Tact

News broke early this month that school officials at New York University fired an adjunct organic chemistry professor named Dr. Maitland Jones, after 82 of his class of 350 students signed a petition, that charged Jones with making the class too hard.

The mean grade on one midterm was 30 percent.

In their petition the students did not ask school officials to terminate Jones’s employment, but just to address his degree of difficulty when grading.

Jones is eighty-four years old, and was a well-respected and long-time professor at Princeton, where he wrote 225 academic papers, plus the 1300...