Rigor, Labor, and Teaching, Oh My!
What the 2022 Firing of an NYU Adjunct Can Teach Us about Teaching, Trust, Rigor, and Academic Labor
Note: This essay was not sent as an email. Instead, I made it available for anyone to read on my Substack.
As we near the end of another semester, these topics become even more poignant. Let’s take a look at each one and learn from them.
1. Rigor Angst, Revisited
Let's go back in 2022 (eons ago, I know), when an adjunct professor at NYU was fired by the school. This professor taught organic chemistry to undergraduates and wrote the foundational textbook on the subject. According to the popular narrative, he was fired by NYU after students complained that this course was overly difficult and that he mocked students who did poorly. (That is a very brief précis.)
Here's the deal: The coverage of the event, including the framing of it by NYU itself, pitted the students against the professor. In other words, the professor was fired because of the students, right? Wrong. The professor was fired by NYU. The students did not call for the professor's firing. In fact, afterwards, students said in interviews that they didn't even think that he could be fired.
Thus, two issues collide in the story of the fired chemistry professor at NYU: "rigor angst" in the classroom and job insecurity in higher ed.
"Rigor" has been tossed around by professors for eons, but ever since the pandemic it has gained traction among those who are worried that Covid has made higher education (and students) "soft" or whatever. They say that they're worried that courses are rigorous anymore. See my article When "Rigor" Targets Disabled Students for a primer on these issues; I can't cover them all here.
The problem is that "rigor" is used by different people to mean different things. Even the dictionary has two different definitions: harsh and extreme, or careful and thorough. Educational theorist Kevin Gannon suggests we think of rigor in the classroom as coming in two types: (1) intellectual rigor, which focuses on what students are learning, and (2) logistical rigor, which "requires adherence to strict policies about when and how work is produced and evaluated," such as, "Why didn't you upload your assignment to the course management software in the correct format?"
What I call "rigor angst" happens when professors freak out about rigor without examining what it is they're actually teaching. Do your course objectives, what you teach in class, and what you grade actually line up? For most professors, the answer is no. If you're teaching students, say, history, then why are you grading them on usage of course management software? That is where logistics get in the way of learning, what I call "bad hard" course work clogging up the works so that students are unable to do the "good hard" work that actually helps them learn.
The NYT interviewed the fired organic chemistry ("orgo") professor about his perception of student work being poor, and he leaned into the rigor angst phenomenon: "The problem was exacerbated by the pandemic, he said. 'In the last two years, they fell off a cliff,' he wrote. 'We now see single digit scores and even zeros.'" I was not impressed by his use of passive framing, as though the students' grades just rained down from heaven. "We now see single digit scores?" No, sir. You are giving single-digit scores. You are the actor here, the grader, the score-giver.
Teachers, all: If your students' grades are so poor that students are getting zeroes, then that is your fault as a teacher. If your students are learning poorly, then you are teaching poorly.
Furthermore, for all teachers out there: if your students' work gets worse during a world-wide crisis, you shouldn't act surprised. Seriously. None of that is surprising. And given the prevalence of world-wide crises at the moment (now, in November of 2024), we should be taking better care of our students, not worse.
That goes for ourselves, too, by the way. But that's a different essay. (Check out my book that came out this year, A Light in the Tower: A New Reckoning on Mental Health in Higher Education for so much more on all of this, including professor burnout.)
So, after a particularly shitty semester in 2022, NYU students wrote a letter of concern about orgo and its professor: “We are very concerned about our scores, and find that they are not an accurate reflection of the time and effort put into this class.”
I believe these students—because I believe students are not sneaky slackers who are grade-grubbing cheats. If you are a teacher, and you feel any twinge that maybe some of your students are sneaky slackers who are grade-grubbing cheats, then you need to reframe how you think about teaching as a profession. Do you want to exist in constant adversity with your students, fueled by suspicion and doubt? That sounds exhausting.
Former students who did well in the orgo professor's class defended him: “I think this petition was written more out of unhappiness with exam scores than an actual feeling of being treated unfairly," said a former student who is now getting his doctorate at Harvard. But students who signed the petition said the the professor was "condescending" and was "sarcastic and downbeat about the class’s poor performance."
Here's the deal: If you excel in a professor's class, the professor will likely treat you well. But how a professor treats their struggling students reveals the professor's true colors. Do you respect your struggling students as much as you respect your students with perfect "scores"? Think about the words the NYU students used in their letter to describe the orgo professor's treatment of poorly performing students: "Condescending." "Sarcastic." "Downbeat."
The NYT adds this: "The entire controversy seems to illustrate a sea change in teaching, from an era when professors set the bar and expected the class to meet it, to the current more supportive, student-centered approach." This statement is a fallacy. You can have high expectations and be supportive of students.
You can have intellectual rigor. You can assign good-hard work. You can support your students, and trust them. You can do all of these things.
As much as NYU and media outlets have tried to frame this debate as about keeping high the intellectual bar vs. supporting students, it isn't. It's about teaching like an asshole vs. not teaching like an asshole.
I'm glad the NYU students demanded that a professor treat them with more kindness and respect, and I hope more students do the same for professors across higher education. I'm deeply sorry that it took a pandemic to make them desperate enough to do so.
So what does this mean for us today, in 2024? Professors, as a group, need to trust and care for our students as our world burns down around us. We can't pretend that the ivory tower protects students emotionally from the pain in the world around us. That's ridiculous, and besides, we shouldn't want that anyway. Tragedies are only redeemed if we learn from what went wrong and do better in the future.
2. Job Insecurity in Higher Ed
But the 2022 firing brought up another issue that the media, and definitely NYU, ignored. At the time that NYU fired the orgo professor, who did not have tenure, all contract faculty at NYU were in a unionization battle.
The professor might be the worst; I don't know, I just don't like what he said in interviews about students being weak. But the fact remains that NYU should not have fired him like they did. Instead of solving an institutional, pedagogical problem, they fired a worker.
Contingent faculty live in fear of our course evaluations. Contingent work fucks with our mental health and leaves us burned out, anxious, and depressed. (See: The Freelance Academic: Reclaim Your Career, Creativity, and Mental Health for more.)
That is the kind of abusive behavior that I left higher education to get away from. I've taught in higher education since 2007. In 2014, I left full-time teaching in part because of the constant insecurity, which led to anxiety and stress that I couldn't stand anymore.
I've since come back on my own terms, and teach a course once every year or two in a way that I have more control over. In short, if I were to get fired, I'd still be able to pay my mortgage, and I'd still have health insurance. That perpetual fear is gone; I can now enjoy teaching. No one should have to live under the conditions that contingent faculty face—especially since universities literally could not function without us.
Any time an institution fires an adjunct rather than facing up to a problem, every contingent faculty member’s job is thrown into question, made worse, and made more insecure.
Every contingent faculty member deserves job security, period. If there are student complaints, you work with your professor to address them. You don't fire the professor to make the complaints go away. That's abusive. It is also par for the course in higher education.
3. “Weed-Out” Courses
As the wise Professor Alexa Chew of UNC Law wrote on Twitter (on 10/4/2022), with regards to the NYU orgo professor controversy, "A pre-req course can be viewed as a 'weed-out' course or as a 'foundational' course: the course can be designed to keep people out of a field or to help as many people as possible build a foundation in that field." What gorgeous framing.
Do we want more doctors? (Desperately.) Do we have a health care provider shortage? (Absolutely.) Is organic chemistry a pre-requisite for medical school? (Yep.) Is it frequently a weed-out course—or "stumble" course as a NYU rep called it in the NY Times? (Yes.)
The problem is structural, inherent in higher ed itself.
When it comes to weeding out students via certain courses that seem intended to cause students to fail, the problem is one of mindset. For too long and across too many campuses, these weed-out courses are seen as a necessity for keeping up some vague "standard" for being a doctor, veterinarian, or other professional care provider.
We need those people in our society, and how they do in orgo does not correlate to how good they'll be at being care providers. The students who get perfect grades in weed out courses, as the 2022 NYU controversy showed, go into research and doctoral programs.
Perhaps those students, who want to be chemists, shouldn't be in the same courses as those who want to take care of children.
Then, run the pre-requisite courses with the expectation that students will succeed, and that you want them to succeed, because these courses are the foundation for a field we want students to join.
And if, if, a student realizes in your course that the field isn't a good fit, then kindly help that student find another path. Don't drag the student's psyche through the mud.
4. Honor Codes: Do Better
I was recently drafting an honor code from scratch, after reading a few from both secondary schools and colleges. I noticed a few things inherent in all of them. The language is impersonal, and it is punitive. They read like criminal statutes (which, as a lawyer and law professor, I'm very familiar with). And the question I asked myself as I read code after code was this: Why?
The answer is obvious, right? Students are tricky, cheating, lying little bastards that need to be kept in line.
So that's totally false, and honor codes reveal a deep institutional mistrust of students that permeates the entire educational experience. For everyone, professors too.
I like the idea of an honor code. A code to live by. A touchstone. A motto. Something to look to when times get tough. That's why I was drafting one in the first place.
As I wrote, I realized that honor codes never delve into "why."
They write: "Plagiarism and cheating are not tolerated at this school." But what comes after that? Why aren't they "tolerated"? There is a "because" missing, and we need to think hard, as educators, what that because should say.
Because there really is only one good answer.
"Plagiarism and cheating are not tolerated at this school because they hurt your learning as a student." I don't love the phrasing of that sentence because the first part is so impersonal and mean. But the second half shows that the reason we don't want plagiarism and cheating is because we care about you. As a student, as a person.
Next, after giving a reason why those things are not good, there needs to be assistance, rather than punishment. Like this: "If you feel like you might cheat or plagiarize, reach out for help, and here's how."
Can you imagine it? Student support endorsed in an honor code? (If your institution has such a thing, I'd love to hear about it.)
Like everything else I've written hear, honor codes create an adversarial relationship between professors and students. They make students feel afraid instead of supported. Students don't need that, and neither do we, as faculty.
-Katie