An organic chemistry professor at New York University was fired after 82 of his 350 students signed a petition against him for his low grades and his instruction methods.
The professor, Maitland Jones, is 84 and has taught organic chemistry for decades, first at Princeton University and then at NYU. He also wrote a textbook called Organic Chemistry that is now in its fifth edition. According to the Monday New York Times report, the petition read "We are very concerned about our scores, and find that they are not an accurate reflection of the time and effort put into this class." We urge you to understand that a class with such high percentage of withdrawals and low grades has failed to make students learning and well-being a priority, and reflects poorly on the institution as a whole, the petition continued.
Jones denied that he spent $5,000 of his own money to make videos of lectures for students, according to the NYT NYT report, which complained that Jones did not accommodate students who missed class time while sick with COVID.
Jones said that they weren't coming to class and that they weren't coming to class. I can count the house and that is for sure. Elizabeth Spiers, a NYT opinion writer and journalism professor at the NYU, reacted to the situation on TWTR. One of the problems with a private education is that institutions have an incentive to treat the student as a customer and not a student who needs to learn certain things, Spiers said.
NYU spokeswoman John Beckman said that the faculty member with a one-year appointment with Professor Maitland Jones was a faculty member with a one-year appointment to teach organic chemistry. In one of his organic chemistry classes in spring 2022 there were, among other troubling indicators, a student petition signed by 82 students, course evaluation scores that were by far the worst among all the University s undergraduate science courses, and numerous student complaints about his dismissiveness, unresponsiveness, condescension, and opacity about grading. Organic chemistry is a difficult course for students who want to go to medical school.
The Times indicated that the 82 students who signed the petition represented about 23% of Jones'students.
A popular website where college students can review teachers called Rate My Professors takes a somewhat similar, but imprecise look at how Jones viewed his students over the years.
Nearly 200 students posted reviews of Jones'teaching at Princeton and NYU between the years 2003 and 2022.
Jones is a professor at Princeton and has an overall rating of 3.5 5 based on 13 total student ratings and a 2.9 5 as a NYU professor based on 183 ratings. Jones was tagged as a tough grader on Rate My Professor by his students. More than 7,500 professors are in the database of the RMP, which has more than 1.7 million professors.