeton before it. He had also written a widely used textbook on it. Causes cited include MJ being an asshole; COVID educational policies; and a general downward trend in student quality preceding COVID. One thing that isn't mentioned is that NYU adopted an SAT-optional test policy for the class entering in 2020.
This is why educational policies matter at every level. As a cohort degrades in quality, downstream institutions face pressure to adapt curricula and policies to satisfy those students. The next downstream organization then faces the same pressure. If the student was good enough to graduate high school, shouldn't they be good enough to go to college? If a student got into a university, shouldn't they be good enough to pass all their classes? If a student graduated from undergrad, shouldn't they have a shot at doctoral and professional degrees? If they got into med school, shouldn't they be able to graduate? If they got an MD, shouldn't they able to be a practicing surgeon?
Students do stupid things all the time, often en masse. And yet an ad hoc collection of students suddenly has the power to fire faculty? Where were the adu...oh, right. Once again, the person who affirmatively took the action described in the headline, who had the absolute ability to choose otherwise, skates past entirely unmentioned. "What shall I do in the face of a student petition?!" cried the dean. "My hands were tied!"
I have no idea whether the petition was "encouraged" by university staff, or whether it was truly...uh...organic. But the person responsible for the firing has a name, and allowing whoever that was to evade responsibility is counterproductive to reversing the rot in academia.
Failing to ask and answer one of the core questions of the story--"who made the central decision described in the headline?"--is incompetent journalism at best.
We have a name! I did not push through the NYT registration to read the full article there, but I did google some other articles from other sources, and this detail was not included in those other places.
Next step: accountability. Is Gregory Gabadadze going to feel the heat for this, or will he be allowed to withdraw into the academic swamp, while whatever blame is assigned lands on the (mostly unnamed!) students, and even then, mostly dismissed as "kids these days"? Even the quotes from other professors who thought this was a bad thing gestured vaguely at NYU as an institutional actor, not the Dean himself.
I'm predicting that Gregory Gabadadze continues on generally untroubled by his actions, rubberstamping the petitions that suit him and ignoring the others and any consequences for his decisions. I would prefer to be wrong again.
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