A New York University chemistry professor—at NYU after four decades at Princeton—has been fired because his students, many of them doctor wannabes, circulated a petition complaining about how hard his class was. Their petition read in pertinent part,

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….

Neither should grades be a reflection of the time and effort; they should be a reflection of actual performance and learning. Imagine a patient whose illness was prolonged, or who was maimed, by a botched treatment being told “So sad, but I tried really hard.” Or the survivors of a patient who died from that botched treatment being told, “Too bad, but I put in a lot of time on your son.”

The seemingly unjustified firing because some precious snowflakes didn’t want to work is not the only problem here, though. The other problem is NYU itself.

I wouldn’t hire anyone who had New York University on his resume. NYU appears unconcerned that its graduates cannot think critically, or that its graduates are afraid of the hard work the real world contains, even as it appears to take student whining seriously. NYU graduates would seem to be a waste of any enterprise’s payroll.