Professor Sues Students For Questioning Her Opinions

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: dewayne () warpspeed com (Dewayne Hendricks)
Date: May 5, 2008 8:01:47 PM EDT
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <xyzzy () warpspeed com>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Professor Sues Students For Questioning Her  
Opinions

[Note:  This item comes from friend John McMullen.  DLH]

From: "John F. McMullen" <observer () westnet com>
Date: May 5, 2008 12:43:57 PM PDT
To: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Subject: Professor Sues Students For Questioning Her Opinions (fwd)

(johnmac -- this is, to put it simply, bizarre)

<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120995103004666569.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries 
>

Dartmouth's 'Hostile' Environment
By JOSEPH RAGO
May 5, 2008; Page A13

Often it seems as though American higher education exists only to
provide gag material for the outside world. The latest spectacle is an
Ivy League professor threatening to sue her students because, she
claims, their "anti-intellectualism" violated her civil rights.

Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that
some of her students were so unreceptive of "French narrative theory"
that it amounted to a hostile working environment. She is also readying
lawsuits against her superiors, who she says papered over the
harassment, as well as a confessional exposé, which she promises will
"name names."

The trauma was so intense that in March Ms. Venkatesan quit Dartmouth
and decamped for Northwestern. She declined to comment for this piece,
pointing instead to the multiple interviews she conducted with the
campus press.

Ms. Venkatesan lectured in freshman composition, intended to introduce
undergraduates to the rigors of expository argument. "My students were
very bully-ish, very aggressive, and very disrespectful," she told Tyler
Brace of the Dartmouth Review. "They'd argue with your ideas." This
caused "subversiveness," a principle English professors usually favor.

Ms. Venkatesan's scholarly specialty is "science studies," which, as she
wrote in a journal article last year, "teaches that scientific knowledge
has suspect access to truth." She continues: "Scientific facts do not
correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct."

The agenda of Ms. Venkatesan's seminar, then, was to "problematize"
technology and the life sciences. Students told me that most of the
"problems" owed to her impenetrable lectures and various eruptions when
students indicated skepticism of literary theory. She counters that such
skepticism was "intolerant of ideas" and "questioned my knowledge in
very inappropriate ways." Ms. Venkatesan, who is of South Asian descent,
also alleges that critics were motivated by racism, though it is unclear
why.

After a winter of discontent, the snapping point came while Ms.
Venkatesan was lecturing on "ecofeminism," which holds, in part, that
scientific advancements benefit the patriarchy but leave women out. One
student took issue, and reasonably so – actually, empirically so. But
"these weren't thoughtful statements," Ms. Venkatesan protests. "They
were irrational." The class thought otherwise. Following what she calls
the student's "diatribe," several of his classmates applauded.

Ms. Venkatesan informed her pupils that their behavior was "fascist
demagoguery." Then, after consulting a physician about "intellectual
distress," she cancelled classes for a week. Thus the pending  
litigation.

Such conduct is hardly representative of the professoriate at Dartmouth,
my alma mater. Faculty members tend to be professional. They also tend
to be sane.

That said, even at – or especially at – putatively superior schools,
students are spoiled for choice when it comes to professors who share
ideologies like Ms. Venkatesan's. The main result is to make coursework
pathetically easy. Like filling in a Mad Libs, just patch something
together about "interrogating heteronormativity," or whatever, and wait
for the returns to start rolling in.

I once wrote a term paper for a lit-crit course where I "deconstructed"
the MTV program "Pimp My Ride." A typical passage: "Each episode is a
text of inescapable complexity . . . Our received notions of what
constitutes a ride are constantly subverted and undermined." It received
an A.

Where the standards are always minimum, most kids simply float along
with the academic drafts, avoid as much work as possible and accept the
inflated grade. Why not? It's effortless, and there are better ways to
spend time than thinking deeply about ecofeminism.

The remarkable thing about the Venkatesan affair, to me, is that her
students cared enough to argue. Normally they would express their
boredom with the material by answering emails on their laptops or
falling asleep. But here they staged a rebellion, a French
Counter-Revolution against Professor Defarge. Maybe, despite the
professor's best efforts, there's life in American colleges yet.

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