Students get NYU Prof cancelled after getting bad grades

4 lessons for the future

I had a chance to read the news story about Maitland Jones, who was the author of the Organic Chemistry textbook that I used when I was a student. For most of his career, Dr. Jones taught organic chemistry at Princeton University, where he was generally considered a superb lecturer. In his older years, he began teaching the class as an adjunct at NYU. Organic chemistry is often used as a litmus test of who gets to become a doctor. Over the last couple years, the grades in the class declined. Dr. Jones contends that the problem was zoom has resulted in students becoming lazy. They don't come to class. They don't learn the material. As such, their grades went down. There is no survey of all the students in the class. A fraction of students have defended Dr. Jones as providing good content. While approximately 80 out of 350 students signed a petition saying Dr. Jones was not teaching well. Ultimately, Dr. Jones was dismissed from his position.

The article in the New York Times struck a chord, as many people believe that students are being coddled, and administrators are capitulating to their every demands.

Having reviewed the original article, and dozens of commentaries about it, I offer 4 thoughts. Two are about what might have actually happened in the class. The third is about the need for organic chemistry, and the fourth is a broader comment about students, and the reason why the article went viral.

1. What if Dr. Jones is right. Consider for a moment the first hypothesis that Dr. Jones is entirely correct. It is not hard to believe that in the era of zoom, people have forgotten how to study. Students have become so accustomed to watching videos at home, and they are phoning it in. It's possible he's right, and that's what most people have accepted at face value.

2. What if Dr. Jones is slipping. Consider the second hypothesis that Dr. Jones was once a great teacher, but in his advanced years is slipping. He was irritated by zoom, and now he is phoning it in. He's not putting in the same effort, or lacks the same talent.

How do you separate these two? Unfortunately the students' petition is useless. Because we don't know the opinions of the vast majority who didn't sign it. It's also useless to hear anecdotes about how good he is, or how bad he is. The only way to know for sure is if the university made every single person who took every single class fill out surveys in every single year. They could also send faculty to observe each other on random days and file reports. You need comprehensive, or at least random data to draw an assessment. You can't do it from selected data. People who feel strongly in any direction will be the ones most likely to comment. Universities haven't figured out the simple solution. Fill out a quick five question survey about a class before you get your grade. Then you'll get 100% compliance every time. Right now the story of Maitland Jones is he said, they said, they said.

3. No matter what happened with Maitland Jones, we have to acknowledge that organic chemistry is absolutely useless as a prerequisite for medical school. 99% of practicing doctors could not pass a elementary organic chemistry exam, because it is not necessary or pertinent to the day-to-day practice of medicine. Being able to assess information, reading studies, talking to people, solving problems, those are vital skills. Some say that organic chemistry teaches discipline or problem solving, even if the content is irrelevant. But this is a foolish argument. You can make students memorize state and national capitals to test wrote memorization and it would be equally irrelevant for being a doctor. Or memorize baseball statistics from the 1950s. In fact, memorizing sports trivia might be better to connect with your patients.

   The prerequisites for medical school have to make sense. We are using standards that were developed hundreds of years ago, and that have not been updated. Medical educators are scared to change. I don't know if Maitland Jones has to go, but Orgo certainly does.

4. The reason the article is resonant is that regardless of the truth in this situation many people agree with the broader cultural point. Universities seem less like a place that challenges students, and more like a customer service industry trying to capture their business. This is evident in their cafeterias which serve opulent food trying to get the higher earning children's parents to send their kids there. The dorm rooms are nicer. The gyms are nicer. It's like going to a spa. Many universities don't want to offer ideas that may offend the students. They want safe spaces from ideas. They want to capitulate to every demand the students have. And students also want to guarantee the grades they get. A generation raised on participation trophies gone mad.

   When I was a student, it would be unthinkable to submit a petition like this. When I was a student if you got a bad grade, you blamed yourself first and foremost. And you set out to do better. And I've had many s***** teachers. Teachers that were incompetent and inept, some even had the wrong answers to questions. What did I do? I didn't complain about it. I figured out a way to outsmart the system and still get a good grade. Because that's what it takes to succeed in life. That's the real secret.

   Ironically if you want to be a good doctor the best skill you could possibly have is figuring out how to advance your cause in the face of a relentless, grueling, heartless system. When your patient needs something, you find a way to bend and flex every rule and program to make sure your patient gets it. Maitland Joneses are a dime a dozen. Finding ways to succeed even with a Maitland Jones standing in your way is the secret to being a good doctor. Insurance companies are Maitland Jones. Pharmaceutical companies are Maitland Jones. The journals are Maitland Jones. You can't sign petitions to replace all of them. You've got to figure out a way to outsmart the system for the best interest of the person in your office.

No matter what happened in this case, this story resonates because people feel it is intuitively true that administrators are capitulating to students. So there are three things they do wrong. 1 They don't collect feedback in a useful way to figure out who's telling the truth here. 2. They still requiring a useless prerequisite for medical school, because they're scared to adapt to the changing times. 3. They're coddling students. I think probably all three of these are true. And it does not bode well.