https://www.frontpagemag.com/what-the-firing-of-prof-maitland-jones-says-about-our-democracy/
The swift firing of the renowned chemist Maitland Jones by New York University is still being discussed in the academic world and even among the commentariat that generally would have moved on to the next topic the day after the event had occurred.
Perhaps there is something perturbing about an 85-year-old esteemed professor who had had a distinguished career at Princeton before joining NYU being fired under such nefarious circumstances. After 82 of his 350 students signed a petition complaining that his organic chemistry course was too difficult, and that they did not like the way he ran his course, he was discharged. They further claimed that he lacked empathy; empathy towards those students who had family problems and mental health issues. But basically, his workload was regarded as too demanding against the backdrop of myriad courses students had to take aside from chemistry.
That less than a quarter of his students (23.4%, actually), could marshal enough power to have him discharged from a career spanning over five decades is frightening and disgraceful. Not one of the students came forward and publicly identified him- or herself. They signed a petition anonymously—these cowardly perverse members of the Olympics Oppression team who fail to realize that college is designed to provide one with skill sets and information in particular fields and then to certify that the individual has mastered them. Universities and colleges, too, are not just educative institutions. They are ones that, in the ideal sense, weed out those who are unfit to be in them; that is, those who fail to qualify to meet the standards required to be certified as mastering the skills and knowledge in a field, whether it be in chemistry, medicine, history, nursing, the law, or philosophy. We are, though, wedded to the egalitarian progressive idea that everyone who enrolls in a university has a constitutional and democratic right to graduate. Hell hath no fury like a parent whose child, after repeatedly failing all his courses, is given an honorable and noble piece of advice: The academic life is not meant for you. You’re smart, and your smarts lie in a trade school. You’d actually make a superb plumber, or carpenter.
But back to Professor Jones. How did we arrive at a point in our society where 82 village idiots had the temerity to make such preposterous demands, and were granted the institutional power to have their intellectual superior fired from his professorship?
