Quality Assurance Certifies Structure, Not Teaching

Eighty-two students, out of three hundred and fifty in an organic chemistry course at New York University, signed a petition of protest in 2022. They were asking for changes in the curriculum, not the dismissal of their professor. But the professor was fired shortly afterward, even though he had taught for decades at Princeton and had written one of the most widely distributed chemistry textbooks in the world.The petition was followed by the termination of Jones’s contract, turning the case into a wider debate over academic rigor and institutional responsibility. The incident shows something broader, which concerns every quality assurance system in higher education today. Certification bodies consider whether an institution has the right structures, the right documents and the right procedures. They rarely look at what's really going on inside a classroom and they almost never look at what's going on in an institution when demanding teaching becomes annoying for those who pay for it.