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.
Spambot of the day
Hitting the nail upon the top:
Unquestionably believe that which you stated. Your favorite justification seemed to be on the internet the easiest thing to be aware of. I say to you, I definitely get irked while people consider worries that they just don’t know about. You managed to hit the nail upon the top and defined out the whole thing without having side effect.
The AMA wants not only censorship but DOJ investigation of those who would publicize what’s going on with the treatment of children who believe themselves to be transgender
It seems that the AMA wants Garland to prosecute speech that they believe is thoughtcrime of a dangerous sort:
BREAKING: The American Medical Association is asking Big Tech and the Department of Justice to censor, deplatform, investigate, and prosecute journalists who question the orthodoxy of radical gender surgeries for minors, arguing that public criticism is "disinformation." pic.twitter.com/NHv32Zzdu5
— Christopher F. Rufo ?? (@realchrisrufo) October 3, 2022
Social media has been doing this already, but the AMA wants the DOJ involved.
This is just another step in the criminalization of dissenting speech, and it’s been going on for a long time.
Ace has a post about this latest AMA move, and points out that only 17% of doctors belong to it. The organization has been on the activist left for a long time, and so this request is unsurprising.
Rufo spells it out, as quoted by Ace:
The morality of this situation is blindingly clear:
* Threatening hospitals is wrong.
* Censoring journalists is wrong.
* Criminalizing political opposition is wrong.The four stages of radical gender surgeries for minors:
1. It’s not happening.
2. It’s good that it’s happening.
3. It’s empowering when we say it’s happening, but disinformation when you say it’s happening.
4. The F.B.I. should put you in prison for quoting us saying it’s happening.
The argument made by the AMA, as well as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association who joined them in the letter, is the same one made by so many people who ask for censorship and even the prosecution of speech (here’s a link to the AMA’s letter in more easily readable form). If you read it, you can see how it starts with something reasonable – the prosecution of actual attacks on health providers, and the investigation of actual threats to attack – and segues seamlessly into complaints that they are afraid and have had to increase security and that demonstrations and “harassment” (which are protected activities) have been the cause, and that the DOJ must get involved [emphasis added]:
The attacks are rooted in an intentional campaign of disinformation, where a few high-profile users on social media share false and misleading information targeting individual physicians and hospitals, resulting in a rapid escalation of threats, harassment, and disruption of care across multiple jurisdictions. Our organizations have called on technology companies to do more to prevent this practice on digital platforms, and we now urge your office to take swift action to investigate and prosecute allorganizations, individuals, and entities responsible.
“Responsible” for what? What “attacks”? The words “attack” or “attacks” are used five times in what is actually not that long a letter, but not a single actual attack of the non-verbal sort is cited. Have there been any? I really don’t know, but I will assume that if anyone has been physically attacked the letter would have cited such an incident. What is mentioned instead are threats, verbal attacks and demonstrations, as well as doxxing. These have been the favored tools of the left, and are approaches that they heartily defend when it involves the left against the right. Nor does the letter even cite an example of the “disinformation” they say is rampant, but if it resembles what the Twitter user “Libs of Tik Tok” was deplatformed for (you can follow some of that story at this link), it probably is mostly not disinformation at all.
Here’s the paragraph in the AMA letter that immediately precedes that paragraph I quoted that starts “The attacks are rooted in an intentional campaign of disinformation…”. This seems to be what the word “attacks” refers to:
From Boston to Akron to Nashville to Seattle, children’s hospitals, academic health systems, and physicians are being targeted and threatened for providing evidence-based health care. These attacks have not only made it difficult and dangerous for institutions and practices to provide this care, they have also disrupted many other services to families seeking care. In one hospital, a new mother was prevented from being with her preterm infant because the hospital’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit was on lockdown due to a bomb threat. Children’s hospitals across the nation have substantially increased security in addition to working with local and federal law enforcement, both on their main hospital campuses as well as across their ambulatory delivery sites, in order to ensure the safety of patients, families, and medical staff who work there. In addition, some providers have needed 24/7 security. Children’s hospitals and their medical staffs continue to face increased threats via social media – including to their personal accounts. Coupled with harassing emails, phone calls, and protestors at health care sites, there is elevated and justifiable fear among families, patients, and staff.
Criminal threats already come under laws governing death threats, but protests and angry emails should be fine. If protestors block the entrance of a hospital, some localities have laws against it (see this as well as this). Nor do I see any reference in the AMA letter to protestors actually blocking a hospital entrance, just to a case in which a bomb threat caused a temporary lockdown at one hospital.
There is an intentional blurring of the lines between physical attacks, protests that block entrances, death threats – all mostly illegal already – and milder threats, doxxing, nasty emails and phone calls, and the right to use speech to publicize the policies of hospitals regarding their treatment of transgender minors. The letter is a call to FBI harassment of anyone who does any of those latter things, including journalists such as Rufo. This is similar to the earlier letter from the NSBA (see these posts) asking the DOJ to prosecute protesting parents as dangerous threats. It’s just another step down a tyrannical path that the left has been on since it seized power.
[NOTE: At the height of the Floyd protests of 2020, Republicans introduced this bill to create a new federal crime:
Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) joined Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) today in introducing the “Stop Blocking Hospitals Act,” a bill making it a federal crime to obstruct any ambulance, fire department vehicle, law enforcement vehicle, or other emergency vehicles or personnel from responding to an emergency. Penalties for such obstruction would include imprisonment of one to five years, a fine, or both.
I haven’t seen anything that indicates it passed.]
RIP Loretta Lynn
Country singer Loretta Lynn has died at 90:
Just about all the obituaries have the words “coal miner’s daughter” in the headline or prominent in the body of the text, and that’s my impulse, too. Not only was it the title of a famous biopic about Lynn and a song she wrote, but it was a defining truth about her origins and the identity that mattered to her even after becoming rich and famous.
A short summary of her beginnings:
Lynn was born Loretta Webb in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky on April 14, 1932. She was the eldest daughter and second child [of eight, one of whom was singer Crystal Gayle] born to Clara Marie “Clary” (née Ramey; May 5, 1912 – November 24, 1981) and Melvin Theodore “Ted” Webb (June 6, 1906 – February 22, 1959). Ted was a coal miner and subsistence farmer…
Loretta’s father died at the age of 52 of black lung disease a few years after he relocated to Wabash, Indiana, with his wife and younger children…
On January 10, 1948, 15-year-old Loretta Webb married Oliver Vanetta “Doolittle” Lynn (August 27, 1926 – August 22, 1996), better known as “Doolittle”, “Doo”, or “Mooney”. They had met only a month earlier. The Lynns left Kentucky and moved to the logging community of Custer, Washington, when Loretta was seven months pregnant with the first of their six children. The happiness and heartache of her early years of marriage would help to inspire Lynn’s songwriting. In 1953, Doolittle bought her a $17 Harmony guitar (equivalent to $172 in 2021). She taught herself to play the instrument, and over the following three years, she worked to improve her guitar playing. With Doolittle’s encouragement, she started her own band, Loretta and the Trailblazers, with her brother Jay Lee playing lead guitar.
Much much more at the link.
Open thread 10/4/22
You say tomato, I say tomahto:
Update on the war in Ukraine
I offer my usual caveat on linking to this post with recent news on Russia’s war effort in Ukraine. The fog of war is always operative, so each person will probably take this differently. But I think it’s fairly clear that Russia is having major problems at the moment. I also think it’s likely that the war will go on for a long time to come.
Here’s an excerpt:
When asked to explain Russia’s apparent collapse in northern Donetsk/eastern Luhansk, Hauer tweeted, “They ran out of men – an issue long predicted and now very acutely felt.”
I’m starting to give more credence to Kyiv’s KIA claims against Russian forces. Before September, claims of 30,000-40,000 Russian dead seemed wild. More conservative estimates — like from the Dupuy Institute — were around 9,000-10,000. If Hauer is right, Russian losses must be at least double Dupuy’s estimate.
At this time, Russia is still trying to plug the gaps with freshly mobilized “mobiks.” Theses men are older, less fit, and barely trained. Russia doesn’t have a reserve system like ours, with National Guard and Army Reserve units staffed with people who work and drill together somewhat regularly. All they have is a list of men who put in a year or two as draftees sometime in the last 30 years — and local “recruiters” don’t always stick to the list.
These mobiks are getting sent to the front against UA troops who are now combat veterans…
The New York Times reported two weeks ago that Putin, apparently frustrated with his generals, has “thrust himself more directly into strategic planning for the war in Ukraine in recent weeks.”
If that last paragraph is true – and although it’s the NY Times reporting it, that doesn’t mean it’s not true – it’s not a good sign for Russia. I also wonder, as the author of that piece – Stephen Green – does, whether Putin will resort to nukes.
Jonathan Haidt set to resign from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology
I already had quite a bit of respect for Jonathan Haidt. He’s a moderate who tends more to the liberal end of things, but his work on political belief systems is very important and for the most part very fair. I’ve written about him several times previously.
My respect has only increased due to this action he recently took to repudiate the woke academy:
Last week the New York University (NYU) psychology professor announced that he would resign at the end of the year from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, his primary professional association, because of a newly adopted requirement that everybody presenting research at the group’s conferences explain how their submission advances “equity, inclusion, and anti-racism goals.” It was the sort of litmus test against which he has warned, and which he sees as corroding institutions of higher learning.
“Telos means ‘the end, goal, or purpose for which an act is done, or at which a profession or institution aims,'” he wrote in a Sept. 20 piece published on the website of Heterodox Academy, an organization he cofounded that promotes viewpoint diversity on college campuses, and republished by the Chronicle of Higher Education. “The telos of a knife is to cut, the telos of medicine is to heal, and the telos of a university is truth.”
“The Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP)—recently asked me to violate my quasi-fiduciary duty to the truth,” he added. “I was going to attend the annual conference in Atlanta next February to present some research with colleagues on a new and improved version of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. I was surprised to learn about a new rule: In order to present research at the conference, all social psychologists are now required to submit a statement explaining ‘whether and how this submission advances the equity, inclusion, and anti-racism goals of SPSP.'”
Such diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statements have proliferated at universities and in academic societies, he notes, even though “most academic work has nothing to do with diversity, so these mandatory statements force many academics to betray their quasi-fiduciary duty to the truth by spinning, twisting, or otherwise inventing some tenuous connection to diversity.”…
“So I’m going to resign from SPSP at the end of this year, when my membership dues run out, if the policy on mandatory statements stays in place for future conventions,” he concludes.
I was quite moved when I read the words “the telos of a university is truth.” Why? Because I think that, for most universities, that used to be the case but no longer is. Or rather, the truth they now seek is a “greater” truth, a sort of lefist “my truth” rather than the truth as best it can be ascertained. This is one of the biggest failings of our age, and Haidt is correct to call it out.
I don’t fool myself that his voice will make a particle of difference to academia or the huge majority of present-day academics, though. I don’t know whether he himself thinks it will matter, but his actions are a case of “live not by lies,” and I applaud him for it.
He adds an excellent point about this being in part a generational conflict:
“I have gotten about a dozen supportive emails from other social psychologists, and no real criticism beyond a few psychologists on Twitter who, perhaps shaped by Twitter, go to great lengths to assume the worst about me and my motives for writing the essay,” Haidt told me by email. “I have the sense that there is a large generational split. Psychologists and academics who are older than me (I’m 58) seem uniformly supportive: they are all on the left, and the left used to be creeped out by loyalty oaths, whether administered by the McCarthyite right or the Soviet left. But young people on the left seem to be very comfortable requiring such pledges.”
Almost all psychologists are on the left, but the older ones are more the old-fashioned type who got into the habit of championing free speech when they felt it was their speech that was being suppressed. Some of them have adopted it a general principle. I wonder, however, how many of those academics who have emailed Haidt (only a dozen?) would be willing to go public with their support.
How can Fetterman be leading in the polls?
Commenter “huxley” points out the strangeness of John Fetterman, the Democratic candidate for the Senate from Pennsylvania, and asks a question:
Then there’s this Fetterman character running for the US Senate in Pennsylvania who looks and dresses like a tattooed reboot of Lex Luthor, Superman’s arch-nemesis in DC Comics.
Fetterman has had a stroke, which seems to have left him with a large mysterious lump on his neck (usually concealed by his hoodie) and damaged his brain. When asked how he was doing in an interview, he responded bizarrely..
Yet Fetterman has been leading in the polls over his Republican opponent. The race has tightened, but this Fetterman could shortly become a new member of the US Senate.
How does this happen?
It’s an excellent question, and I’ll take a stab at an answer.
The first possibility is that the polls are wrong and that Dr. Oz, Fetterman’s Republican opponent, is actually ahead. But there’s an excellent chance that’s not the case, so let’s put that one aside.
Next, there’s probably a solid core of Pennsylvania voters – perhaps a quarter or a third, although that’s just a guess – who are hard leftists and cultural warriors who love both Fetterman’s look and his politics.
Then we have the sizable portion of the electorate who are what used to be called “yellow dog Democrats,” people who would vote for a yellow dog if it had the label “Democrat” next to it.
We also have low information voters who are not paying attention, and some of them are reliable Democrat voters as well. In addition, Fetterman has taken a leaf out of the Joe Biden campaign book in 2020, and to a certain extent has kept a rather low profile with the help of an enabling MSM. For example, there has been no debate, and Fetterman has only agreed to one debate (as opposed the usual two in Pennsylvania) late in the game (October 25, after considerable early voting will have occurred) with special accommodations:
He has done just a handful of media interviews and no press conferences since the stroke and has used closed-captioning in video interviews with reporters.
Lastly, Fetterman’s opponent Dr. Oz isn’t a traditional conservative and many people on the right aren’t enthusiastic about him.
The combination of all those factors could account for Fetterman’s lead in the polls.
Open thread 10/3/22
I find this dance style strange yet rather hypnotic. It’s similar to certain other ethnic dance traditions in that it features a fairly rigid upper body with movement centered in the legs and feet. But in this case, the women glide along almost always on or near what’s called 3/4 pointe – that is, up on the balls of their feet. Women can do that for a long time with the support of high heels, but these women are doing it without high heels. In this clip they only put their heels down for short periods, and not at all often. I keep thinking they need to give their weary calves more of a rest by coming down and doing a plié (knee bend with heels on floor) now and then, as ballet dancers usually do:
Love before first sight: Felice and Boudleaux Bryant
Being an Everly Brothers fan even as a child and seeing these two names – Felice and Boudleaux Bryant – on so many of their songs, I wondered about them for a long time. Who were they? It’s quite a story:
Boudleaux Bryant was born in Shellman, Georgia, in 1920 and attended local schools as a child. He trained as a classical violinist. Although he performed with the Atlanta Philharmonic Orchestra during its 1937–38 season, he had more interest in country fiddling. Bryant joined Hank Penny and his Radio Cowboys, an Atlanta-based western music band.
In 1945, Bryant met Matilda Genevieve Scaduto (whom he called Felice) when he performed at a hotel in her hometown of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She was born in the city in 1925 to an ethnic Sicilian family, and had written lyrics set to traditional Italian tunes. During World War II, she sang and directed shows at the local USO.
Bryant and Scaduto eloped five days after meeting. Boudleaux’s song “All I Have to Do Is Dream” is “autobiographical” for Felice. She was working as an elevator operator at the Schroeder Hotel when she saw Bryant. She has said that she “recognized” him immediately; she had seen his face in a dream when she was eight years old, and had “looked for him forever.” She was 19 when they met.
Now, that’s a romantic story. It’s even more astounding than that, though:
Felice (which was Boudleaux’s pet name for his wife) believed that the couple’s meeting was fate. “I had dreamed of Boudleaux when I was 8 years old,” she said. “When this man was walking toward me in the hotel I recognized him right away. The only thing that was wrong was that he didn’t have a beard. Although he grew one for me later. In the dream we were dancing to our song. Only it was our song.”
In other words, part of the dream seems to have been that they would write songs together.
More:
In the early years of their marriage, the couple settled in Moultrie, Ga. Boudleaux continued to work as a musician and a mechanic, while his wife started dabbling in songwriting. “I always wrote,” Felice said. “I wrote letters and poetry that I would tear up so that they couldn’t be found. I wrote all the time, even if I was only doodling. I had to have someone to talk to, so I talked to myself. I don’t read music. I don’t play an instrument. The words themselves will have a musical value. That’s how I can compose a melody. Then Boudleaux will write the music down, or I’ll turn on the tape machine.”
“We started writing for the hell of it, for fun,” Boudleaux said. “And after about 80 songs we thought, this looks like it could be a good thing. But we originally wrote them for our own amusement, and we’d show them to our friends.”
After months of writing letters to everyone he knew—and didn’t know—in the music business, Boudleaux placed a song called “Country Boy” with Grand Ole Opry singer Little Jimmy Dickens. The song went to No. 7 on the charts in 1949, and by the next year, the Bryants had upped stakes to Nashville…
“At the time, in the field that we flopped into, the artists wrote and performed all of their own material,” Felice recalled. “Then, after a while, the road got to them. They couldn’t think, they couldn’t doodle around on the front porch with a guitar, they couldn’t stroll through the woods and get inspired. So Boudleaux and I were the first people who came to Nashville who didn’t do anything but write. We were the factory.”
It can be difficult to predict which songs will be hits, even for people in the business:
The Bryants’ biggest song of all was one that had been turned down by everyone in the business. “‘Bye Bye Love’ was shown over 30 times before it was ever cut,” Boudleaux recalled. “It was even shown the very morning of the same day the Everly Brothers heard it in the afternoon. When it was turned down, the fella said, ‘Why don’t you show me a good strong song?’ So nobody really knows what a good song is.”…
Of their success, Boudleaux once said, “Unless one feels driven to compose and at the same time has all the instincts of a Mississippi riverboat gambler, he should never seek songwriting as a profession. Unless you know in your heart that you’re great, feel in your bones that you’re lucky and think in your soul that God just might let you get away with it, pick something more certain, like chasing the white whale or eradicating the common housefly. We didn’t have the benefit of such sage advice. Now it’s too late to back up. We made it. Sometimes it pays to be ignorant.”
Do you believe the story of their meeting? I do – perhaps because I have an ever-so-slightly similar story. When I was fourteen and attending an arts camp, I took a drawing and painting class and at one point was required to do a charcoal drawing of something I imagined. I drew a young man’s face; it wasn’t someone I’d ever seen before. I liked it well enough to save it. Seven years later, I met my husband-to-be, who looked very much like that drawing.
We certainly never wrote songs, though, together or separately. I’m in awe of people who can do that.
Weighing evil: Soviets and Nazis
Some years ago I read Martin Amis’ book entitled Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, which deals with Stalin. At one point (I noted at the time that it was on pages 82-86, although I no longer have the book with me to check), Amis tried to differentiate between the evil done by the Nazis and the Soviets, and offered a reason why so many Western intellectuals sympathized with and/or excused the latter and not the former.
I agree with Amis’s conclusion that for those intellectuals it was not based on the violence or the amount of violence perpetrated by either, but on the differences between the stated ideologies used to justify that violence, which of course in the case of the Soviets become a travesty in operation but sounded superficially “good”—the equality and fraternity of humankind. The Nazis made no pretense of advocating those things. This is a very important distinction that I believe explains a great deal. The left is seduced by the facade of the stated intention and can ignore and/or justify or at least partially excuse the rest because of it.
Here’s Amis, quoting someone named Fige (about whom neither my ancient notes nor Google gives a clue):
…[T]he Russian revolution launched “an experiment which the human race was bound to make at some point in its evolution, the logical conclusion of humanity’s historic striving for social justice and comradeship.
I’m not sure I agree that it was inevitable, but I tend to think so. However, I agree that a Soviet experiment seems more inevitable as the end product of a long train of thought than does Nazism, which seems more random and eccentric (although if you look just at the long-lived phenomenon of anti-Semitism, you might say that Nazism launched an experiment which the human race was bound to make at some point in its [d]evolution, the logical conclusion of virulent anti-Semitism).
Also from Amis:
Nobody can be “against” the Just city. This is among the reasons people feel entitled to kill people who get in the way of it.
Another observation from the book:
Nazism did not destroy civil society. Bolshevism did destroy civil society. This is one of the reasons for the “miracle” of German recovery, and for the continuation of Russian vulnerability and failure.
Not so sure about that, either, because Germany was different in what psychologists might call its premorbid personality. Russia was in a worse state even before the horror that was the Soviet Union.
And perhaps we should conclude with this, from that supposedly kinder, gentler Trotsky (who was neither):
We must rid ourselves once and for all of the Quaker-Papist babble about the sanctity of human life.
What a guy. Is it any wonder the whole thing turned out the way it did?
More here from Trotsky:
The road to socialism lies through a period of the highest possible intensification of the principle of the state.” Just as a lamp, before going out, shoots up in a brilliant flame, so the state, before disappearing, assumes the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the most ruthless form of state, which embraces the life of the citizens authoritatively in every direction…
One can’t help but see the embrace and love of violence and power for its own sake, “justified” by a fantasy-ridden and unproven theory.
He knew exactly and precisely what lay ahead and embraced it:
In not more than a month’s time terror will assume very violent forms, after the example of the great French Revolution; the guillotine… will be ready for our enemies… that remarkable invention of the French Revolution which makes man shorter by a head.