NYU’s firing of Professor Maitland Jones Jr. should frighten every American

Article

NYU’s firing of Professor Maitland Jones Jr. should frighten every American

New York University fired Maitland Jones Jr. because his organic chemistry course was “too hard.” The man wrote the textbook on the subject, now in its fifth edition, and had been a star teacher at Princeton. He went out of his way to tape his lectures, at his own cost, to mitigate some of the attendance problems attributed to the pandemic.

Yet students revolted because they feared, according to the New York Times, that “they were not given the grades that would allow them to get into medical school.”

The professor, meanwhile, saw a different problem: “They weren’t coming to class. … They weren’t watching the videos, and they weren’t able to answer the questions.” But the school terminated his employment rather than the students, who are on track to become physicians despite struggling to get into med school.

Every American should be worried because this kind of standard-lowering is becoming commonplace in medical school.

.....