Oh, the reason I switched majors to English Lit! I did pass Organic Chemistry, but phew, it was close, and very much relied on “I have no idea why this is the right answer, but I’ve memorized that it’s the right answer.”
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I read about this a couple of days ago on the blog of a long-time organic chemist:
I don’t have much to add besides that and don’t know enough about the story. I can imagine that teaching/learning organic chemistry during COVID restrictions might have been (especially) hard, especially for a professor in their eighties.
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I remember once we had a semiconductor electrophysics professor at university, an old Taiwanese fellow. In all seriousness I could understand hardly a word of his lectures, and I’m frigging Taiwanese… Oh, once or twice he would accidentally say a word in Mandarin, that’s when I go “I understood a word!”
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Maybe he was the Colonel Kurtz of NYU.
“Are my methods unsound… Dean?”
… and he may well have been teaching the material at too high a level. I mean, organic chemistry can be hard, and these were only medical students, after all.
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Yeah, we had a professor from Serbia or somesuch with a really thick accent, where I’d maybe understand 10% of the words he spoke.
It was an optional philosophy of science course though, where the exam had a maximum score of 200%, capped at 100% for the final results (8 questions each worth 25%, could answer as many as you wanted but should aim for 4). It was an infuriatingly vague course and all a bit pointless anyway, so I guess it didn’t matter much. I don’t feel that it’s held me back in life.
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not medical students; this was an undergrad class. organic chemistry has a killer reputation and is a weed out class, but it’s generally only a 200 level course.
I think there’s more to the story than what the NYT reported. The professor apparently had consistently poor reviews for over 10 years! And while the petition was not calling for his dismissal, it may have been the last straw. As @izzy mentioned above, this is actually a workplace issue, not a student issue
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It seems to be a course that many medical students have problems with, though I think it’s probably useful for doctors to have a basic understanding of organic chemistry for its relevance to drugs etc. (otherwise, they might end up like many Taiwanese doctors, talking about “hot” and “cold” and so on 
).
I don’t remember general organic chemistry at the undergraduate level being that difficult, personally. There were definitely much tougher and more boringly taught courses (sugar/carbohydrate chemistry springs to mind because of its complexity, as does inorganic chemistry, a lot of which is just rote memorization of empirical observations/trends).
I’m curious how much teaching methods have changed since I studied it, with the much easier access to information and modern experimental techniques these days. I’m not that old, but even when I was at uni we were taught by older professors the importance of having a basic knowledge of German so we could understand the dusty old massive textbooks of known chemical compounds, properties, and synthetic techniques, and searching the literature was still a massive pain in the ass at that time too. That all changed with Scifinder and the development of the Internet.
My guess (for many older professors) is: not very much.
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He got a 2.4 evaluation!
Organic synthetic chem is hard because there is so much to know. Introductory level stuff is not too bad. We don’t know what course it was, so hard to say.
One point is that often the people who write the text (and his text is not the best out there, it’s one of many) know it so well and forget how to teach at an appropriate level.
But I suspect that both students and teacher and department as well are all partly at fault.
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I’d like to see how he and the subjects he taught compare to other universities’. To put things in perspective. We already know he’s old and there was a pandemic.
That’s a great piece, very clearly written. Thank you for linking it.
Guy
I totally agree. That’s an excellent article.
I remember a Chinese math prof at our university that was hard to understand… He kept talking about a “Pow Wow Paipt”:
If bla bla bla bla “Pow Wow Paipt”, you juss bla bla bla of the “Pow Wow Paipt” and bla bla bla…
Students were all looking around at each other until one loudly whispered “parallelepiped”… look at page 127."
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I always thought not doing this was what set the West apart from Asia when it came to education… no “deriving the formula” and “understanding the concept first” for chem majors…
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It depends on the subject, the student, and the prof
I had a physics prof who derived everything from first principles. To get an A we needed to understand that, for those who just needed the credit a C was attainable if you could just memorize how to dump numbers into a formula. Sensible approach to physics, doesnt work well for all subjects.
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Hey, I did say I barely passed. I have no recollection of how the professor tried to explain things, but I strongly suspect the in-one-ear, out-the-other effect was much more my fault than his.
Plus I simply found the material dull. I don’t think I ever had any sense of how people could find chemistry lovely until I read (and only semi-understood) Nick Lane’s book Life Ascending - unlike with physics and math, for which I had plenty of “Oh that was hard to figure out, but damn this solution is cool” moments.
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Wow great article. The professor was really a c*nt. And the NYT article really missed the mark on that one, in spite of there being many examples illustrating the point they were trying to make, see for instance the Stuart Reges case.
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I’m actually surprised that the professor taught the class and not the TAs (which is the case for a lot of 1st and 2nd year courses in NYU pre-med or neuroscience). Usually the TAs make the tests, grade, and teach most class sessions.
What’s that about?
Guy