The Undersigned

This spring, eighty-two students at New York University signed a petition against their organic chemistry professor, Maitland Jones Jr., who literally wrote the 1,300-page textbook on the notoriously difficult subject. “We are very concerned about our scores, and find that they are not an accurate reflection of the time and effort put into this class,” protested the undergraduates, many of whom aspire to be medical doctors one day. As the New York Times recently reported, school administrators listened to their complaints — and those of their tuition-paying parents — and let them purge their transcripts of the offending low marks. The university also terminated Jones’s adjunct contract for this fall.

I never took organic chemistry myself, but I remember several of my university friends struggling to make sense of carbon-carbon covalent bonds and spectroscopic data...