A Combustible Mix 

I was one of the organic chemistry students that Professor Maitland Jones failed. But I now run a public health chemistry lab and offer this tale of redemption.

In 1998, failing organic chemistry destroyed my hopes of becoming a doctor. A medical anthropology course revealed alternatives; a mentor steered me to public health. I went on to earn graduate degrees in epidemiology and am now on faculty at the University of North Carolina.

I disagree with Freddie deBoer that this type of course gives opportunity for “figuring out what you’re not good at.” The assertion dismisses the reality that sometimes we are called on to skill up on the very thing that we failed.

At UNC I specialize in preventing drug overdose. Since the COVID pandemic, overdose rates have soared as street drugs suddenly became adulterated with more than a hundred substances, each with unique clinical harm.

I suppressed my fear of organic chemistry and set up a laboratory to determine what is in street drugs, providing timely warnings and solving medical mysteries.

The day after The New York Times ran the story on Professor Jones, the same newspaper sent a photographer to take pictures of my chemistry lab. In December, The Times ran a full-page story spotlighting our work. It was then that I finally, and permanently, relegated the shame of failing. It took me 25 years to realize I wasn’t inherently bad at organic chemistry, but rather that I needed a real-world application to master the molecules.

This article presents a false choice between being fair to students and upholding standards. Upholding standards should not be optional, but being fair to students should not be optional either. 

In my day, Maitland Jones’ organic chemistry courses sometimes were given the highest scores in student evaluations although Professor Toner’s Chemical Engineering Thermodynamics was usually first.  Having taken both courses, the big difference I saw was that while both professors lectured well and had rigid grading systems (Toner using T-scores, Jones curveless absolute test scores), Toner projected a deep commitment to being fair to students and making the system fair. Jones, on the other hand, was openly callous about students and grading.  

When I was disappointed with my final grade in “Orgo,” my TA explained that my penchant for using fountain pens left my exam books messy, so they were always left to the end and “people get harsher as the night goes on.” If that was true, it speaks to a lack of academic standards that is every bit as egregious as passing people who don’t deserve it.  Even if it was just jive from a TA, it is emblematic of an attitude towards students that we accepted at the time as part of the cachet of a killer course to weed out pre-meds, but it appears the younger generation no longer accepts. Good on them! Standards may be timeless, but disrespect and capricious grading have no place in education.

The fact that these questions have become “central” and need to be asked says it all:

“It also raises some central questions, among them: Should students be expected to meet a professor’s standards [YES] or the reverse? [NO.] And should grades represent whether students learned the material [YES] or how hard they tried?” [NO.]

I appreciated PAW’s thorough analysis of the fate of Maitland Jones. While I never took his class, I would have benefited from trying. Nonetheless, I find discussion of his case ignores the deep connection between the failure of higher education to reach diverse audiences and the poor preparation and support for the actual teaching done by instructors.

In graduate school I taught an introductory engineering course and was provided no syllabus, standards, objectives, or guidance on what topics to cover. While this might be considered “academic freedom,” I likely did not appropriately prepare my students for more complex content they would encounter later, setting them up for failure.

We could charitably reframe the complaints of NYU students as a request for productive struggle. If serious, consistent effort in a course by qualified students yields no improvement, conditions may not be in place for a diverse set of learners to demonstrate mastery of that content. All alumni can recall a professor who had assessments that were not aligned to coursework, nonsensical essay assignments, or grades which emerged from thin air. These products of poor pedagogical systems leave many students, particularly first-generation college students, feeling confused, isolated, and frustrated.

The failure to prepare doctoral students in pedagogy, the lack of emphasis on teaching in the tenure review process at research universities, and the low emphasis on advising belies the academy’s beliefs about the ease of teaching. Most tragically, this keeps many talented students from seeing their efforts translate to understanding and excellence.

“The culture wars are fought by volunteer armies, but like Vladimir Putin and the old British navy, they sometimes grab unsuspecting conscripts and force them into battle against their will. Maitland Jones Jr. is trying to avoid being one of them.” Not an auspicious beginning; the culture wars are, by and large, fought by highly-paid mercenaries, not volunteers, though often enough their rhetorical arms target unsuspecting civilians — many of them teachers.

But that is not what I came to say.

The viral response to the story of Jones’ non-renewal by NYU brought up a multitude of old complaints from my academic experience (at two Ivy League institutions and a state school), the most salient in the form of questions: “What do grades mean?” and “How much effort should a single class require?”

I never took organic chemistry. But I did take a microcontrollers course that — like the one at Princeton — had a reputation for requiring 40 or more hours a week in lab. When I pointed out that it was possible to have more than one course with similar requirements in one’s schedule, and that, in any case, no one was taking only that course, the associate dean I was complaining too waved it off as “good preparation” for the engineering workplace. I’m sure Elon Musk would be proud.

What is accomplished by packing tremendous demands into a single course? (Are there [more] courses that should be split into multiple semesters?) While Jones denies that his course is a “weed-out,” organic chemistry notoriously is exactly that. If well-prepared students at elite universities, who are determined (I’ve TA’d many courses, but summer physics for pre-med students featured the absolute most determined students I’ve encountered!) to succeed, and willing to put in the effort, aren’t able to succeed, then I submit that there’s something wrong with the class or the teaching — not the students.

There was plenty of abysmal teaching while I was at Princeton: the Linear Algebra section that was so incomprehensible that they had to open a new section (taught by a grad student, who was actually the best teacher of the three) after the alternate professor’s section grew and grew in size; the Logic Design class taught by a new faculty member for whom English as not a first language, using the previous professor’s slides; the Differential Equations class that in which they decided to take attendance, and give in-class quizzes, after no one showed up to class the previous semester; the Intro to Physics professor who openly asserted that, “You can’t teach physics; you present the material and those that can, will.” But the one that seems to have brought me closest to the NYU orgo experience is probably the weed-out Electronics class in which the professor graded on a curve ... around a B- in a department that required a B average.

In order to facilitate his curve, the professor in question gave impossibly long exams, which did have the desired effect of stretching out the distribution of scores: the few people with previous familiarity with the subject material (or actual geniuses — they certainly exist at Princeton; or, I suppose, those who could devote all their energies to that one course — I was taking four others at the time) were way off to the right, then there was a pretty wide gulf, and then the rest of the normal distribution. Normally a good test taker, I panicked and got bogged down trying to solve a problem that I should have skipped, and was near the bottom on the midterm. I did better on the final, but only well enough for a C overall, and ended up in a different department. (It took a roundabout path and a few years to get my MSEE; I now work in tech.)

What is served by grading on curve in an elite institution? By forcing an artificially wide distribution onto a cohort of by-definition above average students? No one was even trying to evaluate our objective mastery-or-lack-thereof (to say nothing of our effort!) of the material — all the effort was put into relative ranking to weed out the “least fit.” I can’t honestly tell where Jones’ teaching and class fall — he sounds like he was at least once a pretty dedicated teacher — but I suspect that no one in the NYU administration was particularly surprised or bothered by low passing rates in Organic Chemisty, at least until the organized revolt. There’s been a practical mandate to use it as a pre-med gate and keep the supply of medical doctors low (and salaries high) since the mid-’80s, at least.

It’s disingenuous to decorrelate effort with success and then wring your hands about “lowered standards,” though that doesn’t seem to bother the myriad armchair “cultural warriors” for whom this is a call to arms. There are real, important questions about teaching, testing, grades, effort, and expectations (on all sides) here that deserve a much more significant examination than they’re getting in this he said/she said presentation — questions that aren’t new or popular or well-studied (or if they are well-studied, their solutions have not been widely adopted). It would be good if it didn’t take more serious crises with casualties on both sides for this to get more serious attention and study.

I walked into the legendary lecture hall as a Princeton freshman and sat down in an orange upholstered auditorium seat among a sea of sophomore pre-medical students. In walked a slender man with a salt-and-pepper beard and a notable spring in his step. In one hand was a bucket of colored chalk and in the other a mug made of pottery. He filled a small teapot with water from the sink built into the laboratory bench at the front of the classroom, lit a Bunsen burner, and placed the teapot on a metal support that was perfectly centered above the flame. Once the tea was made, the professor — always with a spark in his eyes — reached into the bucket of chalk and the unforgettable magic of a Maitland Jones organic chemistry lecture began. 

Each day that Maitland Jones lit a fire to brew his tea, he also ignited critical thinking and creative problem-solving skills in his pupils, challenging and inspiring generations of pre-medical students. He is singlehandedly responsible for putting me on the physician-scientist career path that I have been pursuing for three-and-a-half decades since, as a physician, scientist, and teacher. Whether organic chemistry is a “rite of passage” for becoming a doctor may be debatable, but the capacity to confront a formidable puzzle with the tools he provided, and then discover that you can independently solve it through a series of transformations to arrive at point Z from point A, represents the critical thought process — under time-pressure no less — that is essential both to succeeding in his class and to doctoring.

As chair of admissions for the Harvard/MIT MD-PhD program for 10 years, I have read thousands of medical school applications. A clunker grade in any one premedical course requirement has little to no effect on the outcome of a holistic review. In fact, the process of failing, learning from failure, persisting, and ultimately persevering represents the very grit and resilience that I seek in medical school applicants. Perhaps we should worry more about that “perfect” student who has never achieved anything less than an A, who will for the first time experience the inevitable failure that comes with pursuing discovery research or trying to cure an incurable patient. In those contexts, the formula of maximal effort in yields a guaranteed successful outcome simply does not apply. When the majority of experiments in the laboratory do not work, because after all you are seeking to find something brand new, critical thinking and creative problem-solving are the only means of moving from darkness to light. When you give everything you have got, blood-sweat-and-tears, to save a child’s life — such as in my profession as a pediatric oncologist — but your tireless efforts are ultimately not enough, you do not call it quits. You learn everything you can from that patient in the hopes of saving the next one.

Our American culture values, if not worships, the “greatests-of-all-time,” whether Serena Williams in tennis, Tom Brady in football, Muhammad Ali in boxing, Michael Jordan in basketball, or Simone Biles in gymnastics. Maitland Jones is, by every measure, the GOAT in teaching organic chemistry. If there was a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for teaching, he would be a clear winner. He has dedicated his life to it, nearly 60 years of teaching organic chemistry. Think about how remarkable that type of dedication is and the thousands upon thousands of students he has educated over those decades. Yes, he has high standards (thank goodness), and yes, organic chemistry is not for everyone. But a bad grade in his course can only preclude you from becoming a physician if you let it. Courses can be retaken to demonstrate mastery, whether during the regular school year or over the summer. I’m not sure I would want anyone taking care of me or my family who gives up that easily when confronted by adversity. Pursuing science and medicine is about leaving no stone unturned to uncover the answer to a profound scientific question or the antidote to an otherwise fatal disease. So, to Maitland Jones, I say thank you for setting such a high bar for your students, and shame on those who summarily fired you for being exacting. I, like countless others, will never forget you or your magnificent organic chemistry lessons, which changed our lives. Your legacy is felt by every patient we treat and every student we inspire. 

An excellent but terrifying article; I am glad you had the courage to publish it. My wife has worked at NYU and is leaving academia for private research, and this makes me even more relieved. I was particularly struck by the petition’s assumption that mentally ill and otherwise marginalized students should not be shoved out of pre-health if they lack the necessary ability and prefer to spend time with family/friends rather than do the necessary studying.

Maitland Jones was by far the best professor I had during my time at Princeton, and organic chemistry was my favorite class (despite graduating as an economic major). I am beyond bewildered that students at an accredited university would think that their grade should be a reflection of the time and energy required to learn the material rather than an evaluation of how well they understand the material.

Growing up, I could have spent all my waking (and sleeping) hours trying to develop my limited baseball skills, but never would I have made it as a professional, much less hit 62 American League home runs and been named MVP. Although, given the protesting students’ logic, perhaps I should be expecting a 9-year, $360 million offer from the Yankees any day now.

I’m certain that many of us have followed this situation with a wide range of perspective, perceptions, emotions, and even, perhaps, biases.

As a (belated!) parent of a high school freshman and a rising seventh grader, this article challenges me to think harder about what I want from our daughters’ education. As we head down the educational railroad that leads to God only knows what, multiple layers of complex inquiry emerge. How do we teach “resilience”? What is “learning”? What’s the difference between a “career” and a “vocation”? What kind of (and perhaps “which”) institutions are most aligned with our own personal expectations? How do we measure that success, and hold those institutions “accountable”? Learning “what we aren’t good at” is a lesson I learned with an early attitude adjustment at Princeton, with freshman physics and calculus (God knows they tried to help me). I also learn what I don’t know daily. Just ask my girls.

Personal position aside, I commend this thoughtful article for any parent, at any age, who has the luxury of having “choice” in the educational paths on which we place our children, or who has influence over the institutions — public and private -—to which we entrust that education, hoping for nothing more than success in life.

I may even challenge my ninth grader to read it. That’s a start.

Thank you for the thorough coverage of Maitland Jones’ adventure with NYU. As an orgo student in the early-mid ’90s, I’ve pondered why this exceptional professor faced such negative feedback. Perhaps his NYU students had adopted the habit of skipping over material they found too difficult, since next week’s topic would likely be a new chapter, and they could get by with some weak areas.  I think this could work in most classes, and it’s an intelligent way to cope with a large workload. However, in organic chemistry, every class builds on the foundation of the previous one, continuing the structure for future classes.

Any neglected material would leave a gap that couldn’t be overlooked but would impair the student’s entire grasp of the subject. Once a student figured that out, they would likely be daunted by all the work to go back, comprehend that first difficult week, and then get caught up on all the following weeks; and they would just give up. Jones’ comparison of orgo to a language would support this idea: Suppose one week you just found verbs too hard and decided to let that week slide?

I began reading PAW’s article “A Combustible Mix” and fully expected to read about another professor being fired due to nonconformity with today’s campus woke ideology. Instead, what I read was music to my ears and a total validation of one of my life’s turning points from almost 30 years ago. I’m an engineer married to a physician, who often asks why I didn’t become a doctor, to which I usually grumble something about not being able to afford med school costs, etc. The real truth, though, is it’s because I took “Orgo” with Dr. Maitland Jones.

I was an “underprivileged” (poor) student working several jobs and playing multiple sports at Princeton in 1994, when I found his Orgo class to be just ridiculously difficult. As an engineer with two master’s degrees, I’ve always welcomed hard work and challenging course work, but Dr. Jones began each lecture with an assumptive air that he was speaking down to third year med students.  I’m not shy either, so I’d ask questions, but as one NYU student said, you’d just be opening yourself up for a rude response with him.  Freshman physics was tough, but they provided weekly review classes at night so you could keep up.  I believe teaching is a two-way street, and I’d contend that Dr. Jones was absolutely guilty of not making sure that he was being understood and probably still has no idea of what it is like to walk a mile in the footsteps of some of his students. 

It wasn’t just the C he gave me, but the complete feeling of ineptitude I was left with that made me forget about a medical career altogether.  Meanwhile, my undeniably highly intelligent roommate, who didn’t have to worry about money, worked zero jobs, and played zero sports, got an A and later became the esteemed doctor that he is today.  So at the end of the day, social standing does matter, and ideally you’d like to see professors who can teach classes that inspire, as well as inform, to students from all walks of life without crushing their souls.

I was a full-time tenure track (tenured in 1982) professor for 40 years at research one public universities. I puzzled over grading for nearly all of those years. The questions raised by the article are: “Should students be expected to meet a professor’s standards or the reverse? And should grades represent whether students learned the material or how hard they tried?”

Most of the classes I taught were required for departmental majors. Required in the sense that my colleagues who taught subsequent courses expected students competent in the content of the requisite courses. I submit that the answer to the article’s first basic question (including for organic chemistry — without question the most demanding course I took as an undergraduate) is: You bet students should be expected to meet the professor’s standards. Rare is the student who comprehends what they should learn as well as the experienced professor (whose standards likely are expected by colleagues, not simply his or her sole creation) does.

It’s mathematically impossible for everyone to be above average. Hence, roughly half of every class is filled by students who do less well than the majority of their peers. Those students commonly lament “but I worked really hard.” I learned in freshman physics that “work” is a measure of output (result), not how much energy (effort) was expended. Students usually do not like hearing that if there is a 1-ton weight in front of them and they struggle mightily to move it without success, they’ll be tired, but will not have accomplished any work.

If grades mean anything at all (and apart from everything else, they may not), then they must indicate that learning has taken place. Trying alone has no sustaining value.

As an undergraduate I assumed that the oft repeated “an C at Princeton is an A anywhere else” was simply hubris. However, my repeated experience after graduation was that statement is true more than not. In short, grading has no underlying scale. It simply isn’t realistic to compare grades from one institution to another and probably not from one department to another either (an A in physics means something different than an A in poetry). There have been a number of studies undertaken to understand what grades correlate with. I haven’t surveyed the field entirely, but my understanding is that grades predict only other grades.

For the last third of my career, the distribution of my grades tended to match the distribution of my colleagues. I explicitly told my students “In three years, no one will care what I thought (what grade I assigned), but they are likely to care whether you learned anything.” I did the best I could assigning grades that indicated the degree that students demonstrated mastery of the course material, but I suspect that the correlation was somewhat less than 1 to 1.

I do sympathize with students who are confronted with graduate school admissions that insist on high GPAs leading to a focus on competing for a relatively meaningless score card rather than on learning to think well and solve relevant problems. I think NYU made a serious misstep that undermines the institution’s integrity by attending to the wrong problem in the case of Professor Jones. His standards probably are the best measure available of the world his students will graduate into.

NYU’s controversial dismissal of Professor Jones is nothing less than an academic disgrace. I had the pleasure of knowing Mait Jones as the former master of Stevenson Hall as well as taking his “Orgo” course for two semesters and found him to be professional, personable, and always approachable. He had a unique teaching style which I found engaging and feel that his dismissal is truly NYU’s loss.

I took “Orgo” my sophomore year which was taught by Paul Schleyer, an excellent teacher. Schleyer left on a tour in the midst of second semester. A team of guest profs filled in for the balance of the year, one being Dr. Jones. Wow, who was this guy?

My junior year, as a starter on the varsity squash team, I somehow got connected to give Mait an afterwork squash hit. We had a great go, and he was a most gracious and enjoyable — victor! I later learned that he was equally talented on the tennis courts. It’s not often that you find such an all-around, capable, high-energy, and motivating person. What a gift to Princeton for so many years.

I had mixed feelings about the NY Times story. First, I was pleased to find that Mait had not retired at 65 to 70 but continued to serve the world with his great teaching and book publishing. But, I was distressed about his dismissal and the eroding student standards for hard sciences. When wokeness and statistical representation allow people to be chemists, doctors, engineers, architects, etc., with gaps in their capabilities, won’t subsequent accidents follow? And, who likes being in a position in which they don’t feel 110% masterful? 

I know this opinion will inflame the hard-core representation/quota crowd. If so, I’m sorry. But I will ask for what other educational track/scenarios should exist?  To pretend, more personally, that all kids who enter first grade — based on being 7 years old — should be able to learn at the same speed is wrong. Some will be overwhelmed and others quite bored. If you have a “privileged” ADHD, dyslexic kid in elementary school, should we pretend that your kid should be able to do a standard level of learning mastery? All kids are great! Shouldn’t they be educated at their respective speed to achieve full mastery? And, if some take a few more gap years before or during college, so be it.

Fast-forward, a diverse class is admitted to college averaging 18-19 years old. Why should we assume that they are equally able and equipped to take any course and do well? Should we just pretend that they all master every course and give them A’s and move them on? For hard math and science courses should we just dumb them down so everyone can pass? Or, should we — in some cases like Orgo — allow students to self-select into slow, medium, and fast-paced options?

Some students have always figured out their own workarounds. I had pre-med classmates who spent entire summer vacations just doing Orgo summer school (9-to-5, Monday through Friday) at hometown colleges to get it out of the way with a higher grade — all to get into more, better med schools. In the past decade, I have coached a few young men to take several gap years to work while acing one course per semester at a local community college to then transfer in as a sophomore into a bigger-time college and graduate at 25. Pretending that all kids are equally able to master tough courses and giving them fake grades for enrolling isn’t the answer.

Perhaps the positives that will come out of this negative NYU story will be new pathways to excellence in tough, hard courses for all students. 

Students are probably more successful in school if they study what they are good at and what they are interested in. I recommend aptitude testing and an interest inventory prior to registering for a course of study. It doesn’t mean a student must register for organic chemistry if the aptitudes perfectly match those of doctors, but at least the student’s probability of success in school and in work will be greater.  The Counseling Center at Princeton helped me to decide on a major by administering 40 hours of testing (do they still do that kind of thing?). I doubt I would have graduated had I not followed their recommendations.

Even considering the challenges and heartaches with the practice of medicine in 2022, I love working as a physician. I finished training 15 years ago, so I am solidly mid-career. By all objective measures, I have already had a very successful career in academic medicine and I’m still excited to do this work every day.

And so, from this vantage point of privilege and success, I had some complex emotions reading the article in The New York Times about Dr. Maitland Jones as well as the follow-up in the Princeton Alumni Weekly.

In fall 1993, I took organic chemistry from Dr. Maitland Jones. As others have noted, this was a notorious weed-out course for premedical students.  I knew it would be tough and I worked hard.

Despite my effort, I failed the first midterm. I sat for three hours and managed to score just 23 points. A classmate scored in the single digits. “The average hovered around 30 percent” just like in the NYT article about the current-day NYU undergraduates in 2022. I dropped the class. So did she. So did a lot of other students.

I was 19 and knew I wanted to be a doctor someday. It still felt like a fragile dream, far away and in the future. The very real chance of failing organic chemistry was too much to risk.

I took organic chemistry again over the summer back at home at a local college.  I earned an A-. And here I am, 30 years later, with a career I adore and an important legacy of service to patients, my community, and my students.

But many of my classmates never took organic chemistry again. They switched majors and changed career paths. I know they found success in many ways, but what about medicine? The field is not better off because bright young minds were discouraged by a professor like Dr. Jones.

It’s shocking from my perspective now. I remember how ashamed I was and how terrible it felt to fail. How many students abandoned careers in medicine as a direct result of Dr. Jones’ classes over those 30 years since I sat in his class? Likely hundreds. What a terrible tragedy.

I am a professor myself these days. I don’t want my students to “fear for their futures” like they did in Dr. Jones’ class at NYU in 2022 and I did at Princeton in 1993. That’s not “rigorous instruction” and it’s not necessary.

I would challenge those of us serving on medical school admission committees to consider applications holistically; applicants are so more than their organic chemistry grades. It’s up to us to identify and prioritize the unique strengths and skill sets applicants bring to the field of medicine. We should not be delegating this to undergraduate professors of organic chemistry.

As we recruit the next generation into medicine, how do we value not only academic achievement but also communication skills, empathy, integrity, leadership, and enthusiasm? How do we value diversity and distance traveled?

I also have a message for the students who are struggling: Don’t give up. Come join us in medicine. Don’t let bad experiences in organic chemistry keep you away from this field. We need you. It’s worth it. There is a place for you here.

Bravo, Maitland Jones! As a humanities major and now after a long career as a UC Berkeley literature professor and dean of arts and humanities, I look back with awe and admiration, and considerable humility, at my experience in Maitland Jones’ organic chemistry class at Princeton. I would have been less rewarded had it been easier, in spite of the fact that I was awarded the lowest grade of my undergraduate career in it. Again, I say: Bravo, Maitland Jones!

I took Professor Jones’ “Orgo” in the academic year 1989-90, and in my view it was my first true college course, since much of my first year was a review in many respects of high school courses such as basic chemistry, writing, foreign language, and math. I remember being intimidated before starting the course and, somewhat embarrassingly, started reading the textbook in the summer before the class started. This turned out to be a ridiculous waste of time but it did assuage some of my anxiety. I remember being completely enthralled by the class. Whether it was how it made me think, or the cool visuals and seeming ease of Professor Jones’ ability to draw electron orbitals of various shapes and colors, or just the zeal and energy that he brought to the class, I was highly motivated to learn this new subject. I was also motivated by my fellow students, some of whom wanted to major in organic chemistry, as well as my dream to attend medical school. The concept of learning how we know things rather than just memorizing was also novel. Unfortunately, all of this excitement and energy came crashing down after my first exam result was a 33 (yes, out of 100). I remember calling home and telling my parents that I will need to set some new dreams and drop the class. My parents urged me not to. After my second exam grade came back with a 66 (yes, out of 100 again), I was pissed at my parents and myself for not dropping the class and now it was too late. I went to Dr. Jones for extra help, and things started to click. The rest of that the semester and the next were some of the most memorable and rewarding academic times of my life as I gained confidence in learning how to think deeply and solve problems.

As a parent, a spouse, and spinal surgeon, I am faced with problems every day that force me to think deeply and solve for unknowns. I have shared this story repeatedly with my children to emphasize the importance of learning over grades and that what you think is a horrible performance may not be that bad when compared to the whole. This class forced me to get way out of my comfort zone as a student, it forced me to think differently about my priorities, and made me think much more carefully about how I budgeted my time in college. It would have been much easier and a massive mistake to have dropped the class and taken it at a local college as many of my friends did.  I am truly grateful for the 10 months learning “Orgo” from Dr. Jones, and although I still get a little nauseous when I walk by Frick, never in my wildest imagination would I ever have thought to sign a petition because the class was too hard. In life, we all get kicked in the teeth some day. It is how we react that makes the difference. Thank you Dr. Jones.

I taught marketing at a research I university for 35 years, retiring in 2013. I do not have the impression that students’ performance varied much during my career, but average grades did inflate. To the best of my knowledge, based on available research that I’ve read, grades do not predict much other than subsequent grades. That is, students with high grade averages as undergraduates will likely receive high grades in graduate courses. But, grades are poor predictors of career success measured by economic or alternative criteria.

By the end of my career, students tended to see even an A- as pejorative. After resisting for several years, I decided to follow the grading patterns of my colleagues. I did tell students that in a year or two, no one would care what I thought (what the grade was), but whether the students had learned the material would matter.

Students have a difficult time grasping the concept that work is a measure of output, or accomplishment, not energy expended. Only an ability to demonstrate a capacity to make sense of the subject matter counts. Organic chemistry was, by far, the most difficult course that I took at Princeton. I didn’t blame the professor or feel that somehow it should not have been more difficult than other courses. Some of life’s tasks are just harder than others. As President Truman said, “If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.”

When I was an undergraduate, I believed that the idea that “a C at Princeton was a good as an A everywhere else” probably was hubris. After graduation when I found myself in direct competition with peers who went to school elsewhere, I discovered that the notion about Princeton’s grades was more true than not.

Somehow, graduate schools, employers, and others who find themselves comparing candidates from different undergraduate programs must implicitly, if not explicitly, adjust for institutional differences in underlying measurement standards. Don’t college admissions staff face the same problem comparing applicants from different high schools? Is it the case that Professor Jones’ difficulty at NYU follows from the possibility that Princeton’s conversion of performance to grades is on a substantially different measurement scale than NYU’s? If Princeton grading standards are applied to a single NYU course, wouldn’t that distort the interpretation of an NYU transcript?

Mait was on the faculty during my graduate school years in Frick (the old one, for you youngsters). I was not interested in organic chemistry, but it was impossible not to know Mait, impossible not to know about him, or impossible not to have an opinion on the subject of Mait.

My considered view at the time was that aside from his addiction to The Preppy Handbook and khaki trousers, he was an outstanding scholar, a very fine teacher and mentor, a consummate researcher and research group leader, and ... er ... kinda cute in a New England sort of way.

The entire incident at NYU does little to bolster the NYU brand or to encourage observers to take the school seriously in the educational landscape. This does indeed come as news to me because I’ve always held NYU in high regard. No longer.

Good on ya, mate (or is it Mait?).