I remember how it was -- JR
Should failing students really graduate as doctors?
Lionel Shriver
If I seem to be bashing universities lately, they’ve asked for it. The prestigious New York University in lower Manhattan didn’t cover itself in glory when, just before this semester began, it responded to a petition from 82 students (out of a class of 350) by sacking the professor. The petitioners’ main objection? The course was too hard.
After retiring from Princeton’s chemistry department where he’d taught organic chemistry for more than 40 years, Maitland Jones Jr taught the same course at NYU on one-year contracts as an adjunct. I used to be an adjunct, and this much hasn’t changed since my day: adjuncts are atrociously paid. I’m just guessing, but Dr Jones would surely have been handsomely remunerated at Princeton. His pension must be plump. He could only have continued to teach organic chemistry at NYU for chump change out of passion for his subject and perhaps a devotion to community service. Among many publications, Jones is the author of a classic, widely used 1,300-page organic chemistry textbook. NYU was getting a bargain. Firing a distinguished academic who’s taking on classes of 350 as de facto charity work was worse than thankless.
There’s more at stake in this sorry tale than a rude conclusion to one man’s impressive career. Organic chemistry is mostly taken by pre-med students. The demanding course is commonly regarded as a ‘weed-out’ class. Students who can’t cut the mustard fail or drop out. The subject’s complex problem-solving and lab work develop many of the skills that physicians require (or so I’m given to understand; I wouldn’t survive 15 minutes of organic chemistry). In other words, organic chemistry is supposed to be hard.
Yet as of about ten years ago, Dr Jones revealed in an interview, he noticed that students had lost focus. ‘Students were misreading exam questions at an astonishing rate,’ he wrote to NYU in a letter objecting to his dismissal. He made his exams easier, and still their grades continued to drop. Covid restrictions inflicted the coup de grâce. In the past two years, their grades ‘fell off a cliff. We now see single-digit scores, and even zeros’. Not only did students not study, Dr Jones observed – they didn’t even seem to know how to study.
When our Gen Z students can’t do the work, what do we do? Dumb the classes down? If course requirements are relaxed too radically so that more students do well, professors will fail to convey the body of knowledge the classes are designed to deliver. Everyone gets an A, but still knows diddly-squat about organic chemistry. Education becomes theatre.
But then, education at elite American colleges is already in danger of becoming theatre, an empty going through the motions, at the end of which graduates know little more than they did to begin with. For one ingredient in this story is money. Attending NYU, if you’re paying full-freight, costs $83,250 per year (a whopping £75,000, in today’s sadly depreciated sterling).
Parents want their stonking money’s worth, and the universities want their stonking money. The student-as-customer model encourages administrations to placate petulant undergraduates. After all, the customer is always right. And no parent wants to submit to such severe sticker shock only to have their darling doctor-to-be ‘weeded out’. In the end, a degree is not something you earn, but something you buy.
I’ve grown pretty cynical about higher education. Many majors NYU offers (most notoriously, film majors) won’t result in careers that ever earn back the £300,000 cost of the diploma. Plenty of graduates in a range of soft subjects haven’t been prepared to make a social contribution of any consequence.
But all degrees are not a joke. Some occupations still require you to know what you’re doing, and medicine is one of them. None of us wants to be operated on by a surgeon who failed organic chemistry, or who took baby chemistry because big-boy chemistry was too demanding. Parents and students may not care for the ‘weed-out’ system, but ushering less capable young people onto non-pre-med career paths protects patients of the near future. At 65, I’m looking out for my own interest here.
Reading up on Dr Jones, I sampled the 6,000+ comments after the New York Times article that reported the story. Wouldn’t readers of America’s most woked-out newspaper sympathise with struggling ‘snowflakes’ whose meanie professor gave them crummy grades? To the contrary.
The New York Times readership is the educated professional class – they have high standards. An overwhelming majority of those commenting were appalled that NYU had capitulated to student complaints about the curriculum being intolerably difficult. Many readers had taken organic chemistry. Some had failed organic chemistry and claimed that they deserved to fail, because they realised they didn’t have the chops for pre-med.
Others were teachers or professors who, like Dr Jones, decried their recent students as abysmal. Their classes were full of young people who couldn’t write, couldn’t read and couldn’t absorb information. Some of these teachers had quit.
The larger issue extends beyond medicine and isn’t specific to America. Tertiary education is now infected with solicitousness. Professors are meant to please students, while it used to be the other way round. Aggressive affirmative action drastically lowers admission standards for minority students, often resulting in an embarrassing bottom-of-the-class status for many of its supposed beneficiaries, the easiest solution to which is to reduce academic rigour for everybody. Grade inflation is rife, and cases like Dr Jones’s will encourage other untenured professors to simplify their lessons and give unwarranted high marks. Further bruised by catastrophic Covid lockdowns, both British and American Gen Z kids seem curiously fragile.
The cumulative result is bound to be a less qualified, less skilful and less resilient workforce. Today’s university students are the people who in short order will diagnose our cancers, repair our bridges, design our software, service our nuclear power stations and conceive technological solutions to challenges we can’t yet anticipate. Woe is the day that they throw down their tools because keeping fuel rods in the reactor cool is ‘too hard’.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/10/university-is-supposed-to-be-hard/
****************************************************UK: 'White teachers should teach ethnic minority children to sing God Save the King', says government's social mobility tsar Katharine Birbalsingh
The government's social mobility tsar has said that white teachers should teach schoolchildren from ethnic minority backgrounds to sing God Save the King.
Social Mobility Commission chair Katharine Birbalsingh, known as Britain's strictest headteacher, said children are at risk of feeling they don't 'belong' in the UK if they do not sing the national anthem - even if it makes them feel 'uncomfortable'.
In a lecture at the University Oxford yesterday Ms Birbalsingh, 49, said that ethnic minority children can suffer poor teaching of 'basic cultural knowledge' because teachers believe they 'cannot identify with so-called "white" things'.
She added that white teachers can 'feel uncomfortable having ethnic minority children sing the national anthem'.
'But who loses out?' the co-founder Michaela Community School in Wembley, London asked the audience of her Roger Scruton Memorial lecture education, race and conservatism.
Ms Birbalsingh said the child who is 'taught over and over by his school, by the media' that he does not belong in country loses out as no child could succeed in a country they do not see as home, The Telegraph reports.
The 'Tiger Teacher' issued a stark warning that not letting ethnic minorities identify as 'British' left them 'ripe for radicalisation'.
Ms Birbalsingh also slammed identity politics taking over British schools as well as plans to 'decolonise' the curriculum.
Pupils at her school sing the national anthem and teachers wore black and flew the Union Flag at half-mast in the wake of the Queen's death.
She added that stopping poorer children from learning about Great British culture, customs and historical literature 'shuts them in a cage'.
It is also right to talk about controversial parts of Britain's history and wrong to 'whitewash' ethnic minority people out of it, adding that it was 'wrong to talk about "black history" as if it is some kind of add-on.'
She said the 'determination of the progressives to deny ethnic minorities their birthright to identify as British, is outrageous'.
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Let’s get uni students face-to-face again – for their mental health
A couple of weeks ago, I asked a university colleague if she had an unusual number of students experiencing psychological distress. “Yes,” she replied. “I have lots of students like that.” I told her that I had never had so many students dealing with mental health issues. We looked at each other in silence not knowing what to say.
I already knew that Australian university students suffered significant rates of anxiety and depression. When I wrote a column on higher education for The Age, I’d report on research about students’ mental health. One study that stood out, published in Australian Psychologist, showed university students had higher levels of psychological distress than the general population.
I also knew from studies that financial stress and working long hours affected students’ mental health. I can reel off other predicators for psychological distress, too. At the moment, none of these predicators seem to worry my colleagues and I more than the enduring effects of COVID-19 lockdowns on students.
Now it seems that our hunch that the COVID pandemic has had a negative psychological impact on students is correct. A new Monash University study, led by PhD candidate David Tuck, concludes that more tertiary education students experienced higher levels of psychological distress during the pandemic.
“More tertiary education students experienced severe distress during the COVID-19 pandemic than adults in the general population, as well as before the pandemic,” the Monash researchers say in their study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology.
It is one of the first Australian studies to investigate the level of psychological distress among tertiary students during the COVID pandemic. The research shows almost 71 per cent of the more than 1000 students surveyed displayed elevated levels of psychological distress during the pandemic between September 2020 and February 2021. Twenty-three per cent of the sample reported extreme levels of distress.
Another worrying finding is that students who had already been diagnosed with anxiety, depression, PTSD or other mental disorders before COVID had significantly higher levels of distress than students who did not have a previous diagnosis of a mental health disorder.
And it is the younger students and those studying undergraduate degrees that have higher levels of distress than older and postgraduate students. It’s understandable why this would be the case. It can be tricky for students to make the leap from high school to university, and this year’s first-years have done much of their final years of high school online at home during COVID lockdowns. The students had to readjust to being in classrooms and then acclimatise to university life.
So, what can universities do to help students?
They certainly can do more to help students feel they belong to their campus. One way to achieve this is to make more classes face-to-face. I have been shocked at how many undergraduate subjects, particularly in the humanities, are still being taught online. This semester students told me they chose my unit because it has a face-to-face tutorial. One student said that she “just wanted to see other students”.
Imagine, for a moment, the pressure placed on my first-year students last semester when they had a mix of online and face-to-face classes and had to try to navigate them on one day. I had students doing online classes in the morning and then racing to university to attend their face-to-face tutorial. Or some would try to do their online classes in the library whispering their answers during a Zoom discussion.
Universities justify the increase in the number of online classes by saying they are giving students a choice. But what about the pedagogical reasoning, particularly after students have spent so much time isolated at home during lockdowns? Previous Australian studies have suggested that online learning is not always appropriate for undergraduates because they are unaccustomed to the university style of learning. Besides university is more than the academic work. Campuses are where students can make lifelong friends.
I’m also unsure what the pedagogical reasons are for having pre-recorded lectures, which began during the lockdowns. Yes, students can listen to them any time, but from what academics tell me, many don’t watch them because the lectures are not engaging. You can’t ask questions in real time and hear the student responses.
University bosses need to think less about how to make cuts to teaching resources and examine the evidence about the best teaching methods for students in this COVID age. They could also speak to David Tuck and his colleagues, who have published material on how tertiary students can be helped during this period of COVID. They emphasise that positive social interactions in tertiary settings are vital to helping students.
In the International Journal of Stress Management, the researchers concluded that “engaging in enjoyable and personally meaningful activities, focusing attention on the present moment, exercise, positive social interactions, humour, and acceptance in difficult circumstances have the largest effects on improving resilience in tertiary education students”.
I’m sensitive to what my students are going through. But that’s not enough. Universities need to step up more to support and reduce stress among students. Then my colleague and I may not be staring at each other in silence wondering what will happen to our students going through psychological distress in this age of COVID.
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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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