NEW YORK, NEW YORK - MAY 17: New York University (NYU) graduates wearing masks sit on a bench in ... [+]
When universities fire professors – or, as is more often the case, they decline to renew their teaching contracts – it’s rarely news.
But when NYU decided it was not going to renew the contract of respected veteran organic chemistry professor Maitland Jones Jr., it was news. And when university faculty decisions make the New York Times, that’s very big news in academia.
The short version of the story is that, although Professor Jones had been teaching these courses for years, both at prestigious universities and with distinction, his NYU students this past year were struggling. They were not passing the tests. The students were also displeased by what they said was the instructor’s attitude and demeanor. Some of his students started a petition asking for help and the university essentially fired him.
There’s a ton to take from even that abbreviated description of events, including the narrative that the school caved and catered to student sentiments rather than defend their professor and the challenging nature of their programs.
It’s a view that’s easy to have when, as was reported, NYU’s director of undergraduate studies in the chemistry department, wrote in an e-mail that he would, “extend a gentle but firm hand to the students and those who pay the tuition bills.”
If kowtowing to entitled and unprepared students is the narrative you see in NYU’s decision, others can see a teacher and institution locked in outdated teaching methods, unwilling or unable to meet the needs of contemporary students trying to rebound from pandemic teaching.
Both can be true, of course.
But the more telling, more concerning and more common issue raised by how NYU botched the Jones situation points to a very weak spot in modern college governance.
Bullied by expectations to cut costs and increase scale while also facing enrollment and competition pressures, higher education institutions have increasingly resisted bringing instructors on as employees or extending the job protections of tenure. Increasingly, the ranks of college teachers are filled with part-time, short-term contract, terminatable at-will teachers.
Even though NYU’s professor Jones was a long-time instructor who literally wrote the textbook for organic chemistry, the school had him on the short leash of one of these annual, no protection arrangements. Accordingly, even he was exceptionally vulnerable to any type of complaint, any kind of disruption in the smooth operation of the university.
In other words, what this short and painful saga really pulls into relief is that today’s university deans and department heads are – to appropriate the line that Bill Cosby used about parents – not interested in justice. They are interested in quiet.
Contract faculty who create waves get tossed overboard.
The ability to dismiss contract faculty so easily and for any disruption at all is and has been accelerated and exacerbated in this time when, in addition to being told to cut costs, institutional leaders are being told to treat students as customers – to collect and consider and value their opinions and to give them what they want. When schools try to operate as businesses and “those who pay the tuition bills” are unhappy and replacing a professor is so easy, lopping of a head is the lazy, even logical choice. Problem solved, order restored.
Over years of covering higher education, numerous at-will, contract instructors have told me that they teach to keep their jobs. They grade generously. They overlook cheating. They teach the program syllabus and nothing more. They smile frequently. Because, when the end of course surveys come out, they want high marks. They want their contracts renewed.
I can’t know this for sure but it feels like a very safe wager that few adjunct or contract teachers who have been the subject of student petitions have kept their LinkedIn profiles intact.
The problem is, of course, that when schools view their teachers as easily replaceable, interchangeable cogs – well, that’s a problem. It seems it would be difficult to convince anyone that what you’re teaching is valuable and worth paying for when who is teaching it clearly isn’t.
In this particular case, it’s hard to blame the students for speaking up when facing what feels like an unusually difficult situation. And the decision on its own – students are unhappy with this guy so let’s get rid of this guy – may likewise feel blameless. The real problem is that NYU put a teacher, one of their teachers, in a position where they would be fired for just about anything save glowing reviews.
The story really is that NYU is not nearly alone in doing this. Unprotected teachers who teach for their jobs are the normal now. In that way, Professor Jones is not the canary, he’s the ten thousandth canary. This is not a teacher problem or a student problem, it’s a structural problem which ought to be far more troubling.
