Is NYU Abu Dhabi simply too difficult? Or is this a necessary and beneficial difficulty? There are many sides to this equation. Students in STEM majors — alleged victims of a “misery of natural science,” sitting in rooms writing lab reports all day, fulfilling the same rigid Core requirements as everyone else while facing an even more inflexible set of major requirements. Biology majors have to take a demanding three semester Foundation of Science sequence that includes calculus-based physics. The cutoff for an A in most courses within the Computer Science department is an unwavering 95 percent. Majoring in Economics requires completing Imperfect Markets, a course which exists as an undergraduate requirement at literally no other university.

Spending time at NYUAD and comparing coursework to the equivalents at my friends’ U.S. state universities makes me occasionally wonder how much easier my life could be. My seniors who have studied away at NYU in New York say that, even there, there is a lot less pressure to speak up in courses and come off as the brightest person in the room. “New York classes are a joke” is a common refrain when it comes to most subjects that would match our liberal arts mission.

But what if nothing good comes easy? Maybe NYUAD has produced such an accomplished body of scholars in its short existence precisely due to this pressure. “The real world” is always invoked as an abstract concept where any lack of difficulty students face will catch up with them. No matter how our courses are structured, in a way, just living at NYUAD for four years is a manifestation of privilege. Having all of your friends and collaborators within a ten minute walk, easy and reliable access to food through a meal plan, and many other amenities in this enclosed bubble is an experience that quite a small percentage of the world will ever get to experience in their lives.

Within this bubble, it almost seems like what we manage to do and accomplish will make or break our ability to create a similar standard of living for ourselves afterwards. It is impossible to distill post college “success” down to any one formula or set of traits, but it would be disingenuous to say that GPA is not at least somewhat important. One number, on a scale from 0 to 4 — with all the good values compressed into the highest end — allegedly defines a student’s academic worth. It can feel like a rewarding journey of intellectual growth to take classes with every notoriously difficult professor who wrote the book in their field.

But the reality can feel quite different when you’re actually on campus and expected to be in 37 different places at once and also have hundreds of pages of reading and an impossible problem set to juggle and just want a few hours of sleep. What if you come from a background of just trying to make ends meet and getting into medical school or consulting or FAANG is your ticket out of poverty? After you graduate, you are thrust into the reality of “generation precariat” as the costs of essentials rise faster than salaries and owning a home becomes out of reach for all but the wealthy.

Any unexpected difficulty on that road becomes an intrusive obstacle, regardless of what it teaches. Maitland Jones Jr., a professor of organic chemistry at NYU in New York, recently became a victim of this shift in mindset. He certainly knew more than enough about the subject he taught, serving as the Dean of Faculty at Princeton University and writing a popular textbook aiming to “support all kinds of learners”.

But his storied history did not protect him from being fired from his position after a barrage of student complaints. 82 out of his 350 students from the Spring 2022 term signed a petition to the university regarding their poor test scores.

Dr. Jones said that he noticed “a loss of focus” among his students about a decade ago that has snowballed to “fall off a cliff” since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Students “didn’t know how to study,” he alleged, leading to some students even earning test scores in the single digits.

The students’ side of the story, addressed in the petition, is that Dr. Jones limited their opportunity to improve by cutting out a midterm exam, removing Zoom lecture access, not offering extra credit and having a “condescending and demanding” tone.

None of this sounds at all shocking to the average student body at NYUAD. Online student forums are brimming with professor horror stories, like refusing to honor Moses Center accomodations and marking Covid positive students absent.

It is important to remember that firing was never a suggested course of action on the student petition. But NYU took that step preemptively anyway and is evaluating more of what its spokesman terms “stumble courses”. The mentality of higher education has shifted further towards students being paying customers who are contributing hundreds of thousands of dollars for a credential and a “name” on their diploma. If professors fail them, where is the return on their investment and where are the rankings and prestige for the university?

Going through my educational career, from a U.S. public school system to my state’s STEM residential school to even NYUAD, I feel like I have always been told that my class doesn’t meet expectations. It’s always “the worst ever” or the reason the syllabus has to be dumbed down. But we don’t live in the same world of expectations anymore, and it is very difficult to muddle the line between necessary compassion towards students and grade inflating or coddling.