… an extraordinary blogger, sends UD this story from Gawker (which in turn got some of the following from IvyGate – IvyGate’s worth visiting because it has the professor’s hideous course evaluations, plus background in the comment thread from Dartmouth students… Oh, and if you want to follow the professor’s ever-changing announcements about whether she’s going to sue, see Dartblog):
A Dartmouth lecturer is suing her class for discrimination... Priya Venkatesan (Dartmouth ‘90, MS in Genetics, PhD in literature) emailed members of her Winter ‘08 Writing 5 class Saturday night to announce her intention to seek damages from them for their being mean to her….
Date: Sat, 26 Apr 2008 20:56:35
From: Priya Venkatesan
Subject: WRIT.005.17.18-WI08: Possible lawsuitDear former class members of Science, Technology and Society:
I tried to send an email through my server but got undelivered messages. I regret to inform you that I am pursuing a lawsuit in which I am accusing some of you (whom shall go unmentioned in this email) of violating Title VII of anti-federal discrimination laws.
The feeling that I am getting from the outside world is that Dartmouth is considered a bigoted place, so this may not be news and I may be successful in this lawsuit. I am also writing a book detailing my eperiences as your instructor, which will “name names” so to speak. I have all of your evaluation and these will be reproduced in the book.
Have a nice day.
[Let's pause and note not merely the psycho Have a nice day, but also the unsurprising -- if you've been reading this blog -- revelation that yet another writing instructor cannot write at all.]
Gawker continues:
The details of the discrimination and harassment? Students didn’t pay attention to her, complained about her to her boss, and accused her of not “accepting opinions contrary to her own” and said she would “lower the grades of students her disagreed with her.” In other words, the exact smarmy complaints all entitled college students level against inexperienced teachers.
From the Dartmouth News:
As an example of Venkatesan’s rejection of views different from her own, the student highlighted Venkatesan’s cancelation of class for a week after the class applauded a student who contradicted Venkatesan’s opinions about post-modernism.
Venkatesan said the incident occurred when she was lecturing about “The Death of Nature,” a book by Carolyne Merchant, and the witch trials of the Renaissance. The student went on a “diatribe” about the inappropriate nature of challenging patriarchal authority, Venkatesan said. Vakatesan respected the student’s right to express this opinion, she said, but the manner in which he vocalized his views and the applause afterward were disrespectful and offensive.
“I was horrified,” Venkatesan said. “My responsibility is not to stifle them, but when they clapped at his comment, I thought that crossed the line … I was facing intolerance of ideas and intolerance of freedom of expression.”
[No class for a week. Why, when colleges have clear evidence of irresponsibility and instability, do they not act? Did no one at least talk to this benighted woman?]
More:
From: Priya Venkatesan
Sent: Friday, April 25, 2008
Subject: Class Action SuitDear Student:
As a courtesy, you are being notified that you are being named in a potential class action suit that is being brought against Dartmouth College, which is being accused of violating federal anti-discrimination laws. Please do not respond to this email because it will be potentially used against you in a court of law.
Priya Venkatesan, PhD
From: Priya Venkatesan
Sent: Friday, April 25, 2008
Subject: Class Action SuitDear Student:
Please disregard the previous email sent by Priya Venkatesan. This is to officially inform you that you are being accused of violating Title VII pertaining to federal anti-discrimination laws, by the plaintiff, Priya Venkatesan. You are being specifically accused of, but not limited to, harassment. Please do not respond to this email as it will be used against you in a court of law.
Priya Venkatesan, PhD
Another bit of correspondence from this woman:
The students I am naming in this suit were mostly from Winter 08 term with a few from Fall. Essentially, I am pursuing litigation to see if I have a legal claim, that is, if the inappropriate and unprofessional behavior I was subjected to as a Research Associate and Lecturer at Dartmouth constitutes discrimination and harrassment [sic] on the basis of ethnicity, race and gender. This includes not just students, but a few faculty members that I worked with.
She’s also suing Dartmouth. She’s suing everybody.
UD has seen this before — sociopaths rampaging about the quad in search of money. By definition their desperate gestures never succeed. Yet such people can cause serious problems for the institutions that hired them and set them loose on students.
***********************
Update: Today’s Daily News.
This is how the damage gets done: The story’s essentially tabloid fodder — the nutty professor spouting illiterate nonsense; the scandal of a professor this stupid at an Ivy League school; the easily satirized political correctness of her conviction that she’s being dissed because she’s a minority; the larger insanity of America’s litigious culture. Dartmouth’s Venkatesan eruption is this week’s Aliza Shvarts story, a gift to the press, another high-toned, highly-educated woman at one of America’s finest schools bleeding out with rage and madness.
“I have a whole list of instances that I felt I was subject to unprofessional behavior,” [Venkatesan] said. “Gosh darn it, it could have been motivated by race and gender.”
Her biggest complaint is about the students in her 2008 writing class, who she said asked questions “in a very demeaning way.” When another student stepped in to answer for her, she said he “would be received with respect and deference that I was not.”
At one point, the class applauded a student who strongly disagreed with her postmodernism views.
Campus blogs were filled with invective about Venkatesan. Students called her a lousy teacher and ridiculed her typos and shaky grasp of the law.
Sounds as though the real story is about a teacher so bad, and students so disgusted, that mutinous conditions prevailed.
Bully for the students, says UD, who is always amazed at what students will put up with if you tell them the person in front of them is a professor. UD’s followed quite a number of stories on this blog involving professors who… well, the first example that comes to mind is the guy who on the first day of class asked everyone to write down their social security number and give it to him, at which point he and his girlfriend began stealing his students’ identity and their money. No student questioned his request, though when the police broke the case, the students did concede that he was really a bad teacher, and that they thought it rather strange that he demanded the numbers… UD knows of cases where students put up with instructors who spend most of the class session talking to friends on their cell phones… or they put up with preening narcissists who, furious because students don’t admire them sufficiently, become incensed, slam down their books, leave the room, and don’t return.
But then there are the cases, like this one, where students put up a fight.
At UD’s own university, George Washington, a group of political science students complained early and loudly about having been saddled with a rigid ideologue, a woman unqualified to teach the course and only in it to indoctrinate. She was removed from the class and replaced by a real professor.
Venkatesan’s students no doubt perceived her ineptitude as a writer and her ridiculousness as a discussion leader. They rightly rebelled.
The ultimate responsibility for the fiasco — which will continue for awhile — is Dartmouth’s. Someone there didn’t care that the woman can’t write and can’t teach.
****************************
Update: Wrecking Havoc
Ivy League teacher of writing, holder of a PhD in literature, strikes again.
Venkatesan’s legal case will include charges against a Dartmouth professor who, she complains, told her “You wreck havoc wherever you go.”
April 30th, 2008 at 5:13AM
One of the stranger things – I read through most of this but saw nothing after the "(Dartmouth ‘90, MS in Genetics, PhD in literature)" to remind us that she should have known what she was getting into – she was a Dartmouth undergraduate herself. Why did she need to depend on the outside world for an opinion on Dartmouth as a place?
Writ 5 with Venkatesan looks like a trainwreck of a course – and if she taught it for two terms without some intervention that speaks poorly of Dartmouth’s writing program.
April 30th, 2008 at 8:48AM
In trying to understand this ridiculous situation, I struggle because *no one involved* seems to be able to write clearly. "The student went on a ‘diatribe’ about the inappropriate nature of challenging patriarchal authority, Venkatesan said." What the hell does that mean? That the student thought it inappropriate to challenge patriarchal authority? (Really? Ever? That seems unlikely. Maybe the student said that challenging patriarchal authority is not *always* and automatically a good thing?) Another description of the same situation: "At one point, the class applauded a student who strongly disagreed with her postmodernism views." "Postmodernism views" makes no sense. Views about postmodernism? More likely: postmodernist views. But of course even that, while grammatically coherent, conveys no real information. This is one of the consequences of the kind of education Venkatesan has received and is now passing along to others:it puts us in a linguistic world so abstract and denuded of content that *everyone’s* language becomes inhuman.
April 30th, 2008 at 9:08AM
Good point, Alan. I suspect the situation was the following:
This woman’s ideas are shittily expressed bullshit, and the students know this. They are insulted and angry to have to listen to her. She on the other hand knows of her genius and the urgent truth of her views. Most of the students are probably middle of the road politically, but the effect of this rigid martinet upon them is to make them ridicule her by exaggerating views opposite to hers. Thus everyone laughs and applauds when a student defends patriarchy — if opposing patriarchy puts you in this woman’s camp, better to defend it.
April 30th, 2008 at 10:30AM
Good guess, UD. (Yeeesh.)
April 30th, 2008 at 2:24PM
<<As a courtesy, you are being notified that you are being named in a potential class action suit that is being brought against Dartmouth College
. . .
I suppose this is the least of her problems, but in order to have a "class action" lawsuit, you have to have a "class" of people as plaintiffs (i.e. more than one, probably a bunch). I also don’t understand how she can accuse students of being "unprofessional" — since they are not professionals or employees of the school. (Did she ask for protection from her horrible students? Is this the first that Dartmouth is learning of the situation?)
I also really like that she is pursing litigation "to see if I have a legal claim" — that’s just a Freudian slip right there. She doesn’t know whether or not she has a claim; she’s just throwing a tantrum and figures that she’ll get something out of it.
It doesn’t look to me like she’s even hired a lawyer, if she’s sending out those (dumbass) emails herself. Chances are, she’s just hoping they’ll cut her a check to make her go away (which they might do, in some circumstances). If you really file suit, defendants get notice via srevice of process. She’s just dicking around.
April 30th, 2008 at 2:57PM
"This woman’s ideas are shittily expressed bullshit"
Yes, exactly. We can tolerate shitty expression of worthy ideas or worthy expression of bullshit, but not yet the worst of the worst in tandem. Can we hope that this event flags Venkatesan so she is never again allowed in front of a class?
April 30th, 2008 at 6:28PM
"I am pursuing a lawsuit in which I am accusing some of you (whom shall go unmentioned in this email)"
Ohgodohgodohgod – she teaches writing? And why is a writing class called Science Technology and Society? Since when is STS a writing class?
One doesn’t know whether to laugh or throw up.
April 30th, 2008 at 7:33PM
Reluctant as I am to criticize anyone’s writing, Ophelia, I must say that this woman’s prose is a scandal that makes one sit up and take notice (and throw up).
April 30th, 2008 at 7:46PM
Well I just love to criticize people’s writing, Margaret, but I suppose people whom criticize the writing of Priya Venkatesan might just find themselves added to the List Of People To Promise To Sue.
April 30th, 2008 at 8:57PM
You know what Barbra Streisand says, Ophelia: People whom need people are the luckiest people in the world.
May 1st, 2008 at 9:06AM
It would be really interesting if the students sued the professor and Dartmouth back for fraud in their description of the class and not providing a properly trained professor.
May 1st, 2008 at 9:16AM
Tim: I like that idea, but am haunted by what a lawyer among my readers once told me: It’s considered bad form to counter-sue…
Anyway, as it develops, this story is no doubt having the desired effect on Dartmouth. I think the school understands that things have to change.
May 1st, 2008 at 9:03PM
Ophelia: I suspect "Science, Technology, and Society" was the theme of a composition course. I presume using this name is shorthand to allow students et al. a quick avenue to establish which specific section of a course with multiple sections with differing themes. I’ve seen this tactic since I started college in 1988. I think it’s rather naive for anyone in the academy to not know this sort of rhetorical shorthand exists.
To All: Am I the only person on the blogosphere who thinks this woman had a breakdown and it manifested in some "crazy" e-mails? You all keep criticizing the writing, which is obviously incoherent, as if it were crafted for publication.
How do we know EXACTLY what happened to Venkatesan? How do we know she wasn’t mobbed by disgruntled students who felt threatened by…her grading standards? her intellectual acumen? her desire to want them to learn, explore, see the world in a different light than before?
Lastly, how can you fault someone for believing in the veracity of postmodernist philosophy when everyone knows it was forced down our throats in grad school in the 1990s? So, she believed it. So, she tried to teach it. So, students rebelled because….well, you don’t know why, but many of you project yourselves into the students and think they rebelled because they knew it was shit. Is there evidence to support that? I’d apply Occam’s Razor and simply suggest she was disliked, she was mobbed, and she feels slighted. I think the lawyers will suss out whether it’s actionable or not.
P.S. I found a few sites some academics should be required to read:
http://www.bulliedacademics.blogspot.com/
http://academicmobbing.blogspot.com/
http://arts.uwaterloo.ca/~kwesthue/mobbing.htm
May 4th, 2008 at 1:35PM
Myth, this is a thoughtful and generous hypothesis. I considered it also, in part because I watched someone go through a psychotic breakdown with some strikingly similar symptoms of paranoia and skill-degradation.
That said, I’m not eager to sideline her agency that quickly, in large part because I have a number of close colleagues who are not mentally ill (I think), yet who share her basic illusions about students and disillusioned anger at students’ ‘failures’ to live up to the ideal. The fact that she was unable to turn the students’ disagreement with her, regardless of how it was expressed, into a teaching moment means that at the very least she needs some intensive practical training in teaching strategies and attitude adjustment about the need for such.
What I’m saying is that her behavior is far more consistent with a widespread clueless entitlement among the professoriat than any personal mental instability. I also accept the reality of ‘mobbing’, but again the important thing is to protect the specifically educative agency of professors. These are the students we have to work with. It’s our job to figure out how to do that. And it’s not actually hard, once one gets past the counterproductive fantasies produced by a lifetime of being the ‘good student’.
March 10th, 2009 at 5:21PM
She’s baaaaack.
Apparently the students at Santa Clara University will now be subjected to the horrors of Priya’s mind. She’s teaching English. Seriously.
http://www.scu.edu/cas/english/news/index.cfm (scroll down . . . she’s fifth in the list of new hires)
From the website, "She will be teaching English 1 this winter."
March 10th, 2009 at 5:24PM
Non Knee: Yes. I’d read that. Yikes.