Bad Old School?

If you’re a college-level chemistry instructor, the big news that has gone around in a flash stems from a New York Times article today titled: “At N.Y.U., students were failing organic chemistry. Who was to blame?” NYU dismissed professor Maitland Jones, Jr., after a student petition submitted a petition that the O-Chem class was “too hard, blaming Dr. Jones for their poor tests scores.”

 

I was surprised to see Jones’ name because I recognized it immediately reading the first sentence of the article. He’s known among other things for his organic chemistry textbook. Jones retired from Princeton over 15 years ago and has been teaching as an adjunct at NYU. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t need the money and that he’s doing it because he enjoys teaching and cares about the education of students. One doesn’t write a textbook, continue to update it, and continue to work on new teaching materials, if one doesn’t love teaching. And if your textbook has gone through multiple additions, it’s probably not bad, and likely quite good.

 

Despite the lengthiness of the article, we don’t really know what happened here. I expect more pertinent details to be revealed over time. Was Jones doing such a terrible job teaching as the dean claimed when referring to teaching evaluations? Maybe. But maybe students complained because they were getting poor grades on their exams and were very concerned that it would affect their medical school applications. Jones says that students weren’t coming to class, weren’t watching the videos he had made, and seemed ill-prepared. Were they? Maybe. But maybe Jones was a hard-ass old fogey who was doing a poor job. I don’t know – there’s not enough information to tell.

 

The Times article says the following: “The entire controversy seems to illustrate a sea of change in teaching, from an era when professors set the bar and expected the class to meet it, to the current more supportive, student-centered approach.” It then quotes some chemistry department professors, essentially saying that Dr. Jones teaches in the old-school way, and hasn’t “changed his style or methods”. That worries me. There’s an unspoken assumption that old-school is bad and that it’s a less student-centered approach (which isn’t defined clearly either). Within my own department, I suspect I would be labeled old-school, although I don’t think my department views this as a negative. But students may see this as a bad thing. I do have a reputation for being “hard” and my sections of G-Chem are less popular with students. Compared to my colleagues, my G-Chem grade distributions aren’t too different although I suspect they are marginally lower than the average. (I grade on an absolute scale; there's no curve.)

 

As to whose fault low test scores are, I think that grades are earned, but the instructor also sets the exam and the grading scale. There’s no easy absolute clear-cut way to define what counts as low or high. Perception matters a lot and colors the whole situation. In the Jones case, it is clear that a number of the students perceived the O-Chem class to be way too hard and the grades to be too low relative to “the time and effort [the students] put into the class”. John Beckman, NYU’s senior vice president for public affairs and strategic communications is quoted as saying: “Do these courses really need to be punitive to be rigorous?” I think he misuses the words punitive and rigorous here, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he got misquoted or some context was left out. That being said, I’m unimpressed with the university’s response both from the dean and from the senior vice president. But I should not be too quick to judge. Let’s see how the details unfold. And for the record: old-school is not necessarily bad or good. It depends on the context.