[danso]

Forcing out a long-time (non-tenured) professor seems a bit extreme, but there are a lot of extreme circumstances:

- Professor Jones is 84 years old (according to his Wikipedia [0])

- Students are recovering from an unprecedented break/rift in their studies b/c of the pandemic

- faculty and administration are still struggling to adapt to the new technology and methods hastily adapted for pandemic education.

My reflexive assumption is that after 2 years of diminished educational experience, students are just unprepared to handle o-chem's traditional rigors. But maybe Professor Jones's instruction ability has also fallen in that time, especially if he's had to do ad hoc adoption of new educational software and processes. And I'm sure the administration is even more out of whack.

It truly sucks that, at least from what the story tells us, we don't have a good idea of where the deficiencies and room for improvement are, and educators are stuck trying to figure it out mid-flight while the academic machine continues to stumble forward.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maitland_Jones_Jr.