Academia: A Tale of Two Firings

Thursday's Child Has Far to Go

Two professors, both alike in dignity. In unfair academia, where we lay our scene. From silent administrators break to sudden termination, where “we do not comment on personnel matters” makes managerial hands unclean.

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Of the two I have in mind, Patricia Limerick’s removal as the head of the Center for the American West at the University of Colorado Boulder seems the more straightforward as a case of managerial blunder. Incoming senior administrators generally know better than to make sudden personnel moves before they know the score, even if they’ve been brought on board specifically to be a hatchet man.

Limerick is a well-respected historian who co-founded the Center for the American West in 1986. That’s a long time to be in charge of anything institutional and over that duration some entanglement between the personal life of a leader and the professional life of a center would be inevitable. This is particularly true when a leadership role called for frequent fund-raising and for representing the entire institution (e.g., CU Boulder) to local and regional publics throughout the United States.

This seems to be the issue that led to Limerick’s firing. The Colorado Sun has obtained an internal audit that shows some staff at the Center were frustrated or concerned by periodic intermingling of their work with Limerick’s personal life—but the audit also showed that she had been very careful to pay for any personal costs herself and to clarify that staff did not have to be part of a birthday party and wedding that she asked for help with.

Limerick told an Inside Higher Ed reporter that she recognized the issues raised in the audit, but that the public-facing and fund-raising activities associated with something like the Center for the American West created intrinsic pressures to intertwine her personal professional work as a scholar and the center’s institutional work, such that she genuinely needed help from staff for things like sorting out the Center’s work from her work as a faculty member in preparing her taxes. She observed regretfully to Inside Higher Ed, “But I don’t think it’s going to happen again—to do that thing where you blend your scholarly reputation to the cause of building trust and ties with the university … Nobody should try that again. Because that is going to be misunderstood. There is going to be a lack of boundaries between your personal world and their professional world.”

If that’s all that was going on—and it really seems to be the sum total of the story—then no wonder the executive board of the Center all resigned in protest. The 36 years between the founding of the center and the present covers an era where organizational leaders routinely looked to staff for help with personal tasks to an era where that is much less common and happens under much more transparent and constrained conditions. (Nevertheless, executive leaders of organizations—including university presidents—do still expect some overlap precisely because some of the errands that most of us think of as totally personal, like dry cleaning or shopping for dinner, may genuinely overlap into the professional work expected of a leader who has to be constantly at receptions, at meetings, hosting dinners, and so on.)

This was a simple task and the new dean at CU Boulder blew it. What you do when you get an audit like that is arrive at an agreement that it’s time to prepare for a new leader and to make that be a gradual transition over a year or two, with some interim attention to creating new guidelines and processes within a center or department. Nothing in that audit seems to be an extraordinary breach that justifies immediate action, action that wipes out 36 years of building reputation capital for the university itself with one careless swipe. When Limerick says “nobody should try that again”, she is incidentally speaking to a much larger kind of breach that is widening on most college and university campuses, where faculty and long-standing administrators who have devoted most of their working lives to the stewardship of an institution are ignored or forgotten when it comes time to step out—a feeling that is feeding into overall feelings of disconnection and alienation in ways that have already been costly to the functionality and quality of many colleges and universities.

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But come on, let’s get to the case that has everybody talking, which is the firing of Maitland Jones Jr., an organic chemist who had been teaching on an annual contract at NYU. Tressie McMillan Cottom has already said a lot of what I myself was thinking about this case, but let’s run it down.

The particulars are this, if you haven’t seen the story: Jones is a well-known and respected organic chemist who authored a textbook that is in wide use in the field and taught for twenty years at Princeton before retiring. In recent years, he’s taught on an annual contract at NYU, which as Cottom points out is a much less-discussed kind of adjunct teaching that generally isn’t exploitative in the way that more widespread forms of contingency are—retirees who teach a single course because they want to and who help an institution provide enough of a particular kind of course that is in high demand. (I’m still not wild about it, in the sense that that even this kind of adjuncting helps institutions, including rich ones like NYU, avoid committing to hiring tenure-track faculty and building job security.)

Jones Jr. was concerned by what he saw as declining performance by students over the past four years, through the pandemic, and wrote periodic emails to his entire class underlining his frustration with their exam results. This in part seems to have sparked a mini-rebellion in his most recent year of teaching, leading to 82 students out of 350 to send a complaint to NYU about the course and Jones’ teaching of it. In response, the NYU administration ended Jones’ contract.

The initial reaction of faculty nationwide, from what I’ve seen, is that this is a very bad canary in a coalmine, a brazen new step towards administrative interference in faculty grading at a supposedly elite institution. That kind of interference is a bit more familiar in other circumstances—for example, quiet pressures at Division I schools on faculty who are grading athletes, or general tensions at some public institutions and tuition-dependent institutions over faculty assessment standards and how they interact with graduation rates. Pre-tenure faculty are often aware that being too demanding in grading may be punished in student evaluations.

It’s also not uncommon at all institutions for faculty to face pressures from individual students who want a higher grade despite poor performance on exams and assignments simply because that student is planning to go to medical school or law school. In my first teaching job at Rutgers, as a postdoctoral fellow, I had a student come by at the end of the semester who had attended only one session of a 14-week discussion course and turned in no assignments angrily demand a passing grade simply because they “needed it”.

The NYT story also reports that there were a fair number of “pro-Jones” students who defended his teaching. So is this another case of administrative clumsiness, in this instance opening up the specter of low standards, of demands by students that they be graded for perceived effort instead of outcomes?

I don’t think so, because there’s some other complexities here to consider.

The first is the entire idea of a “weed-out” class, a course that is a requirement for a particular major or program of study which many students end up failing or performing so poorly on that they are forced to give up their plans and change into another major or pre-professional track. At least some faculty deny that there is any such thing, which I think is plainly false; whether there are any classes which are intentionally designed to serve that function is a different matter. I have only met a very few professors in my entire working life who assertively defend a “weed-out” as an intentional plan, who believe that the purpose of grading is to always and invariably produce an outcome that sorts the best of the best from the rest and essentially closes the door on the rest in order to keep them out of some field that requires only the best. (It’s kind of the “Top Gun” variant of meritocracy.) But I have met a fair number who think that a “weeding out” process is an inevitable outcome of studying certain subjects which are intrinsically, ontologically more difficult than other subjects, that even the most gifted teacher cannot find a strategy that will overcome that difficulty such that most or all students will achieve a strong performance in that subject matter.

Organic chemistry is the subject that is most commonly thought to fit that characterization—that it’s just plain hard and that it has to be. (Jones Jr.’s textbook, interestingly, is apparently known for shifting pedagogical emphasis in organic chemistry from mind-numbing memorization of vast numbers of molecules and reactions to a more problem-based approach, which teaching faculty see as a really wholesome shift away from punitive difficulty but which many students apparently dislike even more, perhaps because memorization is something that yields to intense investment of labor but also enables certain forms of cheating…) What is certainly true is that at every institution, organic chemistry will be the lowest grade that many students will receive, even those who are otherwise all-A students. (I’ve seen this myself when judging various national competitions and fellowships, in the transcripts of very strong students.)

Judging whether a subject is really hard and has to be is quintessentially an assessment that requires expertise in that subject or at least something proximate to it. That is absolutely the kind of thing that faculty governance and academic freedom have to protect: I do not want a dean of student affairs just deciding, “organic chemistry shouldn’t be that hard”. I don’t want to hold any conclusions myself on the subject, either. It’s precisely that it is that hard everywhere that means that it’s not some aberrant temperamental choice of the kind that I might second-guess in a colleague. (E.g., it’s only when I see a departmental curriculum that I know isn’t commonly that punishing or an individual grader who is way out of step with other faculty in that subject matter than I’m willing to hold an opinion about whether there’s something out of line going on.)

But. The issue may not be whether organic chemistry is ontologically the hardest subject taught in college but whether it needs to be a requirement for admission to medical school. Here it is not unreasonable to suspect that medical schools are using the known and perhaps inevitable difficulty of organic chemistry as a proxy tool to “weed out” applicants and reduce the labor burden of maintaining selectivity.

Here we get into truly messy waters. Do many practicing doctors need to call on a knowledge of organic chemistry as it is taught in college in their work? The answer seems to be no, though there are specializations where it’s more important. Is it a good thing for doctors to know? Sure. But if I had to list things that the doctors I’ve visited in my life should have studied and didn’t, I’d put subjects that might make them more able to relate to a wider variety of human beings in a more humane and emotionally intelligent way higher on the list than organic chemistry.

But second-guessing educational requirements in this way quickly becomes a truly tangled mess that opens the door to “my kid doesn’t need to study algebra, he just needs to take accounting because he’s going to be an investment banker” and a host of other parental resentments going all the way back to 1st grade. (Including “my kid don’t need to study what really happened in American history, because that isn’t important and it’s all left-wing nonsense anyway.”) It is perhaps a Pandora’s box best left unopened.

Another Pandora’s box that is almost irresistable, on the other hand, is what actually happened in Maitland Jones Jr.’s courses over the last few years. Here I’m seeing a lot of interesting subrosa chatter in various social media spaces where academics are present. First, about whether it’s ever a good idea to express frustrations about student performance to an entire class via email; second, about whether he wasn’t appreciating the difficulties that students have faced in the pandemic. On the other side of the ledger, it’s hard to shake the thought that Jones Jr.’s irritation with some of his students might have been justified: maybe they weren’t working hard enough, maybe they weren’t studying enough. As one Reddit poster put it, “There is no way anyone can form a well-informed opinion about this based on what is available. It can 100% be a story of a professor defending standards and snowflake-students being whiny, and it can just as easily be a story of a dick-professor who is unprofessional/rude and is being unfair”. One other thing that Reddit conversations surfaced of interest is that at least some of Jones Jr’s emails to the class about poor performance on exams suggested to some readers that the students missing what Jones Jr. regarded as easy questions were using a past exam they’d obtained in the usual ways to answer those questions without noticing that the question itself had changed.

In professional terms, I also don’t want to welcome that kind of second-guessing, especially not in a wide public conversation. I’m with the Reddit poster on that point. But what is surfacing in those discussions is just one more demonstration of how little we talk about the classroom as experience, either on the faculty side or the student side, in any sort of public or shared context. What we have instead is a series of top-level blandishments and then a disconnected set of individual testimonies about specific experiences. Classrooms in this way feel like workplaces: universal but also curiously private and unknowable, a subject of furiously shared conversations and evaluations that never floats into some wider public culture in a coherent way. Not only does talking about classroom experience seem to complicatedly violate a sort of covenant of privacy (even with names left out) but it feels strangely boring, like forcing friends to watch a slide show of your recent vacation. Those 82 students discovered in the course of study sessions that they together felt they’d been treated unfairly—but they never really had to reckon with or talk with the 268 students who felt otherwise (or at least didn’t feel sufficiently aggrieved to sign a petition). We don’t know what Maitland Jones Jr. and his colleagues thought about his pedagogy, or how they think specifically about the NYU students they’re teaching as a whole, whether he was seeing something different than other faculty are seeing.

Which brings us back to the wider box of uncertainties and monsters, which is general public incoherence when it comes to the question of what people ought to know and how they ought to know it, and in service to what. Second-guessing one professor’s grading and one group of student’s reaction to that grading is maybe not profitable. Trying to hold that wider conversation with a more nuanced and real conversation about what actually happens in teaching and studying would be a great idea, if we weren’t in the middle of a general crisis resulting from the highly motivated and strategic lying of a set of partisans about classrooms and curricula in American schools, and if we weren’t in the middle of a general crisis provoked by general doubt about whether there will be any sort of middle-class careers left worth training for and any middle-class culture worth being educated for once the billionaires own everything and have fired everyone.

Image credit: Photo by Terry Vlisidis on Unsplash