Professor fired for making organic chemistry course too difficult
Back when I was in school, I remember that organic chemistry was always considered a very difficult course by those of us who weren’t science whizzes. I was good at science, but college chemistry was something from which I shied away.
Little did we know that we could have gone this route instead:
Professor Maitland Jones Jr. has been teaching organic chemistry for years at Princeton and then New York University.
This past spring, several of his students launched a petition claiming that his course was too hard. NYU ended up firing him, which the students didn’t even demand.
Not that it would have worked that way when I was in college. If anyone were to be shown the door in a case like that, it would probably have been the students.
More on Jones and the complaining students:
In 2007, [Jones] semi-retired and began teaching organic chemistry at New York University on an adjunct basis…
…[A]ccording to Jones, the students weren’t putting in enough effort—and had become disengaged, anxious, and indolent as a result of the pandemic.
“They weren’t coming to class, that’s for sure,” said Jones. “They weren’t watching the videos, and they weren’t able to answer the questions.”…
Organic chemistry is the bane of medical students everywhere, precisely because it is such a hard class. But many doctors would argue that that’s the point: The class is designed to act as an effective gatekeeper, preventing underqualified students from entering the field of medicine…
…82 of Jones’ 350 students [that’s 23%] signed the petition last spring; it alleged that too many of them were failing and that this was unacceptable. The students cited emotional and mental health complaints to make the case that Jones ought to make the class less difficult…
…[T]hroughout the pandemic, Jones made a number of accommodations for struggling students. He reduced the difficulty of his exams, but students were still failing them.
“Students were misreading exam questions at an astonishing rate,” said Jones…
…Jones is a lion in the field of organic chemistry, publishing 225 papers in his 40-year career. He literally wrote the textbook, “Organic Chemistry,” which weighs in at 1,300 pages.
“[Jones] learned to teach during a time when the goal was to teach at a very high and rigorous level,” Paramjit Arora, a professor of chemistry at NYU and former colleague of Jones told The Times.
Those days are gone.
These students are, for the most part, desirous of becoming scientists and doctors, or they almost certainly wouldn’t be taking organic chemistry in the first place. But meritocracy has been sacrificed to ideology, and nothing is allowed to disturb the equanimity of students who otherwise wish to be treated as adults.
And the left’s agenda marches on…
Snowflakes court their future enslavement.
“a government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.” Pres. Gerald Ford, in an address to a joint session of Congress on August 12, 1974 [origin unattributed]
The chairman of the chemistry department is Mark Tuckerman. The dean of arts and sciences is Antonio Merlo. The interim provost is Georgina Dopico. These are the responsible parties.
Good thing they weren’t taking P-Chem.
Of note, DIE doesn’t seem to be playing a central role here. The professor in question is a white male, but there don’t seem to be any accusations of racial or gender bias. Rather, these are just privileged snowflakes, with their helicopter parents complaining because a rigorous science course is, well, rigorous.
They want to be doctors, engineers, or scientists, but they don’t want to EARN those degrees.
with their helicopter parents complaining because a rigorous science course is
I haven’t seen any reports about helicopter parents.
My wager would be that office politics is behind it. Dr. Jones is 84 and has been on renewable contracts there for 15 years. It’s a retirement position. At one time, he was tenured faculty someplace else. He doesn’t need the job and says he does not want it back.
Ethylene glycol and polyethylene glycol. One will kill you or your dog, if you drink it (has a sweet taste IIRC), the other, not. Safer antifreeze vs the other, deadly one. Or ethanol and methanol, one is deadly.
Beware, young, lazy, fools who may become doctors.
Reposting what I wrote on the open thread:
Teaching the Gen Physics course for the bio, chem, and worse premeds was an exercise in masochism. We made sure no one ever taught the course two times in a row. Walking in the first day of class, the faculty were greeted by sullen faces and crossed arms. They didn’t want to be there, and were convinced the faculty were there to ruin their plans for med school. No matter how much effort a faculty person put into teaching that course, including extended office hours and help sessions, it was never enough.
The phrase, “But I studied hours for that exam! How could I possibly get a C (or even a D or F)?!” was used so often it was a cliche. I heard from my colleagues in the chem department, take our experience and multiply by 5 regarding the orgo course.
Decades ago I finished first place in my org. chem course, peopled by sophs and juniors [I was a soph], to everyone’s surprise. But it is simply taking molecules apart, plus making new ones. It is no big deal [or was not to me]. So I was accepted in two weeks to the only med school to which I applied.
I remember cutting out a letter in the Kansas City paper to show the students in middle school math. The writer’s wife was on some medication dose of .1 gram; her doctor said he was reducing it by a fourth and wrote a prescription for .75 gram. Her husband caught the error and held it out as an example of why everyone needs to know math, if only save themself from someone else’s mistake.
nothing is allowed to disturb the equanimity of students who otherwise wish to be treated as adults.
WISH to be treated as adults, while refusing to act accordingly? WISH to act as scientists or doctors, while refusing to act accordingly?
Seems like some administrative hierarchy @ NYU has identical wishes – and should logically be run out of town on a rail. An education this is not.
I’ll most likely be deceased by the time these clowns “earn” their medical degrees. We’re headed for idiocracy.
My current doctor is in her 60s. When she retires, I will only accept a new doctor if he is at least 10 years my senior (currently 36yo) and white. Probably male, too.
I trust almost no one on the tail end of the millennials, let alone Gen Z. And women and minorities I will always suspect to be token hires. I say all that as a woman. Nope, affirmative action and dumbing down of the requirements helped no one. All I know is that if you are a white male who made it in your field, you MUST be the best of the best, else you would have been kicked to side to allow for someone from an “oppressed group” to have a chance.
NS,
Similar thoughts have occurred to me. After moving I had to find a new primary care. First had to learn that here in NE Florida, Baptist Health looks to be the best health system. Next I went through all the PCPs in the area looking at resumes, education, backgrounds, etc. Finally decided to meet one…. she is in her late 40s, retired, decorated Navy vet. We immediately hit it off on a personal level. She also is thorough and professional.
Good news for me, I will probably die before she retires and I would have to find a younger doctor that I could actually trust. 🙂
NS– Here is something to think about.
For years, decades, my doctor (primary care physician in medical-ese) was a friend and former colleague of my wife (ER nurse), We were all about the same age and all was well. Then the doc decided to retire. Nice, but I was still alive and finally entering that point in life (as was my wife) where medical issues take up a bit more of one’s time. There were no doctors practicing who were my age. I’m now within weeks of 78 yrs old. All doctors look like Dougie Houser.
I respect and agree with, in general, your criteria…. but will warn you to not be surprised when you have to make some adjustments in later years. 🙂
This one hits a little close to home, as I was a TA for several years, usually helping run the 1-credit (but 3- or 4-hour) organic lab for sophomore pre-med types. I gained a certain notoriety for the difficulty of the quizzes I wrote and my rather tough approach to grading lab reports generally, although the quizzes (just 5-10 minutes long) really shouldn’t have been that hard for anyone who was thinking a reasonable amount about the point of that week’s experiment.
I had fun writing them. I forget what the exact questions were, but to give an example of the kinds of things I used to ask, take this somewhat made-up one:
Today’s experiment requires you to dissolve 100 mg of benzaldehyde in methanol and then add compound [whatever-the-heck-it-was], which is expected to produce a green precipitate. But suppose you run out of methanol and reach over to choose a different, unlabeled solvent in which to dissolve the benzaldehyde, and suppose this ends up yielding a red precipitate instead. Based on what you know from studying this experiment, is the unknown solvent (a) ethyl ether, (b) acetone, or (c) chloroform?
I was also a bit obsessive about personally verifying the melting points of every product that the students turned in. I caught some very bad fakers that way.
These kinds of things led, one fine day, to a visit paid to the professor supervising the lab class (who was an organic synthesis specialist) by a trio of students from one of my sections. As he later described it to me, they felt I was “out to get them”, which I found somewhat amusing and he perhaps more so. I think they wanted him to lean on me to ease up or something like that; it slips my memory what their precise beef was. There might have been a charge of sexism leveled as part of all that. But the professor and I talked it over and nothing came of it in the end. I suppose that’s the closest I’ve ever come to Professor Jones’ calamity.
Now in some of the commentary circulating on this situation at NYU, there are suggestions that maybe Prof. Jones was just a poor teacher. That’s possible – certainly I never claimed to be a fantastic educator when I was serving as a TA. For one thing, I tended to get lost in the fine details of a subject and run off on tangents much too easily. It took me a long time to get that habit under control. So if that is indeed part of the reason for the firing, I could understand it.
Philip Sells:
How hard is organic for a reasonably bright student, though not a chemistry major?
I remember pre-med students who looked forward to organic with all the enthusiasm of a death march.
I had two years into psych when I finally figured out I had not the personality for it. But I had two years sunk and needed a degree for OCS so onward I went. As it happened, the Army had a slot for me…Infantry. Go figure.
So I had mostly “soft” courses. I was required to take some physical science courses, non-major chem and biology and so forth. Call those “hard” courses, although not referring to difficulty.
In my experience, the “soft” courses need a teacher and the hard courses need somebody to tell you what textbook they’re using this semester. Chem lab more or less excepted while they’re showing you how not to blow up the Quonset hut.
I exaggerate, in my reflection on the thing, only slightly.
Another Mike – I completely understand and pretty much agree with you.
The way I look at it is this – in 30 years, either all this woke nonsense will either have died a very well deserved death, and perhaps the next generation (that of my children – what’s after gen z?) will have whipped themselves into shape after the embarrassment of their contemporaries caved to all this pseudoscience and mediocrity. In which case I’ll be looking for a fresh 30something doctor who came after all the woke BS.
OR civil war will have ravaged the country or the New World Order will have taken over, and in either of those cases, my husband and I will be living off the land (possibly on the run?), staying off the grid, and bartering with our silver coins, and we’ll be responsible for our own health at that point.
So…I dunno, can that be classified as “hope?” It’s at least a plan, I guess.
If there’s anything in between those two circumstances – no crazy fascist takeover but everything is still Woke as ever and doctors are all idiots – well, then, I guess I’ll just die young. Not much I can do about the ineptitude of others.
huxley-
As someone who took the class a decade ago. I can say that the wash out rate at the college where I took it was near 75%.
We actually had Canadian pharmacists in the class who needed to complete it for licensing purposes in the states. And some of them were barely passing.
Primarily the class strongly tests
1) Heavy memorization of IUPAC naming and the rules associated with it. These are the long names you usually see on some chemicals. Such as 2,5,5-trimethyl-2-hexene. The numbers and names each have a particular meaning. They also are important for part 2
2) Spacial orientation- The numbers not only represent the location of particular molecules. But how they orient around each other. Without being too technical you need to mentally be able to picture how this molecule looks in your head by the understanding of the name.
3) Strong math skills- and understanding how to apply them. While showing your work.
Many people can be strong in one or two of the areas. But applying all three at the same time is the real challenge. I actually used a system that was not taught much anymore from a teacher I had in the 80’s Where I converted everything to ratio’s and it created a shortcut which I could speed up the calculation portion along during tests. I had to actually demonstrate it to the instructor so he would pass me on my first test. He wanted to make sure I understood the math as I applied it. And I did not luck into a work around.
Most of the instructors when I took the class actually allowed you to use a the text and a calculator. Because if you did not understand how to apply the material you could not pass even with them.
Many teachers also employ a set of dynamic scoring. Where I was given the test and each question had a point value. Usually 4 questions on each topic with points 1,2,3,4. You could answer any questions you wanted. But you also had to balance the time constraints of doing so. Many 4 point questions simply were not worth the time involved. And you racked up 2 and 3 point questions to keep your scores up.
They tell you up front you will not finish the test. No one can. But it can be very demoralizing to only complete say 60% of the questions. That alone washed many people who were perfectionists out of the class by the second test
Mythx:
Thanks for a thorough answer!
This idiocy is already bearing fruit in the field and is why, in my late 40s, I refuse to work with a doctor if they aren’t at least my age. If I am forced to deal with a young PA, I either go over their head, or if that’s unsuccessful, cancel the appointment and look elsewhere. As others have stated, it’s ridiculous.
huxley-
No problem at all. I think the direct answer to your question is. If you are reasonably bright you can succeed. If you are adaptable.
I saw people spend hours trying to memorize the various rules and formulas. So they understood the material far more intimately than I did. But would wash out because they lacked the ability to work the rules and make value judgements.
And when you thing about it. It makes some sense. Math and Chemistry tend to draw perfectionist to fields. Many of my fellow students could complete the material. But really lacked an understanding of the hows and whys. So often they could give you a perfect answer without really being able to apply that in a laboratory setting.
I usually tried to look out for lab partners who were strong in this way. And worked out a deal. Where I did the lab work and they wrote the reports.
This instructor was and remains the co-author of a leading textbook on the subject — up through five editions. If you want to master a subject, this is the best task master to submit oneself to therefore se, you’re faking it.
The fact is, why is the youngest and best n longer capable of this?
My answer is Marxist teachers.
The result can be witnessed at the University of Minnesota School of Medicine induction ceremonies where the entire Class of 2006 recites a woke (racist) anti-racist “Race Marxist” pledge James Lindsey coins the term “Race Marxism” for his latest (and third) book on CRT dogmas.
https://www.campusreform.org/article?id=20259
Nice to see the young absorbing mystical hate dogmas and quackery at the outset. But then they have at least three Deans to implant DIE dedicated to implant such doctrines for four years ahead.
Paging Mr. Bergeron. Mr. Harrison Bergeron, please come to the white courtesy phone.
Heaven help me, I’m going to be old when these “doctors” are doctors.
The writer’s wife was on some medication dose of .1 gram; her doctor said he was reducing it by a fourth and wrote a prescription for .75 gram. Her husband caught the error and held it out as an example of why everyone needs to know math,
A vigilant nurse saved our infant son’s life in this very way. We submitted the details to the state pharmaceutical board (it was the vacation-day pharmacist, not the doctor, who made the error – it was Thanksgiving day), who wrote back to tell us they had basically scolded her, and included a letter of apology from her. Nothing more came of it. I just hope she learned her lesson. Our son would surely have died.
We were anxious to get home from the hospital, it being Thanksgiving day and all. The nurse apologetically refused to release us until she had personally seen the delivered pharmaceutical device and meds and had been able to train us. And she saved our son’s life.
Dr Maitland Jones was tenured at Princeton University.
You’ve probably heard of it — it used to beat Harvard for number one in the US News and World Report college rankings. And when it didn’t, was number two or three.
Back in the 1980s, in the movie “Risky Business,” HS graduate Tom Cruise wanted most to go there. Except that he wished to study for a business degree, and the real Princeton has never offered that degree.
Maybe that’s stopped being prestigious at NYU?
This is the first year so many students flunked that should tell you something
Hi, huxley. To Mythx’ good commentary I would add merely that, depending on how deeply the student delves into the organic-chemistry part of the overall chemistry curriculum as such, what is encountered may involve some study of basic organic chemical reactions in addition to the straight nomenclature and structure things that Mythx mentioned.
I don’t recall the requirements for pre-meds vis-a-vis chem majors, but since the full sequence at my alma mater was three courses I-II-III in organic chem spread across one’s sophomore year, let’s say the pre-meds might have to take the first two, just by way of example. The first segment of that would be dominated by the nomenclature and basic aspects of molecular structure. I think that, as long as your reasonably bright student has enough sense to stay mentally organized and train on some of the common patterns in the nomenclature and structure – and the IUPAC names are purpose-built for this – it shouldn’t be too bad.
The reaction chemistry gets sometimes a little more intimidating, but even there, simply looking out for the ‘hot spots’ in organic molecules, i.e. every atom that is basically not carbon or hydrogen, will provide decent cues about what kinds of reactions can or should happen. From there, getting to the details is a certain amount of memorization, but at least it’s directed by something.
I think organic chemistry is generally more amenable to pattern recognition than is inorganic. And yes, when doing reactions, there is a certain amount of math involved, but not too advanced for most people at that point.
Hmm… okay, let me haul out this old, old copy of Morrison and Boyd, Organic Chemistry, 4th ed. – who, ironically, were professors at NYU. First 10 chapters:
1. Structure and Properties
2. Methane. Energy of Activation – Transition State
3. Alkanes. Free-Radical Substitution
4. Stereochemistry
5. Alicyclic Compounds. Cycloalkanes
6. Alkyl Halides. Nucleophilic Aliphatic Substitution
7. Alkenes I. Structure and Preparation. Elimination
8. Alkenes II. Reactions of the Carbon-Carbon Double Bond. Electrophilic and Free-Radical Addition
9. Conjugation and Resonance. Dienes
10. Alcohols I. Preparation and Physical Properties
etc.
I don’t know, in a way orgo was kind of cool. I mean how many other classes could you say you made aspirin.(We made that in labs as well as mothballs.) Admittedly I didn’t care for the writers of my text book (Solomons and Fryhle ) who could find a complicated way to explain something simple.(No, check to see if you have a conjugated ring system first then just check to see if you have an even number of double bonds or odd.) Still got an A- in that class. Anyway it wasn’t even the hardest class I ever took at college. I mean French 4 was borderline impossible while on top of it being a completely useless class. If I was a religious man I’d wish there was a special place in hell for the guy that came up with the foreign language requirement.(30 years out I can pretty much answer the question, no the foreign language requirement wasn’t useful.)
When I was in college studying physics we had a first year course in theoretical optics that had a 90% failure rate on the exams.
Everyone grumbled, over half of all students washed out of university because of that exam (including me, I downgraded from trying for a PhD to a Ba as a result), but nobody dreamt of complaining about the professor to the university board because it was too difficult.
The course had bigger problems than being difficult. The main problem wasn’t the material being taught (I understood that well, passed the same course with flying colours at Ba level, which included exactly the same material) but the way the exam itself was stuctured and the poor quality of the lectures.
Had something similar happen in high school with my German language teacher. He got reprimanded by the school board about his tendency to selectively fail pupils based on whether he liked or disliked them personally (yes… he did this so much that colleagues noticed).
While we were living our lives and thinking all was well in the U.S., a rot has been wearing away at the foundations of our society. It began in the universities back min the 1960s. It was Gramscian Marxism that began creeping into the faculties and administrations. It spread slowly, but steadily especially into the teacher’s colleges. Unless we were involved in acidemia or had children in those schools we didn’t notice.
It was becoming more apparent during the Obama years, but Obama was smart enough not to seem to be transforming our society too much. However, when he said on many occasions that, “If you like your insurance plan, you can keep it.” Or, “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” We should have known he was gas-lighting us and was undermining much of what we thought was normal.
For the last thirty years our schools have been becoming less rigorous and more concerned with “equity in the form of equal outcomes. It became most evident what was going on when parents saw what was being taught during virtual learning due to Covid. We now know that our schools are failing our children and that the teachers’ unions have become more interested in indoctrination than in teaching knowledge.
Anyone who has ever been engaged in a competitive sport knows that:
1. There is only one winner.
2. There’s no shame in not winning, as long as you give it your best.
3. Not all people are equally talented.
4. Life isn’t fair.
5. Competition makes everyone better at what they are doing.
The same is true in all areas of life. We all have diffident talents. abilities, gifts. Our mission in life, if we choose to accept it, is to learn what our strengths and weaknesses are, and pursue our talents to become the best person we can be and as good at our chosen life work as we can.
No one (except a Marxist) ever said life would or should be easy. And we know from our nation’s history that hard work, diligence, and a meritocracy has served us well. That’s what so many of these young people have lost – the message that, although life isn’t fair, ethical competition among our businesses and other institutions raises the standard of living for more people than any system yet devised by humans. And it also offers more opportunity for a decent life. (Which way are the illegal immigrants coming? They want into this country. That says a lot.)
We know what’s wrong, but there is no quick fix. A generation or more of hard work to regain what has been lost. We have to do it and it begins by electing good people 36 days from now.
You left out the other obvious group who needs to use organic chemistry: engineers. Chemical engineers produce (or rather design and troubleshoot the systems that produce) all the organic compounds everybody uses, whether those are drugs, artificial flavors, dyes, plastics, or other petrochemicals.
When I was at Michigan Tech a quarter century ago, Chemical Engineering was generally considered the most difficult undergraduate degree, and few escaped in four years. Not because you couldn’t get into the required classes, but at least one of those classes took the entire final year to complete, and if you bodged the project at the center of the class too badly you had to start over.
If I understood it correctly, and memory serves, the project amounted to basically designing a commercial chemical plant process, and it made a nice garnish for your resume after graduation.
Mythx, Philip Sells:
It’s interesting to search on “How hard organic chemistry class”. Quite a range of answers. For example:
https://forums.studentdoctor.net/threads/is-organic-chemistry-that-hard.852393/
I was intrigued by this answer:
_________________________________
Organic Chemistry IS Different!
You certainly have vocabulary words to memorize and you may even be given 3-5 math equations to memorize, but that is it!
The rest of organic chemistry is just ONE GIANT PUZZLE. This course doesn’t expect you to memorize and spit back information. In fact, if that is your approach you are probably destined for failure. This course doesn’t have a set of ‘steps’ you can use to answer a question and be done with it. Instead, organic chemistry asks you to do something your other classes probably don’t.
Organic Chemistry requires you to THINK!
As silly as it sounds, too many students are simply not used to this method. They expect to find a formula, work it out and be done.
Organic chemistry is all about the mechanisms, the how and why of reactions and perhaps even the interpretation of a mysterious graph or two.
THAT is why organic chemistry is just so darn difficult!
https://leah4sci.com/why-organic-chemistry-is-so-difficult/
That fits with my current math classes. It’s easy to get a bit behind, then just learn the recipe well enough to get through the next homework, next quiz, next exam.
Soon I only half-know a patchwork of recipes but not so much the big picture and I’m in trouble if I have to Think Something Through from first principles.
There’s also the matter of fluency with the small moves in problem solutions which only comes with much time-consuming practice.
Thanks everyone for a great discussion. Brought back a lot of good memories. My experience with Organic Chem was a little different from most. Having skated through HS without ever cracking a book, I was accepted to Wayne State in 1966 without having to take a placement test on the basis (I believe) that I attended an all black HS. The summer before freshman year I worked through a small book on Organic Chem Nomenclature. By the time I got to class I was familiar with the language and looked forward to seeing how the somewhat daunting names played into the chemistry. Lab work was a breeze as I really enjoyed playing the part of the “mad” chemist. Math was a bit difficult as I had a lot of catchup to do. Turned out to be the subject I did best.
Thanks for reminding me of the textbook, Philip. I just ordered a copy of Morrison and Boyd, Organic Chemistry, 2nd ed (1966). By the way, I think the language requirement was positive. I suffered through 2 years of German and it served me very well in later life – but not as an organic chemist!
Well, the AMA is going to have no trouble recruiting more members from NYU —-
So, one of my favorite essays by Isaac Asimov is on organic chemistry, although you would never know it from the title: “You, Too, Can Speak Gaelic.”
I can’t find a full pdf of the original, although if you are a Scribd subscriber you can see it here.
https://www.scribd.com/doc/239537273/You-Too-Can-Speak-Gaelic
A brief summary is here — which does NOT do justice to the punchline after the long set-up — but does have the bonus of a link to a performance of the filk song.
https://talkrational.org/archive/showthread.php?t=60243
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agWsYExaW80
It’s along the same lines as Tom Lehrer’s “Elements Song” — add his “New Math” and you then probably know more than the NYU students.
Bibliography for completeness, in case you have one of these tucked away in a box, or have a well-stocked library.
You, Too, Can Speak Gaelic
Subject: chemical nomenclature
First Published In: Mar-63
Collection(s):
1964 Adding a Dimension
1974 Asimov on Chemistry
1989 Asimov on Science
And the masterpiece, for all you orgo survivors (I didn’t even think about attempting it):
https://chemphasis.com/2021/03/11/essay-assayed/
PS Orgo? Really? Who thought that was a good shorthand nom?
Sounds kind of like ouzo — which smells a lot like benzene, from my one short encounter with the volatile liquid as a college student in my pre-tee-totaler days.
From LI’s post by LaChance: “The plain truth is that not everyone who wants to be a doctor will be able to become a doctor. New York University did not favor its students by removing Professor Jones.”
I think the university DID favor its students, but they did them no favor by caving to their snowflakery.
At the Legal Insurrection post there are a lot of good comments by several teachers and former orgo students. Most agree that they are going to try hard to avoid going to any doctors who graduated from NYU after 2021 — and similarly, really, for all the woke colleges now, I suspect.
At the end of a long comment, alaskabob (“After graduating with a B.S. in Nuclear Engineering, I had the opportunity to return to college and go for medical school….”) sums up precisely: “Making getting into med school and through med school easier makes it tougher on the patient.”
As for avoiding doctors who are graduates of the woke med schools, let’s give a cheer to Judge Ho and his colleagues who are boycotting Yale Law School graduates henceforth.
https://freebeacon.com/campus/citing-concern-for-free-speech-12-federal-judges-say-they-wont-take-clerks-from-yale-law-school/
Not for refusing to take hard classes (although they do that too), but for protesting the possibility that they might hear something contrary to their leftist ideology, and they can’t handle that psychologically — not a good characteristic for an actual lawyer, as opposed to an activist who can toss out legal jargon to impress the media.
My roommate in undergraduate school was an aspiring pre-med student, to the satisfaction of his parents, and his first exam in organic chemistry earned him a grade of 22. Needless to say, he changed majors and went on to successful career as a Wall Street lawyer.
I will surmise that the NYU administration / faculty were seeking an excuse to fire that organic chem professor and they found it.
I would not be surprised if some NYU faculty / admin personnel “suggested” to disaffected students to come up with the “too hard” scheme.
Would be interesting to find out if the fired prof. was politically conservative or at least not a hard core lefty (like 99% of college profs and admin personnel).
Check this out; student ratings for the organic chem prof.
profhttps://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=1052652
Years ago, I took the physics course in analytical mechanics taught by Dr. Miller, aka Dr. Death. The course was notoriously dificult. We started the course with 36 students in class and ended the course 2 semesters later with 6 students left. Now that’s attrition. I don’t know if the other 30 students tried to get Dr. Miller fired for making the course too hard but I decided that I wasn’t going to take any more physics courses. The book we used was advertised as intermediate level and we joked that if they had used an advanced level book, they would have flunked everybody.
The phrase, “But I studied hours for that exam! How could I possibly get a C (or even a D or F)?!” was used so often it was a cliche. I heard from my colleagues in the chem department, take our experience and multiply by 5 regarding the orgo course.
When I was a senior medical student in the 60s, a group of sophomore students decided to boycott the Surgery (lecture) final exam. They told the professor that it “wasn’t relevant.” That was a popular term in those days. He was very calm about it and told them he would give them an “incomplete” as a grade. At the end of the semester, they realized that an incomplete would become a “D” if not made up. They came to him and asked what to do so he said he would offer the final exam again. They took it, after 6 months to forget the material, and one of them failed.
He came to the professor and said the exam had the wrong questions on it. The professor was kind of a humorist and telling the story was a talent of his. The student said, “I know so much about Surgery that wasn’t on the exam!” The professor told us he said, “OK. I’ll give you a passing grade mentally. I’ll just put the “F” on the paper. The student was horrified and said, “But it’s what’s on the paper that counts !”
I taught clinical Medicine for 15 years after I retired from surgery. I quit at just about the right time.
JohnTyler gives us a link to student reviews.
They are extremely schizoid: those up to his challenge are grateful and admiring. Those who ain’t, aren’t.
Check this out; student ratings for the organic chem prof.
RateMyProfessors appeared around about 2002 and attracted some attention from students, but succeeding cohorts of students lost interest. It’s not difficult to locate a professor who hasn’t been reviews in six, seven, eight years if they’ve been reviewed at all. An adjunct professor with nearly 200 reviews over a period of 15 years is a phenomenon. His reviews are bimodally distributed. He had an impact on his students that few working faculty can imagine.
Organic chemistry was a bear for me because of the memorization involved. I have never been great at memorization. I dropped out and changed majors.
NS — I will also look at women doctors who want to medical school in a more advanced country but with a male-dominated culture, like Egypt, Jordan, or India. And then survived a residency at a top American hospital system. I am shying away anymore from what used to be the highest tier, like Emory or Johns Hopkins, because they are really buying into the DEI crap. But it will get harder to find one that isn’t. Loma Linda, maybe…?
Ray,
Was that the usual junior level mechanics course? What text was used? When I taught the course I used Fowles (later Fowles and Cassidy). There were others that were more popular, but I thought a bit too much for that level. I never had any students complain abut that course….now the next semester when they hit E&M was a different story.
Aesop Fan: I hate ouzo. Really hate it. And its cousin, Arak. When I was in college in Israel, we went on a field trip in the desert. We all brought some water but counted on the school officials bringing big food-grade jerry cans of water. They did. But they had been used recently to mix alcoholic punch for a party, using arak. The arak ate into the plastic. The water tasted of arak with little bits of red plastic floating in it. I could NOT drink the water. It was miserable. I was so dehydrated when we were done. After that, I would bring oodles of water with me.
I’d like to see these college administrators being required to use only doctors who took the ‘easy’ version of the med school course, and fly only in airplane piloted by people who took the ‘easy’ versions of the written and practical exams.
And use medicines developed only by those who took the ‘easy’ versions of the organic chemistry, microbiology, and virology courses.
This firing appears to be the outcome of the divorce of the university’s administrative function from its teaching function.
Administrators had to judge between, on the one hand, anxious, noisy student-petitioners, and on the other hand, a professor who could take his job or leave it with equanimity, being already full of honors in his profession, and only “keeping his hand in” by doing this job. It was all too easy for the administrators to gratify the complainers: Anything for a quiet life might be the administration motto.
If someone with a stake in the affair would complain, and keep complaining, about the betrayal of the university’s teaching function…
Greg Hlatky:
Good thing they weren’t taking P-Chem.
Yup. Both courses are bears, but in different ways. I was a Chem-Eng major. Most of us took Organic and P-Chem in separate years, as they were (and are) very difficult courses. I had a lab partner in Chem Eng Lab who was a very poor writer. I rewrote nearly all of his stuff. But he was dead-drop brilliant: he Aced P-Chem and Organic the same year. After several years as an an engineer,he went to Med School and became an orthopedic surgeon.
Regarding the nomenclature of Organic, I don’t recall it being that bad, and I also recall that very little of the tests involved direct naming per se- just that you had to know the structure of the compound you were supposed to make. Practice in doing reactions is what I remember. Lots of it.
The teacher they SHOULD be angry with is their high school AP Chemistry teacher.
Phisicsguy,
The book was “Mechanics” by Dr Symon. That was used as a senior course. Symon was from Kent state and had his office in the ROTC building. During the riots I heard his office was burned and he lost his class notes. The joke was that after that he couldn’t solve his own problems in the classroom.
Boobah: “ When I was at Michigan Tech a quarter century ago, Chemical Engineering was generally considered the most difficult undergraduate degree”
Same experience here. The Chem Es were the smartest students on campus. Logical skills, reading comprehension, quick learners, excellent memories…
Xylourgos, that’s very interesting about your school story. Did you consider Western at any point?
I found a stamp in traditional Chinese on the title page of my Morrison and Boyd edition. From what I can puzzle out with my Chinese dictionaries and after asking a Chinese coworker, I guess my copy began its career in the library stacks at one of the universities in Dalian, then somehow made its way over the ocean – probably brought here by a Chinese graduate student. I must have bought it at some library rummage sale somewhere. I’m tempted to try and work through it to see how much of the material I can revivify.
This is going to sound like one of those “through the snow, uphill… both ways” stories, but my freshman EE class was over 200. Between transfers to Business and straight out flunking out, only 26 managed a BSEE degree. Sophmore year physics had all engineering students in the same class, well over 200 in a large lecture hall. Four guys got As (not sexist, I think there were 2 girls in that group), 70% of the class got either a D or an F. I managed a C, and was grateful :-).
The point being that STEM has always been hard. IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE!
buddhaha: … STEM has always been hard. IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE!
No, it is hard(er) for those who don’t have the mind for it, and easier for those who do. Humans are incredibly complex mental animals and don’t all have the same abilities, etc. Which of course is why real diversity is beneficial, and pretend diversity is a travesty.
As an engineer, me trying to be an artist or a musician or a therapist, or perhaps even a lawyer, would be hard. I’m not particularly driven to be a blogger, either, so tip of the hat to our hostess for her long suffering but successful efforts.
We used to think of STEM subjects as hard because of the math or the relatively limited number of people with a suitably successful mindset. Whereas psych, sociology, anthropology, English, perhaps other languages (except the study of linguistics??), and some other topics were considered “soft” because they did not involve math, etc. in the same way. Much more conversational, where logic might be harder to apply successfully, etc. But with maturity and knowledge, I now realize that the STEM subjects are “easy” in the sense that the solutions and answers tend to be pretty definitive (and repeatable) once they are discovered. It is much easier to say definitely that such and such is “true” via empirical evidence [which is why the political corruption of climate “science” results in deeply flawed “results”. In addition to the actual phenomena being complex and interrelated in poorly understood ways.]
In contrast, the study of fields involving human nature, psychology, history and motive, etc. are actually difficult to obtain definitive conclusions because of the wide variability in human minds and behaviors. To achieve decent confidence level statistics requires a large population of test subjects, which is both expensive and still subject to uncertainty and questions as to method vs. results. We are now also finding that a great many published reports are not repeatable, even in medicine. So the ability to achieve real knowledge is “harder”.
Hi Philip, No it was always Wayne State for me. I was an inner city Detroit boy and Wayne was my place as it catered for working students. Financially I was in a good place as I always found work in diagnostic and hospital labs. Detroit was very interesting place to be in those days. It was the center of a lot of new stuff bursting on the scene. A good place and time to be alive.
I am looking forward to receiving my Morrison and Boyd. Like you I am interested to see how much of the chemistry I remember. Yesterday Mrs. X asked me about the gardening use of vinegar as an insecticide. I went on about how acetic acid is the second simplest carboxylic acid (after formic acid – the active ingredient in ant stings) and its functional group is methyl. Slowly her eyes started to glaze over and I realized my time was up. Hard to take the chemistry out of the boy!
This is going to sound like one of those “through the snow, uphill… both ways” stories, but my freshman EE class was over 200. Between transfers to Business and straight out flunking out, only 26 managed a BSEE degree. Sophmore year physics had all engineering students in the same class, well over 200 in a large lecture hall. Four guys got As (not sexist, I think there were 2 girls in that group), 70% of the class got either a D or an F. I managed a C, and was grateful :-).
The point being that STEM has always been hard. IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE!
The engineering school you attended wasn’t applying satisfactory admissions screens if they were failing 87% of those admitted.
The teacher they SHOULD be angry with is their high school AP Chemistry teacher.
Why? (And what scores did these characters receive on their AP exams?).
Dying thread….but… in response to Ray:
Symon is a well-known, and often used book. The reason I I never used it was as I mentioned before, I found it to be at a level somewhere between undergrad and the classic grad level text Goldstein. Just not appropriate for a junior physics major encountering their first “upper level” course. However, it’s a great supplemental text, and I would recommend it to students if they wanted to look at some other source
Mechanics is the first course where physics students are required to actually start using some of the calculus they been working on in math courses. It also starts getting them used to dealing with 3-d vectors. Meanwhile the actual material is still accessible on an intuitive level…they have ridden on swings, thrown balls, etc. Once this “warmup” course is done they are then ready to take on the the very challenging material of E&M which uses full blown vector calculus and the material is not nearly as experiential and intuitive as mechanics.
Former GE CEO Jack Welch had a Chemical Engineering degree and a PhD in that subject. It would have been…interesting…to hear his reaction to this ridiculousness.
I took organic chem as a freshman in a class we had to take a test to get into. So the freshmen with me in this class were not only the smartest pre-meds on campus, given the college we just got accepted into, they were some of the smartest pre-meds in the country. Even then, at the end of the year, because of the grades they got, over half of these students were done as pre-med candidates. One of my friends who got C’s in the two semesters did decide to tough it out as a pre med, and after two years spent post-college in the peace corps and an additional 3 years of teaching inner city kids, finally was able to buff up his credentials enough to overcome the freshman organic chemistry grades and get accepted into a top med school.
Which works if they bother to look at the results. I just bring that up because as a freshman I had to take a physics test and a calc test to place into a calc based physics course. The physics test was little more than “Do you understand Newton’s first law” which I did. The calc test I did not do so well in. Looking back on it I shouldn’t have been told to take that physics course which made no sense if you didn’t already know freshman calc.(But that’s exactly what the physics professor who looked over the 2 exams told me to do. He wasn’t doing me any favors) I didn’t do so well but I always like to brag I did get full credit on at least one exam question because I didn’t know what I was doing. I was probably one of the few kids that actually did get full credit on at least one exam question.(Those exams were rough)
Years later I took calc based physics at another university but this time I made sure to know calc first. Just to prove to myself I could do it. Pretty much aced that course, made total sense. (But then again physics ruins you by letting you understand how things actually work. I’m amazed at how many people think you can regularly break the first law of thermodynamics at a drop of a hat. )
Combination reply to R2L and ArtDeco:
I’m using the dictionary definition of “hard”: requiring great effort or endurance; not easy.
Sure, it requires a certain amount of the proper number of neurons and arrangement, but once you reach that, there’s the matter of motivation, which pulls you through. Elite military training is another example where the difference between those who make and those who don’t is 90% will. Most of those who dropped out had the sheer IQ to do it, they just didn’t have the will to put in 60-70 hours of work outside of class to keep up. Sure, there are those whose mental wiring made it easy (think idiot savants, and leave out the idiot part), but there aren’t enough of those to keep civilization running. Most of what I (and every other engineer I know) did was a slog – an interesting slog, but a slog nonetheless. There were occasions, at least for me, where it came easy – Electromagnetic Theory; I just had a feel for it, I could visualize fields in 4 dimensions, I guess, but my test scores were so far above the rest of the class the professor declared that he wouldn’t use them in the curve, because that would flunk half the class. On the other hand, I struggled in computational theory. I still have to work things out, no leaps of intuitive thought as I’ve seen in others. Maybe that difference is why (unusual in an engineer) my verbal SATs were 40 points above my math. Not surprisingly, I wound up in my professional life doing a lot of analog and A/D – D/A work.
Aside: I try to maintain a pseudonymous identity on line. I’m sure that the No Such Agency could identify me in a few seconds, but I want to make it difficult for the jackass script kiddies out there, which is why I’m pretty vague on details.
What is a “satisfactory admissions screen”, and how do you determine motivation. As R2L noted, we haven’t figured out the human psyche to anything more than a very rough approximation. It wasn’t MIT or CalTech, but the school I attended was ranked in the top 50, and I’d put it in the top 5 “practical” (vs theoretical) engineering schools. We graduated ready to go into the world, not grad school. As an example, I had a TA grad student for lab instructor in Electrical Machinery, where we actually played with motors, generators and transformers. He had his BS from one of the top 5, and he could do quadrature equations in his head, but he burnt out a motor because he literally did not know what a nameplate was, nor how to use the info on it.
That 87% number is misleading, many changed majors -one guy I know moved into business and retired as VP out of a Fortune 500 company. The actual “flunk out” rate was probably less than the non-engineer rate. The guys who did flunk out were almost all alcohol and party related.
Sir, there are 1.8 million working engineers in the United States. Were the ratio of working practitioners to new entrants similar to that of other professions, that would mean you’d require at this time 80,000 new entrants to staff the profession. Given the ratios you quote me, we’d have to have 615,000 aspirant engineers matriculating as freshmen to distill this 80,000 cohort.
Total fall enrollment of 1st time students at post-secondary institutions is currently 2.8 million, so we’d have to devote 21% of the slots to aspiring engineers.
Engineering programs are challenging, so I’m skeptical you find many engineering graduates who started out in community college.
As we speak, about 78% of all engineering graduates are male as opposed to 45% of first time matriculants in post-secondary institutions. If attrition rates for male and female institutions are the same, we’d have 480,000 young men matriculating in engineering school.
1st time matriculants in four-year institutions currently number 1.9 million. If 45% of these are male (in line with the share of all 1st time matriculants), there would be 865,000 young men enrolling de novo at four year institutions.
So, we have 865,000 young men or thereabouts, of whom 480,000 would have to be enrolling at the engineering school. So, your preferred system works if 55% of the young men enrolling de novo at 4 year institutions enroll in engineering.
I’m going to guess most places have more effective screens.