I'd guess, based on the article, that this teacher rocks, because he has years of student and institutional awards to prove it. 82 students out of 350 complained that he was too hard. That's 23%. Given the likelihood that the whiny students solicited the entire class for their petition, that means 77% of the students thought that the the teacher was just fine, and refused to sign the petition. Coincidentally, that number, 23%, is close to the percentage of FOREIGN students that attend NYU, and, being ineligible for federal grants, pay full price to attend. The Dean's immediate cowtowing to the 23% suggests that these were either diversity admits, or they were primarily the full-tuition-paying foreign students, and he was afraid of either cancel-culture backlash in NYC, OR he was afraid of losing the income foreign students provide (again, American students never pay full tuition.) Liberal Universities are, at their adminstrative core, for-profit businesses exploiting a tax-free status to enrich their administrators and tenured staff by overcharging, underdelivering, and stealing patents created by their qualified students. Administrstively, almost everything else is secondary to that.....except diversity/equity (esp in NYC) This guy taught for the love of teaching, not for the cash. That's why he was teaching at NYU, untenured, after retiring from Princeton. He is, without a doubt, a fabulous teacher. The 23% are incompetent, unqualified, entitled little children. The fact that the NYTimes reported this event makes me think that these were diversity admit students.