women and be positive
marika
I had to do it regularly in Philly
what's unique is the post Katrina mold
and the difficulty post Katrina in getting insurance on Louisiana property
to enable one
to go to settlement
and the need to have a beef flavored milkshake
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120995103004666569.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries
Dartmouth's 'Hostile' EnvironmentBy JOSEPH RAGOMay 5, 2008; Page A13Often 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.Mr. Rago is an editorial
page writer for the Journal.