NYU Professor fired for making a class "too hard".

Certainly possible. I had an elderly engineering professor that seemed nice enough but you could tell he just wasn’t into it. Some students in his class actually sat through another professors class just so they could learn the material. I focused on learning from the textbook. Talked to a grad student that said he was a fantastic professor before his wife passed away a few years prior.

 

I took six of those classes. I think my head is still spinning.

 

Its an interesting philosophical issue.

I would argue that we need to consider that undergrad courses are often quite unlike the tasks of actual professionals. I teach lots of pre-med students in my physiology course, and as much as I love my class, it simply isn’t like being a doctor. Instead of having a patient in front you unconscious and a support staff around you, it’s answering some fake multiple choice question about heart contractions that I just made up.

If that is the case there is a big dissimilarity between the course and the actual job, I would think accommodations for the courses are justified, as it would seems counterproductive to block the path of possible candidates due to failure to adequately perform tasks unrelated to the actual job.

 

I know he did a bad job because the people he taught rated him as one of the worst professors at the university. In what other career field can you receive terrible performance ratings and still have people claiming that you aren't the problem? I guess politics.

 

You implicitly raise an even bigger issue that I think about a lot. How correlated are threshold metrics to actual ability to perform? I would submit, and of course I'm biased - this is my worldview, that so many of our job requirements and/or qualification measures are not actually related (or not strongly enough correlated) to actual ability to perform, but serve other purposes, either consciously or unconsciously, to limit access. Professionals like myself are famous for putting up market entry barriers that bear little or insufficient relation to the actual quality of product.

Here's an example I used to use which will reflect my age. Emmitt Smith had a pretty poor 40 time. 40 times are strongly correlated with success as a running back. But should you really look solely at the 40 time and conclusively bar Emmitt from proving his ability to be a successful running back?

I would submit that many of the barriers we put up, especially standardized tests, are much closer to the 40 time. There is correlation but it's not nearly strong enough to exclude.

 

Wow. So people who have learning disabilities, or learn differently, don't "belong"??? Sorry, that's just flat out wrong. There are tens of thousands, if not millions, of people in medical professions, legal professions, and CEO's of large corporations with ADHD, Dyslexia, and other brain disorders who do incredibly well. Fact is, brains aren't fully developed until age 25. Does that age mean things are magically better at that age? Of course not. But allowing for some accommodations, like extra time on exams - or sitting in the first few rows of a class, should not be a make or break deal for someone's future.

As for your 'emergencies' analogy, you're comparing a practicing adult to a young developing student, it's not apples to apples.

 

Conversely, he taught a difficult subject for many, they did poorly in the class and blamed it on him. Probably some of both.

 

We are also dealing with a generation that blames others for their own failings. That is what they're being taught.

 

That's every generation.

 

Was he the only professor at the school who taught a difficult subject?

 

Well said. It is related to FA Hayek’s concept of “scientism”, where narrow scientific tools are improperly applied to more broad problems.

One of my favorite examples of this comes from Nobel laureate psychologist Daniel Kahnemann describing the terrible tests he devised for identifying leaders in the Israeli military.

Don’t Blink! The Hazards of Confidence (Published 2011)

 

I was going to say the same thing.

 

Thanks - paywalled, but will check out when I get home

 

Probably not. And I'd bet outside of the science department there were professors who received the lowest evaluations.

 

Thanks for the link, that was a good read.

 

Oh yeah, I’m getting paywalled too. :/ Well it’s a great article if you can read it.

 

I assume students taking organic chemistry are lazy underachievers looking for an easy A.

 

This is a stupid take. One does not need to be a good test taker to practice good medicine.

 

We don’t have enough information to really judge this this case, but an issue is that we are finding that student evaluations are sometimes inversely correlated to actual student learning.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1821936116