I wish there were another gloss on this, but that seems to be the only one that is plausible. It's not that the guy is emeritus at Princeton (until recent years, Princeton was not very strong in chemistry), or that he authored a widely used textbook. It's that the guy taught organic chemistry for 15 years at NYU (after retiring from Princeton), without a problem, until....well, here's what the aritcle says:
After retiring from Princeton in 2007, he taught organic chemistry at N.Y.U. on a series of yearly contracts. About a decade ago, he said in an interview, he noticed a loss of focus among the students, even as more of them enrolled in his class, hoping to pursue medical careers.
“Students were misreading exam questions at an astonishing rate,” he wrote in a grievance to the university, protesting his termination. Grades fell even as he reduced the difficulty of his exams.
The problem was exacerbated by the pandemic, he said. “In the last two years, they fell off a cliff,” he wrote. “We now see single digit scores and even zeros.”
After several years of Covid learning loss, the students not only didn’t study, they didn’t seem to know how to study, Dr. Jones said.
A lot of students have been suffering because of the pandemic, no one doubts that. And the Internet certainly started making people stupider and lowering their attention spans in the early 2000s. But firing a professor who has been teaching for 15 years because of al this stinks to high heavens, and means the "inmates" (sorry, the "clients") run the "asylum" (sorry, the "business").
So let's attend to the "political economy" as they say. NYU now boasts outstanding graduate level faculties in law, philosophy, and economics, and strong faculties in history, political science, and sociology (mathematics was long an outstanding unit and remains one). NYU is not rich enough, however, to easily compete with the universities with mega-endowments like Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, even as it recruits faculty from those schools. NYU lives off tuition, which is why their financial aid is so stingy.
And that brings us back to chemistry. The natural sciences at NYU are weak qua PhD programs--those disciplines are expensive, after all!--but they are very important to students, especially pre-med students. Organic chemistry is required for all pre-med students. NYU can't have lots of them failing out, lest Mom and Dad (and, more importantly, prospective Moms and Dads) decide it isn't worth the extravagant tuition to send kids to NYU. Since chemistry isn't a priority department for the university (with respect to prestige and rankings), there's little cost to sacking a professor under such unseemly circumstances. But the real significance of this episode is what it portends for other schools, in the era in which New Infantilism (and student consumerism) reigns supreme. (To be clear: the consumerist attitude of students is the wholly predictable result of the cost of higher education.)
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