Professor Muir’s Application To Teach Organic Chemistry @ NYU

Students at NYU got an organic chemistry processor fired. Can it be taught better? Yes.

There’s a recent kerfuffle around NYU’s dismissal of a long standing teacher of organic chemistry, based on students complaining. They didn’t like failing grades, and this has made for good reading in the New York Times. It hasn’t made for a particularly good discussion in the public discourse about the utility of teaching organic chemistry well, or about the role of organic chemistry in science education. I think this is probably because nobody either writing or reading about it has any idea what organic chemistry even is. This article seeks to rectify that deficiency in the public imagination, so we can all have some sense of what it is we are being angry about one way or the other with a degree of specificity. Thank me later.

Organic chemistry is notoriously the hardest class in college that people have to take before they get to medical school. This is, I’m positing, both a shame and also not because it’s hard—it’s just taught in a way that fails make it relevant to almost anyone.

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