Most everyone who read it saw it as a testament to some social ill. The story proved to be a bit of a Rorschach test.

The New York Times brought this saga to the world’s attention on Monday. The university responded by (1) granting the students the opportunity to retroactively withdraw from the class and thus spare their transcripts from the smear of a low grade, and (2) abruptly terminating Jones’s teaching contract right before the start of fall semester. The students are pandemic-rattled zoomers who, in a petition to the university, complained that Jones did not provide opportunities for extra credit and gave out grades in his orgo class that were “not an accurate reflection of the time and effort” that they had put into it. The instructor, 84-year-old Maitland Jones Jr., is a legend in his field who literally wrote the book on organic chemistry. The AAUP chapter is committed to organizing an event for the NYU community to discuss this appalling breach of academic norms.Ī recording of the webinar, conducted without attendees, is forthcoming.New York University recently fired a professor after students complained that his class was too hard. If Zoom will not walk back its policy of canceling webinars featuring Palestinian speech and advocacy, college presidents should break their agreements with the company. We urge the administration to issue a strong statement denouncing this act, and to revisit the terms of its contract with Zoom. The NYU administration has told us they knew nothing about Zoom’s decision, and that they have taken up the issue with the company’s representatives. Allowing Zoom to override this bedrock principle, at the behest of organized, politically motivated groups, is a grave error for any university administration to make, and it should not escape censure from faculty and students. The shutdown of a campus event is a clear violation of the principle of academic freedom that universities are obliged to observe. Of course, we recognize that it is an act of sick comedy to censor an event about censorship, but it raises serious questions about the capacity of a corporate, third-party vendor to decide what is acceptable academic speech and what is not. The webinar was scheduled to discuss the censorship, by Zoom and other big tech platforms, of an open classroom session last month at SFSU, featuring the Palestinian rights advocate Leila Khaled. Today, Zoom unilaterally shut down a webinar hosted by the NYU chapter of the AAUP, and co-sponsored by several NYU departments and institutes.

Nyu zoom sign in