if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?"
-- Chief Justice John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison, 1803
“Don’t Question My Authoritah!”
Let’s hear it for subversives!
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.
They were crushing her dissent by daring to disagree. And from then on it got even stranger:
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.
Aside from the question of what, if anything, “French narrative theory,” whatever that is, has to do with “Science studies,” it sounds like the teacher is shocked that her students were willing to challenge her. I guess asking real questions amounts to “Fascism” these days.
Comments
Has she even visited a college before? Sounds like she was in over her head. Stupid harpy. When you teach garbage like that as fact, you have to be prepared to be challenged on that. This probably made her an excellent teacher. Anyone who disagreed with her in class is probably a thoughtful person capable of making an effective argument.
Someone should invite her here for a dose of ThrillWhore, Inc. That would cure her whining lickity-split!
Has she even visited a college before?
Knowing the similar profs from my university, I don’t think she ever left.
So, she wasn’t surrounded by sycophant leftists, incompetent, and got called on it?
Perhaps she should go back to some bastion of leftists twaddle and force herself to be a lesbian again for political reasons…
I had to go look up what this “French narrative theory” was, and by golly, you have to be a complete idiot to take any of it seriously.
You also have to watch a lot of really bad foreign movies and decide what they “mean"…
Sounds to me she is just a typical fucking “academic”. I get this shit at the Jr. College level these days, I have no dillusions that it just gets worse the higher you go. I think I’ll encourage my kids to get their college degree’s on line.
Perfect title.
wtf is “ecofeminism” beinig taught in a composition class in the first place?
This is more typical than you think. I was going to email this story to a leftwing philosophy professor of mine last week, but I was concerned she wouldn’t take the joke.
Sure enough, today she had a meltdown almost identical to this one.
I had only two college professors that even came close to being leftist twits (they were married to each other), one for speech, and one for English composition - technology schools are generally too concerned with reality for “intellectuals” to survive.
Anyway - one of them absolutely hated teaching at liberal arts schools because the could not stand students that were waiting for a professor to “open up their heads and fill it with mush”. He flat out told me he’d rather have an honest disagreement with someone than put up with empty-headed nodding to his genius.
Oddly enough, even though my brother and I never agreed with him on much of anything, we both got along with him quite well.
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I’m amazed Northwestern hired her considering she’s consistently outargued by hungover, half-drunk pothead moron college students on a daily basis.