NYU

On Monday afternoon as I sat in class at NYU studying the antisemitic policies of the Third Reich, the “Flood NYC for Palestine” protests descended upon Washington Square Park. This October 7, a year after the worst Jewish massacre since the Holocaust, hundreds of people had interrupted their afternoons to join a march in support of what’s euphemistically referred to as Palestinian “resistance by any means necessary.” To say “terrorism” would be unsubtle, you see. NYU students staged a planned “walk out” to join the “flood” on Monday.

Just before the start of the fall semester, New York University fired the distinguished professor in organic chemistry Maitland Jones Jr. NYU’s dean for Science Gregory Gabadadze informed Jones in a terse letter that his work “did not rise to the standards we require from our teaching faculty.” Jones is a legend in his field who literally wrote his subject’s 1,300-page textbook Organic Chemistry. He had been teaching at NYU on a renewable one-year contract since his retirement, in 2007, from a forty-three-year career at Princeton University. During his time at NYU, Jones won teaching awards. In 2017, he was named one of NYU’s “coolest” professors, a distinction he shared with only seven of his nearly 10,000 colleagues. Jones’s offense? His class was too hard.