Every Class Is Some Student's Orgo
Weeding out, redux
The big topic of the week was the non-renewal of Maitland Jones as an instructor at NYU after students in his organic chemistry class complained to the administration that they felt their grades were too low for the effort they were putting in. This was aptly described by Ian Bogost on Twitter as a “grenade of shibboleths:”
Really, there’s something to comport with every possible academic-politics prior. If you want to rant about whiny and entitled students, old and out-of-touch professors, arrogant scientists, social justiciers jumping into kind of ugly age-ism with both feet, the evils of insitutional reliance on contingent faculty, or any of a host of other academic pet peeves, you’ve got material galore here.
As a general rule, it’s a bad idea to comment on the particulars of personnel stories that make it into the mass media, as you will never know all of the details unless you are either directly involved or have the power to issue subpoenas. Enough of this discussion is taking place at a level or two of abstraction above the actual situation with Jones and his students, though, that it’s not unreasonable to use this as an excuse to revisit some broad topics.
In particular, there has been a lot of attention given to the status of organic chemistry in particular as a “weed-out” course for pre-med majors, with a fair number of people finding this Wrong at varying levels of intensity. My usual go-to acadmic commentator Timothy Burke has thoughts in this vein, and links to others, and lots of people are citing this tweet from a med school Dean. And there’s this argument that it just generally ought to be easier to become a doctor, which folds into the idea of not requiring organic chemistry.
I’m not a chemist of any variety, let alone an organic chemist, but I have some sympathy for their plight since I’ve taught the other great weed-out course of the pre-med sequence, the “Physics for the MCAT” course. They’re actually in an even harder position than we are, as organic chemistry is a course that is central to their major, where most physics departments have spun the pre-med course off into a separate track, where it’s just a “service course.” That has its own set of problems, but does at least decouple the curriculum of that course from what the future physics majors need to know.
I do have some sympathy for the idea that organic chemistry isn’t really essential for success in the medical profession, and likewise the basic physics that we teach. At the same time, though, that argument can be made regarding essentially any course in any major. And it has essentially zero bearing on whether any particular course should be a major requirement, or even a strong recommendation for students on that track.
To personalize this a little, it is absolutely 100% possible to make a successful career in physics without actually understanding group theory— I am living proof of that. I just never had a course that covered it— it was supposed to be in one of the chemistry courses I took in grad school, but the guy who taught it that year did research on diatomics, where it doesn’t matter much, so he just didn’t teach it (ah, academic freedom…). And, you know, I’ve done okay— it keeps me from really following some areas of theory, but I didn’t want to work in those areas, anyway.
If you ask me whether a physics major should take a course that covers group theory, though, the answer is absolutely yes. Because while you can succeed without it, it does limit your options a bit, and why limit your options at all? And if you’re constructing a list of major requirements or recommended courses, the goal should be to make sure that every student has as wide a range of future options as possible. There may be resource constraints that keep a particular institution from offering such a course often enough to make it a requirement, or that keep particular students from taking it as an elective, but in the ideal world where we design the perfect major, it should be there.
So, can you succeed as a doctor without understanding organic chemistry? Sure. You can also make boatloads of money as a lawyer without knowing the first thing about Criminal Procedure; that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be a required course in law school. There are great doctors out there who never use anything they learned in organic chemistry, and there are others who literally couldn’t do their jobs without it. It’s not just a weed-out course, it’s genuinely essential for at least some of the people who go on to medical careers, and the program requirements should be designed to maximize student flexibility down the road.
This gets wrapped up a bit in the odd double status of organic chemistry, which is both a core course for future chemists and a somewhat less central course for the pre-med sequence. A lot of the complaints about this are really complaints that it’s not a special course that only covers what’s really essential for medical school— a lot of the #discourse about Jones’s class has included comments of the form “Yeah, maybe he’s great if you’re going to be a chemist, but it sucks for future doctors.” And it’s a little hard for me to avoid doing the world’s tiniest violin gesture at those students, because, yeah, you’re not going to be a chem major, but that kid who sits two rows in front of you and always has the right answer? She is a chem major, and she needs this course, too.
And then this gets wrapped up into the question of “Does this course really need to be this hard?,” which comes back to the evergreen issue of the mutual incomprehension between disciplines. As I said the last time I wrote about this stuff, this is one of the great in-one-ear-and-out-the-other topics between STEM and “the humanities.” I have gone round and round with faculty and administrators from other disciplines, explaining that yes, in fact, our curriculum really is strictly hierarchical, and you really do need to take courses in a particular order. And it never sticks— the next time around, the same people say the same things about “Can’t you just waive that?” as if there’s no reason for the sequencing of the courses.
That rigid sequencing brings with it an increase in difficulty, particularly in the more mathematical sciences like physics and chemistry. This gets aggravated by the need for the intro courses to serve students from other majors who just need to know a few key concepts to apply in a different field— it means there’s a big jump in the level of mathematical sophistication required when moving from 100-level to 200-level material. That’s kind of an all-or-nothing deal— it’s not really possible to put just a little vector calculus into an intermediate level physics course— and that means some people will get weeded out by the jump in math level.
It should be noted, though, that every student who chooses not to major in some field has their own “Organic Chemistry” for that particular field. I’ve told the story multiple times about the 200-level English course I took my freshman year, where the prof was incredibly condescending in comments on papers. That course doubled as a kind of survey of critical theories— Marxists this week, feminists the next— and my very strong reaction was “This is a bullshit game.” That was my “Organic Chemistry” for “the humanities”— it effectively weeded me out of majoring in any subject that was going to involve reading a lot of that kind of material. And it is absolutely 100% appropriate for a course like that to be part of the major requirements in those fields, because that kind of work is a necessary part of those professions, and there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with the fact that it weeds out science nerds like me.
This comes back around to the odd double status of actual organic chemistry, as both a weed-out course for people who shouldn’t be chemists and a weed-out course for people who maybe shouldn’t be doctors. And there’s a case you could make that one course shouldn’t be playing both of those roles. You could envision a scenario where you create an “Orgo for Pre-Meds” course analogous to the “Physics for Pre-Meds” that we offer, and run it as a pure service course. That would create two tracks, one for the students who only want to be the sort of doctor who doesn’t really need to know organic chemsitry, and the other for the students who want to major in chemistry on the path to a medical career.
But ultimately, that’s something that needs to be decided by chemists and medical school faculty, not randos on social media. You would need the med school deans and faculty to agree to accept students on the “less organic” track, and you would need the chemistry faculty to agree to offer and staff such a course (determining which of these is less probable is left as an exercise for the reader). In the end, it’s up to those fields to structure their own requirements in whatever way they feel gives their students the best preparation to maximize their range of future options.
I will depart a little from my usual practice and throw an external link in here, to Derek Lowe’s post on the contretemps; whenever possible, I defer to him on matters chemical, but it didn’t fit smoothly in the rant above.
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"Once I got through school, I only ever used ten percent of what they made me learn" is something I hear a lot from former students.
I ask them if they could have predicted WHICH ten percent it would be when they were in school? And is it the same ten percent they will be using ten years down the road? Are there tools and concepts learned in the "Other" ninety percent that support what IS used?
The ironic thing here is that what you describe as your weed-out experience is precisely what I think leads people to be skeptical about whether weed-outs have to be weed-outs. As someone who is more of an insider to the disciplinary spaces involved in the course you describe, I don't think there's anything about that content that has to be so difficult or punishing that some students just can't do the work. There might be things about that content that just leads some students to say "that's not for me, I don't like it", but that's not what's happening with something like organic chemistry--or it's not what chemists are saying when they say "this just has to be difficult because it has to be difficult".
If you had said, "I had my heart set on being a Marxist feminist literary critic, but I just cannot deal with this class", that would be like someone saying "I was going to be a research chemist, but I just cannot deal with organic chemistry". It means there's something wrong with the person expressing that desire--they don't really know what it is that they want.
If you said on the other hand, "I want to do an MFA in film-making and focus on cinematography, but they're telling me I have to take this class on Marxist and feminist theories of culture to get into any MFA program", that would maybe be like the situation with orgo and med school. Would it be *good* for you to have gotten through that class? Yes. Is it necessary? Oh my no.