Feminist journalists lamented the state of academia in op-eds for NBC News and CNN, after an acclaimed New York University professor was fired because students complained his class was too difficult.
Dr. Christina Wyman slammed the university system for treating professors like “commodities” that could be bought by their students.
“Faculty members aren’t commodities, and programs aren’t products. Education isn’t a raw material with a return policy,” Wyman, an adjunct professor at Michigan State University, wrote for NBC.
Professor Maitland Jones Jr., taught organic chemistry at Princeton for four decades before NYU, but he was let go after 82 of his 350 students signed a petition blaming the professor for their poor test scores.
Wyman saw the problem as “the commodification of education” where universities treated students like “paying customers.”
The professor said she had “little hope” for the future of education if someone with Jones’s reputation could be fired over something like this.
“If a credentialed, published and award-winning teacher with an international reputation as an expert chemist can, despite faculty and student support, be terminated over a relatively small handful of student complaints about grades, there is very little hope for the future of teachers, students and education,” she wrote.
Feminist writer and former adjunct New York University journalism professor Jill Filipovic agreed the firing showed “what’s wrong with academia,” in an opinion piece for CNN.
Like Wyman, she criticized the university caving to student complaints, because their parents “write the tuition checks.”
“Turning education into a consumer product rather than a public good also subjects educators to the whims of the consuming public,” she wrote.
Filipovic said that set up a “dangerous precedent.”
“But students are not helped by universities that cave to parental pressure because parents are the ones writing the tuition checks, and they expect their child to get into med school. Doing so sets up a dangerous precedent for academic freedom, particularly for middle-of-the-road public universities in conservative states, who don’t have the freedom or elite status of private ones. And accommodating parental demands above academic rigor doesn’t help students in the long term, either – it may help them get good grades, but it also sets back their transition into adulthood,” she continued.
Parents of education advocacy groups echoed some of the same arguments.
Ashley Jacobs of Parents United told Fox News, “Instead of lowering standards we should be raising them as well as our expectations.”
She also suggested that the role of professors and students needed to be reevaluated.
“The sage on the stage model seems to have been replaced by one that is supposed to entertain its customers in exchange for favorable reviews,” Jacobs said.
NYU defended its decision to let Jones go, in a statement to Fox News Digital, saying Jones simply “wasn’t successful.” The university disagreed with the way his firing was portrayed, saying there was also a high student dropout rate from his class and poor evaluation scores.
