The New York Times reported on the firing of an N.Y.U. professor, Maitland Jones Jr., this week. It set my corner of discourse ablaze. I encourage you to read about it. Depending on your perspective, this is a story about snowflakes run amok, the decline of Western education or the intolerance of hypercompetitive academics. As a professor, I read it as a routine bureaucratic affair. That perspective may be helpful to you in understanding how this slice of academic life rises to the level of social problem.
Jones taught organic chemistry as a contingent (or adjunct) faculty member at a private university. The majority of higher education professors are now contingent, meaning that they do not get the protections of tenure. This is true even at highly selective institutions like N.Y.U. Generally speaking, contingent faculty members are low paid and low status. That combination can make contingent professors very vulnerable. When teaching contracts are fungible, administrators rely more heavily on student evaluations than they do peer evaluations. Even if the administrators do not weigh student evaluations in judging professors’ performance, it is easy to see how contingent faculty members could construe them as a kind of up-or-down vote. Student satisfaction is an easy metric for the university to use to measure success, if only because, by definition, it means professors are not causing bureaucratic headaches for higher-ups.
But not all contingent faculty members are created equal. They are more likely to be women, people of color and first-generation academics than they are to be established white male academics. Jones, previously tenured and retired, was unusual in this way. His contingent faculty status is more like the accomplished musician who teaches a weekend course in an art school. Or like the successful business executive who picks up a course at a local college to stay intellectually engaged. Jones, the students who petitioned against him and the administrators who terminated his contract agree on at least one thing: He did not like his students’ performance. That he could ignore his student evaluations to that effect for as long as he did says that he had a lot of privilege to do so.
I can sympathize. My own student evaluations have called my assigned reading “brutal” and “dense” and “hard.” I try to strike a balance between challenging students and accommodating their discomfort with learning. It is tough. Students still fail sometimes. And even students who succeed in the course often do not appreciate what they learned until long after the class has ended.
Jones’s teaching struggles are common when generations collide in the classroom. But it isn’t just about generational differences. It is about a course like organic chemistry, which is, in part, designed to filter out students unsuited to rigorous pre-med curriculums. At an expensive private university, however, students do not expect to fail out. The estimated total cost of attendance for an on- or off-campus student attending N.Y.U. over the 2022-23 school year is $83,250. Administrators at such tuition-dependent universities have a lot of incentives to make sure that their students do not fail out. That isn’t about snowflakes but about the economics of modern higher education. Any battle in the culture war is always about the culture of economics.
In the final analysis, this is not a great example of academic standards adrift. Organic chemistry has always been challenging. Many majors have similar courses, courses that have to be taught at scale, which means bringing in a lot of contingent labor to meet demand. Anxieties around such funnel classes — in which failing means starting over or changing majors — are as old as these kinds of courses themselves. This is not an invention of the student consumer model. The tell is that the students who petitioned against Jones were surprised that he was fired; that’s not what the petition asked for. This does not exactly smack of the inmates running the asylum. It’s more likely a case of the administration treating Jones the way it has undoubtedly treated other contingent faculty members over the years. This episode is a bureaucratic resolution to a worker widget that created one too many bureaucratic problems. The labor issue is by far the bigger social problem.
Also on my mind:
The music legend Loretta Lynn died this week at 90 years old. I love songwriting and roots music. I also love, in no particular order, a feminist icon who sticks it to the man, extravagant costumes and classic biopics. Ms. Loretta Lynn gave us all of that in her career. Marissa Moss is one of my favorite chroniclers of culture, gender and country music. Her new book, “Her Country: How the Women of Country Music Became the Success They Were Never Supposed to Be,” is a good read. Her reflection on what Lynn meant is moving. As a fan, I will miss her. I am also a Black fan of roots music and a scientist of social life. I would be remiss if I did not also acknowledge Lynn’s politics at the end of her public life: The country girl born in Butcher Holler, Ky., embraced Donald Trump. People are complicated. In the final analysis, she gave the world more than she took.
I learned about the Try Guys this week, thanks to a scandal about workplace improprieties. The BuzzFeed-turned-independent-internet stars were apparently a huge business. Their fans are devastated to learn that Ned Fulmer was ousted for having an inappropriate workplace relationship with an employee. Criticism abounds about him being a prominent wife guy — that is, a married heterosexual man in popular culture who makes loving his wife a central part of his brand likability. The comedian John Mulaney is another recent example of the disgraced celebrity wife guy. The Try Guy microcelebrity is another example of how popular a brand can be without bubbling up to the general culture. A lot of people learned of these guys only through the scandal last week. A Google search shows that I was not the only one trying to figure out who these guys are.
In more serious news, the Biden administration tried to quietly announce that millions of student loan borrowers have been excluded from debt cancellation. After first being included, student loans serviced by private banks were deemed ineligible. Insiders tell me it is a defensive strategy, as conservatives look hard for a plaintiff to sue the administration for its debt cancellation. Those holding such loans were not given notice. They could not reconsolidate with a public lender in time. And the whole affair undercuts the messaging going into election season. Timing has not been this administration’s strong suit.
Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, the author of “Thick: And Other Essays” and a 2020 MacArthur fellow.