Last year, the State of Oregon invited a firestorm of controversy when it announced that it was eliminating the requirement that high-school graduates have rudimentary arithmetic and literacy skills to graduate. Instead of ensuring that adolescents in the Beaver State are well-equipped for the labor market and adulthood, Democrats in Salem chose to kowtow to progressive zealots and prioritize “equity” over competency. Unfortunately, other jurisdictions and schools have followed suit, with supporters calling this a step toward overhauling discriminatory pedagogical methods, another battle in the never-ending left-wing crusade to reimagine everything.
In the latest sign of this worrying trend, it appears that the woke infiltration of scholastic standards has spread to my alma mater. Yesterday, the New York Times reported that organic-chemistry professor and notorious medical-school dream-killer Maitland Jones Jr. was discharged from NYU after his students started a petition against him, claiming his course was too difficult. Yet he was doing what he was hired for: to teach organic chemistry by challenging students to go beyond their comfort zones. Jones’s termination is the academic equivalent of ochlocracy and should concern everyone who cares about the preservation of meritocratic excellence.
It’s safe to assume that many “orgo” students will forget much of what they learned in the course except for the basics, which is enough to make one wonder whether advanced-level organic chemistry is truly necessary to be a good doctor, especially for physicians who aren’t going to become researchers. Nevertheless, Jones’s course, and others like it, served as a testing ground where the best and the brightest could appraise their mettle in high-stakes situations, a particularly valuable trait for people who will eventually be tasked with caring for those with life-threatening conditions.
More significantly, NYU has opened the door for students to protest their way out of taking a class because of how the content or complexity of the course material affects their self-esteem. This flies in the face of everything higher education is supposed to stand for.
Of course, this is nothing new for NYU. This is the school whose official student newspaper pulled an ad for a book by National Review editor in chief Rich Lowry out of concern it might offend some students’ precious sensibilities. It looks like the inmates will continue running the asylum in Greenwich Village for the foreseeable future.