I remember how it was -- JR
NYU Professor Maitland Jones Jr. fired for being too hard says colleges ‘coddle students’
An NYU chemistry professor who claimed he was fired after students complained that his class was too hard said colleges “coddle” students instead of helping them succeed with “tough love.”
Maitland Jones Jr. taught at the expensive Manhattan private school for 15 years before he was canned ahead of the fall semester after a student petition alleged that his organic chemistry class was too difficult to pass.
“Organic chemistry is a difficult and important course,” he wrote in an op-ed published in the Boston Globe Thursday.
“Those of us who teach it aim to produce critical thinkers, future diagnosticians, and scientists.”
The 84-year-old said he has witnessed a decline in student capacity in recent years as well as administrators bending to the wishes of students more often than not,
“Deans must learn to not coddle students for the sake of tuition and apply a little tough love,” Jones wrote. “They must join the community in times of conflict to generate those teachable moments.”
He said professors now fear teaching demanding material and assigning low grades to students who perform poorly because they worry they’ll face punishment.
“[Young professors’] entire careers are at the peril of complaining students and deans who seem willing to turn students into nothing more than tuition-paying clients,” Jones said.
The ex-teacher said the students must learn to accept failure and grow from their mistakes. He argued doing so is a vital life skill today’s students aren’t getting.
“Students need to develop the ability to take responsibility for failure,” he wrote. “If they continue to deflect blame, they will never grow… Failure should become a classic ‘teachable moment.'”
Jones, who previously taught at Princeton University, said he watched a decline in students’ attendance and participation in his class over the past couple of years. He said the college kids were simply not studying and working hard enough.
“They weren’t coming to class, that’s for sure, because I can count the house,” he wrote in a grievance to NYU. “They weren’t watching the videos, and they weren’t able to answer the questions.”
His students said in their petition that Jones often addressed them in a “condescending and demanding” tone and that he “failed to make students’ learning and well-being a priority.”
NYU cited students’ complaints of the professor’s “dismissiveness, unresponsiveness, condescension and opacity about grading” in its decision to fire the professor.
They did not, however, call for his firing.
A spokesperson for the university said his course evaluation was “by far the worst, not only among members of the chemistry department but among all the university’s undergraduate science courses.”
Still, Jones doubled down that universities must hold students to high standards in education.
“Without those standards, we as a nation will not produce those individuals — doctors, engineers, scientists, – citizens! — who will guide us toward a better future,” he wrote in the op-ed.
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Doubt-Free, America's Schools Warm to Climate Activism
Public school districts are adopting curricula on climate change from well-funded progressive groups casting the issue as a threat to life on the planet that students should respond to through activism.
As of fall 2020, 29 states and the District of Columbia have adopted standards that require science classes to teach human-caused climate change as a peril beyond dispute, according to K12 Climate Action, a group that is part of the progressive Aspen Institute.
The school districts often rely on information provided by advocacy groups including the Sierra Club and the U.S. Green Building Council. A Sierra Club teaching “toolkit” signals a wide purpose across subject areas: “The ‘why’ and the ‘how’ of moving our entire society to 100% clean energy — and for fighting climate change more broadly — can be woven into many subject areas, including: biology, chemistry, physics, and even social studies.”
Still more curricular guidelines and suggestions are distributed by well-funded progressive groups that include the United Nations’ Office for Climate Education, and the North American Association for Environmental Education.
Many scientists agree that human activity has contributed to the warming of the Earth in recent decades. But it’s still not clear how much temperatures will rise in the future and the effect that might have on society. While the Biden administration and progressive groups who help shape the school curricula argue that it is imperative to end or limit the use of fossil fuels, there is vigorous debate among scientists and policy makers about the best way to balance mitigation measures with economic and other tradeoffs that, critics say, are largely ignored in schools.
“It’s fine to teach climate if you summarize the pro and con arguments of climate change,” said John Staddon, professor emeritus of biology at Duke University and author of Science in an Age of Unreason. “But you don’t talk about it as a concluded issue. It’s a very political area and [climate change] is about scientific data, which is not a consensus.”
A RealClearInvestigations review of materials used to advance climate learning found that many contain an uncritical examination of climate change; they tend to emphasize worst-case scenarios, and to urge encouraging students to organize as activists.
“There are a lot of resources out there that are … helping students draft policies as well, and getting them involved from the beginning. And this is what we want to see, this whole-institution approach where we’re creating this culture of climate action,” Kristen Hargis, who works on research with the North American Association for Environmental Education, told attendees of an August webinar.
After the pandemic caused a delay to implementing its standards adopted in 2020, New Jersey this school year became the first state to introduce a mandatory comprehensive curriculum of environmental education in its public schools. State lawmakers in Connecticut earlier this year voted to make climate education in public schools mandatory starting next year, while a group of teachers in Oregon have drafted legislation that would create a curriculum similar to New Jersey’s.
Activists in other states are also working through legislators and state education boards to make uncontested climate change assertions part of classroom teaching.
Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, said there are limits to what high schoolers can be expected to read and understand from complicated climate science reports. “But you do want them to realize that [climate change] is a real thing and know the causes and … that it’s a serious problem that will be disruptive to nature and society for centuries to come and that there are ways to adapt.”
To question the widely disseminated doomsday view of much climate science is to invite outrage and personal attacks, as Wade Linger found in 2014. As a member of the West Virginia Board of Education, Linger sought to change the wording in a proposed lesson that would, if his amendment were adopted, allow students to consider “factors that have caused the rise and fall” of global temperatures over the past century, rather than only considering the idea that temperatures have increased. Linger also suggested students be allowed to consider the credibility of climate change data.
The lessons he challenged were developed largely by Next Generation Science Standards, developed by a series of mostly progressive science learning groups; they encourage students to “[take] action within their own spheres of influence” to combat what is presented as out-of-control global warming.
“This was a precursor on the education scene to all the indoctrination stuff like [critical race theory] and the gender conflicts,” Linger said in an interview with RCI. “This was an early trial balloon to see how they can use the system to indoctrinate kids.”
His stance drew widespread criticism, with strangers shouting him down on social media. State universities and science groups sent letters to the board, denouncing Linger’s proposal.
“Adding the words ‘“and fall’” to [the lesson] risks confusion among students between the concepts of weather and climate,” read a letter from the National Science Teaching Association.
Despite a widely mixed series of public comments on the planned curriculum, Linger’s suggestions were not implemented. He resigned in 2017.
“No one ever wanted to debate the data,” said Linger, who was appointed by then-Gov. Joe Manchin, now a moderate Democratic U.S. senator from the coal-producing state.
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Racism Theory Found Widespread in Public Schools
To what extent, if at all, are critical race theory (CRT) and gender ideology being taught or promoted in America’s schools? With little data available, and no agreement about what constitutes the teaching of critical social justice (CSJ) ideas, the answer up to now has remained open to political interpretation.
Motivated by the work of Manhattan Institute senior fellow and City Journal contributing editor Christopher F. Rufo, many on the right allege that CRT-related concepts—such as systemic racism and white privilege—are infiltrating the curricula of public schools around the country. Educators following these curricula are said to be teaching students that racial disparities in socioeconomic outcomes are fundamentally the result of racism, and that white people are the privileged beneficiaries of a social system that oppresses blacks and other “people of color.” On gender, they are being taught that gender identity is a choice, regardless of biological sex. But are the cases Rufo and others point to representative of American public schools at large—or are they merely outliers amplified by right-wing media?
The response to these charges from many on the left has been to deny or downplay them. CRT, they contend, is a legal theory taught only in university law programs. Therefore, what conservatives are up in arms about is not the teaching of CRT, but the teaching of America’s uncomfortable racial history.
But strong connections exist between the cultural radicalism of CRT and the one-sided, decontextualized portrayal of American history and society that Democratic activists endorse. And these ideas have also influenced many Democratic voters. Indeed, according to a 2021 YouGov survey, large majorities of Democratic respondents support public schools’ teaching many of the morally and empirically contentious ideas to which opponents of CRT object. These include the notions that racism is systemic in America (85 percent support), that all disparities between blacks and whites are caused by discrimination (72 percent), that white people enjoy certain privileges based on their race (85 percent), and that they have a responsibility to address racial inequality (87 percent).
Whatever one thinks of these ideas, they are hardly “settled facts” on the same epistemic plane as heliocentrism, natural selection, or even climate change. To the contrary, they are a moral-ideological just-so theory of group differences, an all-encompassing worldview akin to a secular religion, whose claims can’t be measured, tested, or falsified. They treat an observed phenomenon (disparate group outcomes) as evidence of its cause (racism), while specifying causal mechanisms that are nebulous, if not magical. Their advocates have not refuted counterarguments; they’ve merely asserted empirically unverified statements about the nature of group differences.
Publicly funded schools that teach and pass off left-wing racial-ideological theories and concepts as if they are undisputed factual knowledge—or that impart tendentiously curated readings of history—are therefore engaging in indoctrination, not education. The question before us, then, is not whether or to what extent public schools are assigning the works of Richard Delgado, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and other critical race theorists. It is whether schools are uncritically promoting a left-wing racial ideology.
To answer this and other related questions, we commissioned a study on a nationally representative sample of 1,505 18- to 20-year-old Americans—a demographic that has yet to graduate from, or only recently graduated from, high school. A complete Manhattan Institute report of all the findings from this study will be published in the coming months; what follows is a preview of some of them. Our analysis here focuses mainly on the results for the sample overall rather than for various subgroups.
We began by asking our 18- to 20-year-old respondents (82.4 percent of whom reported attending public schools) whether they had ever been taught in class or heard about from an adult at school each of six concepts—four of which are central to critical race theory. The chart below, which displays the distribution of responses for each concept, shows that “been taught” is the modal response for all but one of the six concepts. For the CRT-related concepts, 62 percent reported either being taught in class or hearing from an adult in school that “America is a systemically racist country,” 69 percent reported being taught or hearing that “white people have white privilege,” 57 percent reported being taught or hearing that “white people have unconscious biases that negatively affect non-white people,” and 67 percent reported being taught or hearing that “America is built on stolen land.” The shares giving either response with respect to gender-related concepts are slightly lower, but still a majority. Fifty-three percent report they were either taught in class or heard from an adult at school that “America is a patriarchal society,” and 51 percent report being taught or hearing that “gender is an identity choice” regardless of biological sex.
We also wanted to assess whether certain concepts were more likely to be taught in some educational contexts than in others. To this end, we separately asked respondents whether, “in high school, college, or other educational settings,” they were ever taught that “discrimination is the main reason for differences in wealth or other outcomes between races or genders” or that “there are many genders, not just male and female.” Overall, excluding those who didn’t know, 62 percent were taught that discrimination is the main reason for outcome gaps and a third were taught that there are many genders. As shown in the chart below (which includes “don’t know” answers), statistically significant (if only modest) differences emerged between respondents with no versus at least some prior college instruction: 58 percent and 26 percent of those in the latter group, respectively, report having been taught these two concepts, compared with 50 percent and 25 percent of those in the former. Far from being the preserve of academic curricula, then, CSJ ideas central to contemporary left-wing racial and gender ideology are being taught to students before they arrive at college.
The summary chart underscores the pervasiveness of at least some form of exposure to these concepts. For instance, 93 percent of respondents reported either being taught (85 percent) or hearing from an adult at school about at least one of the eight listed concepts, with an average of 4.3 concepts; 90 percent reported either being taught (80 percent) or hearing about at least one of the five CRT-related concepts, with an average of 3.0 concepts; and 74 percent reported either being taught (54 percent) or hearing about at least one of the three gender-related concepts, with an average of 1.3 concepts. While these figures are for the sample overall, they do not meaningfully differ by school type. Levels of exposure were similar regardless of whether respondents reported attending public or private high schools.
https://www.city-journal.org/yes-critical-race-theory-is-being-taught-in-schools
***********************************My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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