Posted on 01/26/2023 4:11:53 AM PST by karpov
As a direct result of student complaints that his course was too difficult, Maitland Jones will no longer be teaching organic chemistry at New York University (NYU).
Jones has a distinguished record, having taught at Princeton for 43 years before retiring. He then continued to teach at NYU for 15 years because he loves his subject and wants to share his enthusiasm with later generations.
The termination of his year-by-year contract came because he refused to lower the standards of learning that students were expected to attain. This serves as a sad reminder of the many things that have gone wrong at American universities.
It is a simple fact that average student performance in college has been declining for decades. That teachers are increasingly being assigned blame for this fact reflects broad trends in society at large: the devaluation of special expertise, the ignoring of facts and logic, and the misinterpretation of statistics, all of which are part of the social attitude once described as “political correctness” and now usually called “wokeness.”
Declining Student Performance
A drastic decline in student performance was observed and remarked on by many chemistry professors as early as the 1980s, as was the fact that student ratings of instructors correlate directly—albeit, of course, in reverse—with students’ grades. Many faculty members prefer popularity among their students to maintaining rigorous standards in their courses and grade accordingly.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
The obvious problem here...it’s not a recent past decade problem...it’s been brewing since the 1980s.
You have high school teachers who wrapped up their education and have spent the past 20 years giving marginal education. Kids finishing high school....probably could not compete with the same crowd who graduated in the 1970s.
College education, unless you were in a engineering situation, ought to be a reduced value tuition.
Is his course difficult because of the subject matter or because he is a terrible teacher?
I remember several professors who spoke marginal English. I had others who made ideas impossible to understand.
Customers?!
They aren’t customers.
They’re just the grist for Deep State’s higher re-education mills.
Customers...
🤣🤣🤣🤣
Professor Jones was teaching Organic Chemistry. It is a premed wash out course for those lacking the skills and ability to succeed in medicine. It is a very difficult class for everyone. The “students” that rated him poorly that led to the firing were lazy whiners who felt he gave too much hard work and they were unwilling to do it. If they couldn’t do it, they have no business going in to medicine.
If you start with the premise that colleges and universities are out to take in as much revenue as possible, by any means necessary, then everything makes sense.
But teachers are under pressure to pass everyone, and some districts pass the kids to the next level even with straight Fs. I worked in Los Angeles; I saw hundreds of them. I used to test all the 9th graders I got--in order to see their reading level--and most of them were around grades 4-5.
But the schools are passing everyone, and the colleges are accepting anyone. And now here we are.
I remember reading an editorial in Chronicle for Higher Education about six years ago wherein a professor was complaining that her incoming freshmen all read at the 7th grade level. I thought, "7th grade? Lady, you're getting the good ones."
True. It is called Social Promotion.
The university “customer” is not just the students. It is the community the university serves and ESPECIALLY the companies that hire graduates of that university.
The teachers I respected the most were the ones who challenged us.
way back in the day when i was an undergrad at va tech, pretty much everyone knew which classes were difficult ... those who were motivated to learn made a point of taking those classes, and the slackers avoided them ... things worked out ...
i remember that the most popular and hardest class to get into was an elective horticultural class ... it was brutal because it covered a large number of areas and required identification of dozens of plants and memorization of both their common and latin names, properly spelled ... final exam was a random selection of plants presented for identification ...
OTOH, students graduated the class with a large variety of young house plants ... i still have them today ...
despite the intense nature of the class, it was nigh impossible to secure a seat, even though everyone knew that the class required intense effort ... this class wasn’t about grades, but about knowledge (and free houseplants!) ...
You idealist You
The first customer is the Student because they want to get as many in the door as possible.
The second customer and the university’s primary concern is the Democrat Party (CPUSA).
The university’s primary goal is the furtherance of the Party’s objectives.
As evidence of this you need only look at the required courses for a Freshman.
The first year students course load is packed full of social engineering courses designed to indoctrinate the student in socialist ideals.
The universities do this because of the high attrition rate of first year students.
They must capture their minds in the first year because many of them will not be there the following year.
identification of dozens of plants and memorization of both their common and latin names, properly spelled
/\
Now that
is impressive to me.
Way more rhan some weasel with a polisci PhD.
( waves at Roger /-)
.
There are two sides to the revenue equation: recruitment and retention.
Recruitment involves attracting students who, through direct payment or scholarships/grants in aid, etc., can pay for the full costs of tuition, housing, books, meal plans, etc.
Once that student has been located and enticed to attend a college or university, the Administration then leans into the Deans and Department Chairs to convince their faculty that each student is special and needs at least 4 years to find themselves. Thus, unqualified students are either passed up the ladder to a degree or convinced to pick another, more appropriate major at the same institution.
From the perspective of the University, the students are the product, the Golden Geese upon which their future financial health resides. The faculty are just an expense; an unfortunate cost of doing business. Colleges would gladly fire all their faculty if they could re-brand themselves as late-adolescent Day care with the same level of success.
It is no wonder that the Bio-Chem Professor was tossed out. He was upsetting carefully balanced dance of college finance. He was taken perfectly good students and throwing away their dreams of becoming incompetent and dangerous physicians. How dare he!
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