Between my mid to late teens I was feeling more and more bored in school. Okay, not by everything. I liked English composition, literature and American history. But overall it seemed as if too much of school was a San Quentin experience, and I always felt instinctually suffocated by math (algebra, geometry) and science (biology, geology), to put it mildly.
It followed that I developed an intense loathing for certain professors who, I felt, were not only boring me to tears but giving me shitty grades and thereby harming my future.
Sorry for the ignorance and arrogance but I was young, angry and nihilistic, and this is how I saw things.
All to say that if the current Age of Zoomer and Millennial Entitlement Insanity had somehow been a thing during my years of educational agony, I definitely would have signed a petition to get some of my teachers fired. It wouldn’t have been fair but I saw these teachers as absolute villains who were bringing unmitigated misery into my life. So I understand the impulse of those 82 NYU students whose signatures on a petition managed to trigger the firing of NYU organic chemistry professor Maitland Jones Jr.
I don’t agree with whacking the poor guy and feel that the 82 students should have studied harder, but some teachers do have an almost magical ability to suffocate their students’ souls, and it’s possible that Jones was one of those.
From a letter to the N.Y. Times by Martin E. Ross of Boston: “The overpampering of children by parents and teachers combined with soaring tuition has turned students into entitled customers demanding to be catered to as such. The student-professor interaction has become far more transactional than in previous years, with administrators increasingly inclined to side with their customers. Students expect their professors to be like either Mister Rogers or Stephen Colbert, and woe to those less entertaining ones who dare to assign poor performers the grades they deserve.”