Leftist Academia Shows Its True Colors
April was another stellar month for the Ivy League, with a Yale senior's art project about abortion topped only by a Dartmouth professor planning to sue her students.
April is the cruelest month, as T.S. Eliot wrote — and this year it has bred twin scandals out of the dead land of American academia. First there was the sanguinary spectacle of Yale senior and aspiring menses genius Aliza Shvarts’s culminating art project, which consisted of “video recordings of [her] forced miscarriages as well as prepared collections of the blood from the process.” It was a valuable look at what passes for art instruction in even the best American universities — as Michael J. Lewis pointed out in the Wall Street Journal — and a reminder that there are cheaper ways to earn your beret. The affair calls to mind a few lines of another poet:
Round him much embryo, much abortion lay,
Much future ode, and abdicated play;
Nonsense precipitate, like running lead,
That slipp’d through cracks and zig-zags of the head
Embryo and abortion, even of the make-believe variety, have been a public relations disaster for Yale, but at least the outcry has focused on the student herself, sparing the faculty members who approved her possibly dangerous but certainly asinine project. No such luck for Dartmouth College in the case of Priya Venkatesan, a former English professor who is now attempting to sue her students for hurting her feelings. Well, I shouldn’t put it so crudely. True to her profession, Ms. Venkatesan never uses three words where thirty or forty will do: “I think that I have a good case because there were just so many instances — it was almost an incessant barrage — of hostility, nastiness, and anti-intellectualism that I may just in fact have a case, but I’m not a lawyer.”
That’s a relief, because if hostility and nastiness are against the law, I’m headed for ADX Florence any day now. Of course, the important issue isn’t that Ms. Venkatesan isn’t a lawyer but that she doesn’t sound like an English teacher in any but the technical sense.
To provide some background, Dartmouth has a history of putting questionable professors in charge of English 5, an introductory course that freshmen may bypass by performing well in AP English or on the verbal section of the SAT. I don’t believe that anyone paying an Ivy League tuition, no matter how poor his or her facility with English, deserves to suffer through a class about why Band-Aids are racist and eating lobsters is an unforgivable sin. I’m not a lawyer, but I think I can cite precedent to illustrate why students tend to have low expectations of this course.
So what was Ms. Venkatesan teaching to invite her mistreatment? Chaucer? Shakespeare? Things Fall Apart? The answer may surprise you:
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.”
Venkatesan contacted [Thomas Cormen, chair of Dartmouth’s writing program] about the event, she said, but claims she received no support from him. She canceled class because the incident caused her “intellectual and emotional distress,” she said. This event, which occurred on Feb. 1, would likely be included in a list of grievances relating to a potential lawsuit, she said.
What’s more plausible: That a mysterious straw man led the class in canticles to “patriarchal authority,” or that a bunch of bored and frustrated students, fed up with Ms. Venkatesan’s ultra-specialized and irrelevant preoccupations, smelled blood (a redder shade of Yale!) and went in for the kill? One student put it in mercifully jargon-free terms: “We didn’t like her because she was not a good teacher. … It had nothing to do with her race or anything like that.”
It gets better. Ms. Venkatesan has plans to write a tell-all book about the horror at the College on the Hill, a scathing indictment of everyone from eye-rolling eighteen-year-olds to eye-rolling medical students:
Venkatesan also said she was exposed to a “barrage of offensive behavior” while working as a researcher in the medical school. Venkatesan, whose specialty is the intersection of science and literature, said many of her academic interpretations of science in the context of literary theory during laboratory meetings were received in a “hostile,” “demeaning,” and “anti-intellectual” manner by her colleagues.
My heart goes out to everyone at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center — they did such a fine job of removing my appendix — who was forced to listen to Ms. Venkatesan’s “theories” on the “intersection of science and literature.” (The intersection of scalpels and organs just seems so much more consequential.) But most of all I feel sorry for the undergrads, whose supposedly “elite” school can’t be relied on to screen out juvenile, self-pitying buffoons like Priya Venkatesan. Check out Joe Malchow’s Dartblog for a look at the churlish and sinister emails she sent to her students — kids barely out of high school, whose only crime was the expectation that they’d get what they paid for.
They have been informed — regretfully, Ms. Venkatesan promises — that she is “pursuing litigation to see if [she has] a legal claim, that is, if the inappropriate and unprofessional behavior [she] was subjected to … constitutes discrimination and harassment [sic] on the basis of ethnicity, race, and gender.” The students are safe, in any case, because, as Mr. Malchow notes on his blog, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act only applies to employers, and students do not “employ” their professors.
But we are left with this to ponder: An old, venerable institution hired a woman so devoid of talent, humor, and scruple that she would hire a lawyer just to see if she could nail her ungrateful students. To improve on an old joke, she’s just like a Marxist utopia — no class.
Stefan Beck is a writer living in Palo Alto, California. Mr. Beck has contributed to The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, and other publications. He also blogs for The New Criterion’s Armavirumque, and Jewcy’s Cabal.
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18 Comments
1. Tony Ryan:“…..she is “pursuing litigation to see if [she has] a legal claim, that is, if the inappropriate and unprofessional behavior [she] was subjected to … constitutes discrimination and harassment [sic] on the basis of ethnicity, race, and gender.””
Isn’t it well past time the Oxford English dictionary amended its entry for the word “victim” to include a new 21st century definition;
Victim (n) – anyone who isn’t a white male.
Someone has to put their foot down on these useless parasites. And soon.
May 2, 2008 - 3:57 am 2. Marc:I cannot believe this tripe. So, you have dissenting views about race or religion or whatever, and now you can’t express them! THAT is an infringement on freedom of expression. The content of the idea is not on trial, that is absurd. That is why we left England. That is why we have the 1st freaking amendment. Dear God, I’m going to have to live underground now…
Should students have to operate under an expectation of this title VII? What are the limitations?
A classroom that places limits on the ideas you can express in not a classroom, its a sqaure box of brainwashing.
A homeschooling we will go, a homeschooling we will go….
May 2, 2008 - 4:55 am 3. goy:Tony – you may not have caught the fiasco at U. Delaware (covered here at PJM previously), but the faculty and staff there have achieved that very redefinition of victim in the context of “re-educating” students and forcing them to conform to progressive notions of victimhood. And yes, this is at an institution where students’ parents are paying for them to get an education.
IMHO we desperately need to graduate from this occasional nit-picking about specific instances of this sort of thing. I know it’s (still) very much the nature of blogging and new media to react, essentially, to what appears in the mainstream media. But the problems that underly these outrageous incidents are pervasive and ultimately destructive to our culture and social fabric. Simply reacting to the occasional outrage that’s absurd or blatant enough to make it into the 24-hour news cycle isn’t really improving anything.
Academics, and the bureaucrats in academia who support their adolescent ideologies, have become far too comfortable with their utter lack of accountability. They’ve now turned that circumstance on its head – demanding accountability, and now apparently seeking compensation, from those who dare to disagree with their idiotic notions or who call them on their incompetence as teachers. This is handily and publicly demonstrated in the case of Ms. Venkatesan, but it’s happening at most academic institutions at one level or another, under the public radar. Unfortunately, unlike this particular instance which made the news, the peer pressure typically sides with the ‘victim’.
May 2, 2008 - 6:58 am 4. Marc:Goy – Interesting comments. I agree that the acute outrage may not get us anywhere but angry and disenfranchised. What then, must we do to be activists? It seems to me that a dissection of faculty hiring, firing, and tenuring (sp?) should be first and foremost. Secondly, who are the players in this drama? Parents, students, teachers, teacher’s aides, the chair of the department, deans… Is going up the ladder with complaints going to do much?
A less tangible question is why are younger people flocking to the liberal agenda? It seems that these students were dissenting in their views of the professors lectures. So, does this mean that the idea of college students being liberals is flawed?
May 2, 2008 - 7:24 am 5. Andrew:We might as well all forgo higher education since all it teaches our kids is how to be good comrades and hate on the white-man. Maybe Marc is right since even elementry schools teach kids about global warming, equality, peace and the goodness of planting trees. I mean they even make sharing a priority (socialism anyone?). I think we as a country should boycott all public k-12 schools (since the waste tax payer money) and liberal colleges and universities until this sort of left-wing victim culture nonsense stops.
May 2, 2008 - 7:33 am 6. Irish Cicero:When I went to college, Leftist Feminism hadn’t yet taken over. It was on the streets, but not in the planning departments. In those olde days (the Seventies), it was straight-up anti-Americanism.
It is really embarrassing to see these people in action. They need to be fired from their jobs and forced to actually generate wealth in the market place of life. Only then can they understand how truly psychiatric they are.
May 2, 2008 - 7:47 am 7. Joanna:I used to be like this woman, in the sense that if someone wasn’t nice to me I wanted them to stop it right now because my feelings were hurt.
Then I grew a spine and got over it.
May 2, 2008 - 8:18 am 8. mwl:I don’t recall experiencing anything close to this level of idiocy during my school years (Cornell ‘92), but I was an Engineering student. Thankfully, the physical world is apolitical. In terms of my non-engineering classes, maybe I was just lucky.
May 2, 2008 - 9:14 am 9. goy:Marc – I was expecting/hoping someone would ask that question.
But first, I think it’s obvious why younger people subscribe to liberal / progressive / socialist ideology: it represents a continuation of the only reality they’ve ever known, which is for someone else to be responsible for them and their wants / needs / desires. Ultimately, cradle-to-grave support is the (false) promise of socialism and “social justice” programs ostensibly aimed at ‘victim’ groups. Since that’s what almost all young people already enjoy – especially while in college – it’s no wonder that the ideology appeals to them.
I believe that it’s for precisely this reason we see ‘progressive’ efforts to lower the voting age or get out the young vote: they are predisposed – through worldly ignorance, lack of experience and nonexistent reasoning skills – to blindly support an ideology that represents a continuation of the only thing they understand. This is reinforced, of course, by things like handing out condoms instead of emphasizing personal responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions, eliminating grades, not holding teachers accountable for classroom outcomes, making most school activities a “group-grope” where everyone in the group takes credit for the work done by the few willing to do it, as the teacher lays off as a “guide on the side” watching students wander aimlessly, etc., etc.
Same deal with Academics – adult adolescents whose positions and futures are guaranteed through tenure, making them wholly unaccountable for their actions and/or their performance as teachers. We see the result of that in cases like this one.
What to do? Call ‘em on it whenever one sees it, I guess. This is of course going to be mostly limited to people either actively pursuing an education (or whose children are doing so), those working in academia and those associated with same. My wife is pursuing a doctorate and all three schools she’s attended to date have been riddled with this kind of problem. Education takes a back seat to ideological indoctrination, “sustainability” programs, so-called “diversity”, Bush-bashing, feminaziism, and other popular progressive pastimes.
Perhaps we need an online clearing house (somewhat similar to F.I.R.E.) where even the most seemingly innocent examples of this silliness are exposed. I don’t know.
May 2, 2008 - 10:04 am 10. Bob Miller:The need for a counter-academia that sane parents can send their kids to actually learn in should be manifest by now.
May 2, 2008 - 10:24 am 11. John M:Accountability wouldn”t
May 2, 2008 - 12:14 pm 12. Marc:that be nice.It appears
that many in higher learning have completely lost their way.Someday they will
regret their disrespect
for God”
To what level is this occurring in high schools? It seems to me the generation doing much of the teaching now were brought up on Reagan. Perhaps we may see a swing the other way, especially as the baby-boomer entitlement moves on.
A friend of mine coined the action going on here as “litigating liberalism”. Spot on, I tell you. If you don’t agree with me, then I am offended, thus, you are discriminating. To which I would reply, you’re damn right I’m discriminating. This extension of the Utopian theology of liberalism is scary. Operating blindly, thinking everything is fair and equal, while Rome burns around you is no way to go through life. Self-determination is in the corner whimpering.
A similar story is unfolding in a Northern county of Illinois. Here is the link, make associations at your own risk.
http://www.mchenrycountyblog.com/ and
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-tshirt-arrestmay02,0,1435143.story
Apparently, it’s okay to say “Goddamn America”, but it’s is no longer okay to point at someone. One more step to Balkanization.
May 2, 2008 - 12:55 pm 13. Kurt:You neglected to mention one of the funniest parts of the Venkatesan episode: that one of her e-mails to students referred to “anti-federal discrimination law.”
Of course, the even worse news about Dartmouth these days is how many of the trustees and the leadership of the college administration are both trying every propaganda trick imaginable to persuade alumni to vote for a slate of alumni association officers committed to furthering the college’s aim of disenfranchising alumni from having much of an impact on the college’s board of trustees.
May 2, 2008 - 1:06 pm 14. Benighted:I went to college. As I recall, I had one truly gifted professor. The rest? Well a few were fortunate enough to be teaching in the areas of their expertise. As for the rest, well, not necessarily.
I didn’t expect to “like” my professors. I didn’t demand that they entertain or even engage me. Somehow, I was under the misapprehension that it was my job to be engaged, learn as much as I could.
Poor benighted me.
May 3, 2008 - 4:36 am 15. BMoon:Since when has any leftist, post-modernist, Nietszchean-Rousseauan ideology not tried to silence dissent while at the same time assuming its infantile ideology as the substitute messiah? Buckley said what can be applied to all our elitist institutions of learning, especially concerning the Humanties Departments:
“I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.” – William F. Buckley, Jr.
May 3, 2008 - 7:07 am 16. Das:mwl,
May 6, 2008 - 12:52 pm 17. Wolf Pangloss:Beware. I just read an article about the move that humanities types are making ready for academic science faculties. They are trying to apply Title IX to the sciences at universities in an effort to get more women into engineering etc. Donna Shalala’s name came up.
Bob Miller says:
The need for a counter-academia that sane parents can send their kids to actually learn in should be manifest by now.
The original European universities were corporations of students who had assembled together, with some combination of learning and dissipation in their plans. At some time in their learning, all students studied the Trivium and those who went on to the next level studied the Quadrivium.
A small, like-minded cadre of students that put their money together could hire learned academics to teach them the Trivium and Quadrivium and any other courses of study they found necessary, better and cheaper than a college or university could do it. Maybe that is the way the revolution in education will break through the ramparts and shatter the useless, post-modern, politically correct academy.
May 6, 2008 - 1:00 pm 18. Professor suing her students — Cranach: The Blog of Veith:[...] Dartmouth English professor is threatening to sue her students: [Priya] Venkatesan said the incident occurred when she was lecturing about The Death of Nature, a [...]
May 9, 2008 - 6:33 am