The New York Times reports on Maitland Jones, a professor of organic chemistry at New York University, who was fired after a quarter of his students signed a petition claiming that the class he taught was too difficult. Important: the students didn’t ask that their professor be fired.
I think one of Jones’s colleagues has it right:
“The deans are obviously going for some bottom line, and they want happy students who are saying great things about the university so more people apply and the U.S. News rankings keep going higher,” said Paramjit Arora, a chemistry professor who has worked closely with Dr. Jones.Keep the customer satisfied! I recall an adminstrator somewhere in these United States encouraging faculty to get creative in finding ways to help students pass their courses.
And I find this detail telling:
Many students were having other problems. Kent Kirshenbaum, another chemistry professor at N.Y.U., said he discovered cheating during online tests. When he pushed students’ grades down, noting the egregious misconduct, he said they protested that “they were not given grades that would allow them to get into medical school.”One caution: when you read that some students found Jones “sarcastic and downbeat about the class’s poor performance,” it helps to know that sarcasm, as Sheridan Baker pointed out in 1962, is “the student’s word for irony.”
[My sense of this situation is based on what’s reported in the Times article. More information might change things. But firing the guy? Uh-uh.]
comments: 5
Many years after I graduated from high school one of my high school teachers recounted a then recent story where a freshman's mother complained about the grade her son had received. Having had this teacher for 4 years I strongly suspect the student deserved the grade. The mother's complaint was that the teacher was keeping her son out of medical school.
I suspect that the student was able to manage that on his own. : )
That was nearly exactly what the teacher said. Fortunately the school administration backed up the teacher.
Good on the administration.
obviously some of the students didn't go to university of tennessee. my statics professor took off 10 points on every question if you didn't include the units in the answer. his reasoning was he didn't want one of his students designing bridges that fell down.
engineering school also had weed-out classes -- organic chemistry is one for med school. we had physical chemistry and quantitative analysis. they were pain in the butt classes but i managed to make it through!
universities are less bastions of knowledge but have become a corporation and the student/parents are the customers and they are always right. and they wonder why enrollment has fallen.
kirsten
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