The Globe and Mail/ISTOCK
Phoebe Maltz Bovy is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.
There’s a time-honoured tradition of the weaker students in a class comparing notes and deciding the problem isn’t their inability or unwillingness to succeed, but rather the teacher – who’s doubtless a terrible human being who has it in for them personally. So what if the mean teacher would just go away?
That’s what happened last spring at New York University, but with a twist: The teacher was fired. The New York Times recently reported on a conflict between “respected professor” Maitland Jones Jr. and a bunch of petulant undergraduate students, who miffed that (per their petition) their marks in his organic chemistry course, a requirement for premed students, were “not an accurate reflection of the time and effort put into this class.” They wanted the course they claimed was too difficult be made easier – leading indirectly to Dr. Jones’s dismissal.
My first impulse was to side with the professor. I, too, have taught college students, including at NYU (in French, not chemistry). I have first-hand experience with students who think the universe owes them high grades. As a human being who benefits from modern medicine, I share others’ misgivings about unqualified doctors.
But the more I thought about it, the more I questioned the framing of the story, both of Dr. Jones’s travails and of the intergenerational conflict more broadly. Is there an entitlement crisis among today’s youth, or is it possible something else is going on?
The article was certainly Team Professor, and so, too, were the social-media posts it inspired, many from fellow journalists. The U.S. media, largely based in New York, enjoys a good story of NYU students acting bratty. Considered less serious than Columbia (the Ivy League university uptown), NYU is a private school with high tuition fees, located in a historically bohemian area of the city, and often felt as a gentrifying presence. Never mind that the grown-ups bristling at their college-kid neighbours do so from US$15-million West Village townhouses.
Dr. Jones is the perfect victim here because he can serve as stand-in for the precarious adjunct (and thus gain sympathy from progressives, for whom he’s the canary in the coal mine of academia), while also holding cultural legitimacy that well exceeds the usual for that line of work. While some 84-year-old adjuncts might be teaching because they can’t afford to retire, this particular one is a Princeton University emeritus professor who is by all accounts teaching out of passion.
His accomplishments are part of this story, but so, too, is his physical embodiment of an ivory tower of yore. In photographs accompanying the piece, he looks extremely professorial: the white beard, the tweed blazer, the tortoiseshell glasses.
Perhaps Dr. Jones’s professorial vibe led students to believe their instructor was tenured and thus had job security. That would certainly help explain how they were, the Times reported, “surprised that Dr. Jones was fired, a measure the petition did not request and students did not think was possible.” (Beyond terminating the professor’s contract, the school promised to “review” the grades of the disgruntled students and gave them the option of withdrawing from the class retroactively.)
Exuding seniority while not technically having any was his downfall. Well, that, combined with failing to adapt his course to the students he actually had. Indeed, the same facts could have been interpreted a different way. This might have the tale of an employee failing to shape up after warnings, then getting the boot. Had that been the reading, there’d have been no such media attention. It’s always sad when people get fired, but unless young, hypersensitive snowflakes instigated the sacking, nobody outside that person’s household cares.
The snowflake narrative requires buying into the idea that Dr. Jones was, objectively, a top-notch chemistry professor, something reporter Stephanie Saul insinuates, while providing evidence to the contrary. She demonstrates that Dr. Jones has had an illustrious career in chemistry, not that he is, currently, an effective college instructor. These do not necessarily overlap.
That’s evidenced by a quoted university spokesperson, who said Dr. Jones’s course evaluations “were by far the worst, not only among members of the chemistry department, but among all the university’s undergraduate science courses.” Student evaluations are not a perfect metric, but that’s not a great sign.
It’s tempting to mock the complaining students. But if undergrads have a consumer mindset, it might have something to do with the US$200,000 sticker price of their bachelor’s degrees. This breeds an entitlement mentality. A sink-or-swim approach, where if a bunch of students flunk out, so be it, isn’t compatible with fees (and debts) of that magnitude, or even those of public institutions in the U.S. or Canada.
Yes, today’s youth often present their grievances in the soft language of wellness and social justice. But much of what they’re objecting to is real. The cost-of-living crisis in Canada and beyond has disproportionately affected the young. However much they might want to live independently, it’s too expensive.
No wonder these premed students are worried about their prospects. This is a cohort that spent the some of their most crucial years forming friendships, connections and romances in COVID-19 lockdowns. The normal rhythm of student life – buckling down, then going out – wasn’t available to them. Is it so surprising that their study habits never properly developed?
Along with the solemn photographs of Dr. Jones, the article includes some crowd shots of random NYU students. A sea of anonymous young people of different races and genders, in jeans and sweatshirts. If any of them get fired from the jobs helping them defray the costs of NYU, it’s unlikely to make the news.
Maybe it’s the combination of the masks many are wearing and their backpacks, or my knowledge of what the past two-plus years have involved, but these do not look like a group of carefree college students. Even the most privileged among them have been through a lot.
So help me, but I think I’m Team Brats.