Lowering standards for success is a foolish and dangerous concept

October 11, 2022

Some of America’s younger generation are failing to understand what their country is all about, how it works, how they are supposed to work to succeed in it, and make the country work like it should.

In one of the more disturbing instances that demonstrate this problem, an 84-year-old New York University (NYU) professor with long tenure and wonderful credentials was recently fired.

Maitland Jones, Jr., who taught organic chemistry — an important subject for future medical doctors, and a necessarily difficult subject — authored the 1,300-page textbook “Organic Chemistry,” now in its fifth edition, and had been a star teacher at Princeton.

In its story on Jones’ firing, the New York Post wrote this about Jones’ subject: “Organic chemistry is a very difficult subject. Doing well in the course in college has been a litmus test for medical-school suitability. It demands discipline, ability to think in three dimensions, memorizing complex structures, managing a series of chemical rules and solving intricate problems. Its intellectual demands and need for disciplined study are surrogates for the discipline and problem-solving physicians must demonstrate throughout their careers.”

During the pandemic, Jones went the extra mile to tape his lectures, at his own cost, to help students who were having attendance problems attributed to the pandemic.

Despite Jones’ sterling credentials, his experience in the classroom, and his knowledge of the subject, 82 of his 350 students — about 23 percent — signed a petition against him claiming he had made his class too difficult and was at fault for their failing grades.

And that was enough for NYU to oust Jones for making the course “too hard.” The New York Times had a story about this saying that students revolted because they feared that “they were not given the grades that would allow them to get into medical school.”

Apparently, these students believe grades, that may not reflect what they actually learned, are more important than what they learned, or didn’t learn, in college.

The Post story, however, tells us, “The professor, meanwhile, saw a different problem: ‘They weren’t coming to class. … They weren’t watching the videos, and they weren’t able to answer the questions.’ But the school terminated his employment rather than the students, who are on track to become physicians despite struggling to get into med school.”

In an interview Jones had with the Times, he told the paper that “Students were misreading exam questions at an astonishing rate. In the last two years, they fell off a cliff. We now see single digit scores and even zeros.”

Don’t we want and need the country’s future physicians to have successfully mastered a difficult educational background in medicine and related topics? 

Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, who wrote the Post story, had this to say about the education of future physicians: “Jones could not be more correct in his judgment that his organic chemistry course should be tough. Entry into medical school these days is almost a guarantee that a student will one day have a medical degree and a license to practice medicine.”

Goldfarb then noted that “Even struggling students are coached through to graduation. I know this as I was the associate dean for curriculum at Penn’s medical school. But until recently, the standards for admission were so high that one could be sure that at least students admitted had the potential to excel. Jones’ experience at NYU makes clear that assumption is no longer correct.”

Today, many colleges and universities offer majors in subjects that may be interesting to students, but that do not prepare them to get a job when they graduate. 

NYU is bowing to fewer than 1-in-4 of Jones’ students’ demands that he be fired, because they think he is the problem. He was the problem because he made his class too hard — like it has been for many years — rather than that the students who were failing were the problem, using the pandemic as an excuse for why they didn’t study as they should have. This is a troubling sign, especially in a critical and demanding field like medicine. 

Goldfarb’s story increases concern: “Every American should be worried because this kind of standard-lowering is becoming commonplace in medical school.”

In every career field, in every job, we need the best available person to fill positions. That is accomplished not by the silly idea of equity, where positions are filled based upon gender and race, so that every gender and race gets its fair share, but on merit: he/she who is best suited for a position gets the position. 

The American standard is that we must all work to be the best we can be at whatever productive career we choose. That is what builds individual success, and what makes a country as good as it can be.

There are other countries in the world — China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, for example — that are doing their best to be effective and capable enemies of America. We need schools and the next generation to keep America at the top of its game against these and other challenges. And that means working hard, not easing up and looking for excuses.

Marriage and a traditional family are still the bedrocks of a stable society

In a few days, a new year will be upon us. And after the disaster of 2020, and the nearly-as-bad 2021, we can all hope for a much better 2022.

We might wish for a return to normal, but that is a bit too optimistic. Maybe we can be satisfied with several steps toward normal.

There is a long list of the things that need to be rolled back to where they used to be. We have seen how crime, destruction and death have risen since foolish ideas like defunding or reimagining the police were put into place in some cities.

Another mistake is destroying our history instead of learning about it and learning from it. And, the so-called cancel culture that attacks people with the goal to destroy them for no better reason than that they don’t agree with them about something is irrational.

But a very important way to fight off these destructive ideas is to rebuild our culture through an emphasis on marriage and the traditional family, as well as how we educate our children. Much of the damage to our culture can be traced to these areas.

The devolution of the family is something that started years before the pandemic came along, and has continued to devolve during it. It is something that desperately needs to be reborn.

Those of us who were fortunate enough to have been brought up in one of those traditional families understand just how important they were, and are.

Marriage and the traditional family are bedrocks of a stable society, and were a critical part of what made America the world-leading nation it became. Today, we see that the traditional family and its stable rules of the road have fallen by the way-side, and that has had a serious negative impact on our culture and our lives.

In 1960, 73 percent of children lived in a two-parent household with parents in their first marriage, another 14 percent lived with two parents who had remarried, and only 9 percent lived in a single-parent home, a Pew Research Center study tells us.

Through the years, those statistics showing 87 percent of children living in a two-parent home have taken a beating. In 2014, only 46 percent of children lived in a two-parent, first-marriage household, 15 percent were in a two-parent re-married family, and 26 percent were in a single-parent household. Things have not improved over the last seven years.

In the 60s, Pew’s study said, “babies typically arrived within a marriage, today fully four-in-ten births occur to women who are single or living with a non-marital partner.” And then there are the millions of babies who were conceived, but never born because of abortion.

The traditional family put children in a stable setting in which most learned valuable life lessons. That stability occurs far less today. That does not mean that today’s parents do not love and take good care of their children. It simply means that the benefits of the traditional family are available to fewer children today.

And whatever the situation is for children and their parents, education from elementary grades through high school and college have changed, too. And not for the better.

In many elementary and secondary schools, tried and true methods of learning how to read, write and do arithmetic have been done away with. Some schools have done away with GPAs and class rankings. And some colleges have abandoned ACT and SAT requirements to enter their institutions. 

Many schools today underhandedly push Critical Race Theory on their students, teaching them that, depending upon their skin color, they are either an oppressor or are oppressed. 

Some advocate the idea that math, as traditionally taught, is racist. And, believe it or not, some are trying to encourage children suffering from gender dysphoria to go through the dangerous process of changing genders before they are even old enough to consider such decisions. 

Some schools are trying to impose equality of outcomes on students — referred to as “equity” — instead of encouraging them to earn rewards through hard work. These efforts to treat everyone as if they are the same, as if everyone has the same level of skills in all areas, are destroying the idea of excellence. 

If everyone is assumed to have the same abilities, if everyone’s’ strengths and weaknesses are hidden under a blanket of equity, people will never fully develop their strengths. How will our country be able to reach the high levels of performance needed to measure up to the rest of the world if, while other nations focus on achieving excellence, we focus on preventing it?

If we cannot achieve our highest possible level of performance, aggressive nations with negative intentions — like China, Russia and Iran — will gain control of the world, and we will be at their mercy.

America must refocus its attention on being the best it can be, which is what made it the best in the world. 

By refocusing on those fundamental concepts that provide stability, like marriage and family, and an education system that is focused on helping every student achieve to their highest levels, we can begin to recover what has been lost.