Chapter 79: Don’t Be So Mean

Writerland is a newsletter from The Delacorte Review whose mission is to help writers tell the stories they need to tell.

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Have you heard the one about the organic chemistry prof who was fired for being mean? No joke.

Earlier this week The New York Times reported that New York University had dismissed an 84-year-old adjunct professor after 82 of his 350 students sent a petition to the university complaining about both his methods, which were demanding, and his results: many of them had failed. Given that organic chemistry is an essential gateway course on the way to medical school this meant that their dreams of being physicians were crushed.

It is important to note that this was not just any random 84-year-old adjunct. This was Maitland Jones, Jr., a retired tenured professor at Princeton, who had written the book on organic chemistry – 1300 pages and in its fifth printing! Prof. Jones’ reputation was such that not long ago he was deemed one of NYU’s “coolest” profs.

And just like that, it seemed, he was gone. 

The reaction, judging by the flood of comments, fell largely along the lines of support for Prof. Jones, while castigating the students for being, how best to put it, a bunch of whiney, privileged weenies.

Toughen up, the supporters of Prof. Jones cried; think this course was tough? Wait til you get to medical school. And while we’re at it, never be my doctor.

I will confess that my sympathies were, at least initially, with Prof. Jones – whom I have never met, and who, given my disastrous performance in college science classes, would have looked at my first exam and written don’t even bother in lieu of a failing grade. 

I’ve been teaching for 30 years and in that time I have witnessed a shift in the student-teacher relationship in terms of expectations, especially their expectations of us. Students are now regarded as more demanding, and perhaps that is not a bad thing. 

At my school, we are mercifully well past the era when the dean would greet a new class with: welcome to the Parris Island of journalism. One colleague used to keep a bullwhip on his office wall; when he retired he deeded to a younger colleague who thought it was a terrific prop - that’ll show these snot nose kids what we’re all about here.

I always hated that smack-‘em-around-for-their-own-good approach, in good measure because as a child I found school an absolutely terrifying place; to this day when I’m asked about school my stock response is that I hated every single day of it. And yet, here I am, 45 years into a profession where the great thrill is the prospect of learning something every day.

Which made my initial response to the tale of Prof. Jones curious: was I really siding with someone who was seen as harsh and whose communication skills, even when he tried, were characterized as “skeletal?” But what began to change my thinking was a Tweet from a former student who wrote that she had gotten a B+ in the class but had so disliked Prof. Jones’ approach of the great man dispensing knowledge that it was not until she began studying organic chemistry for the MCAT that she finally saw “the beauty” in the subject.

Here was a student capable of seeing “beauty” but whose teacher, experienced and committed though he may have been, was not capable of, or perhaps uninterested in conveying the excitement that comes with such a revelation. Instead, the class was as it has always been: a grind, a hurdle to avoid being “weeded out.”

Still, for virtually all the time I’ve been teaching, students come to class believing that the only way to learn to write comes when a teacher beats them up. I ask students what they hope to get from my class and they reply along the lines of: I want my writing torn apart. 

I tell them that unless they are nuts or masochistic they do not mean this. No one really wants their writing torn apart. But nor, as I have written before, do they want what my younger child always called “grandma compliments:” you are the best writer ever!!!!!

So why do they say they want to be criticized so harshly? Where does that come from? And why do they think that learning, in this instance learning to be writers, must come with degradation, and even humiliation? After all, when your writing is being criticized it’s not just about the words on the page. It’s about YOU, the person who thought it was a good idea to put them there.

For many students the best evidence that learning is occurring are red lines, cross outs, questions in circles (what in the name of the almighty are you trying to say here?) ending with: have you considered law school? Proof of concept: I suck. I must be broken down before I can hope to improve. Like a Marine. At Parris Island.

Students are not fools. They were, after all, once young children who if they reached too close to an open flame might well have gotten a smack on the hand, or a scary lecture about the dangers of third degree burns (skin grafts, my child, unimaginable pain) and never did it again. Decades later they too often apply those same lessons to writing: red ink = bad. Do not do that again. Which, in turn, risks molding a young writer into someone who forsakes creativity into someone whose core skill is avoiding pain.

There is something more: students may be more demanding of their teachers, and will speak up when they feel they are being treated unfairly. But so too are students ever more demanding of themselves. They have, after all, been conditioned to please the teacher and worry when they fear they are coming up short. Their lives are filled with stresses we as teachers do not always appreciate. 

Which brings me back to Prof. Jones and the legacy of believing in the school of hard knocks. I have terrific colleagues whose approach to teaching writing differs radically from mine. Where I want students to wait as long as possible before they write – all the while filing reporting memos in which they are, in fact, writing without being self-conscious about it – they will edit drafts so assiduously that their comments might exceed the number of words a student actually wrote. 

From the outside, flagging every misused word, flabby phrase, infelicitous sentence, meandering paragraph, may look like “tearing a story apart.” It might even appear cruel. But it is not. It cannot be cruel when it comes from a place of kindness.

My colleagues want their students to succeed and the students know it. They understand that their critiques are intended to make them better; they want them to be good writers. Students can sense this immediately. Hence Rule 1 of teaching from Grades K through Phd: students will do anything to please a teacher whom they believe cares about them. 

I do not know what Prof. Jones thought of his students, nor do I know if he was as tough as his accusers claim. I believe he was a committed teacher; why else would he return to the classroom? But I also know that he had lost 82 of those students, and that is a shame. He had things to teach them, perhaps even things about beauty. 

But no teacher, especially we who teach people to write, needs a whip, not even as a joke. 

And if you, as a student see one on the wall, run and find someone else to teach you.

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Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture. Writerland, The Delacorte Review Newsletter comes out every other week. Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and website. Never miss an update.