Former Dartmouth professor Priya Venkatesan is threatening to sue her former students “because, she claims, their “anti-intellectualism” violated her civil rights.”
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.”
…
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.
For the rest of this train wreck, see Dartmouth’s ‘Hostile’ Environment.
UPDATE: Greenfield has some great commentary on this issue here.
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May 6, 2008 at 3:38 pm |
She also thinks that references to the movie Gattaca are harassing because Gattacca includes “tt”, which references tenure track, which she is not.
“Sanity” is merely a social construct.
May 7, 2008 at 7:48 am |
Ignoring for the moment my immediate impression of this professor (batty lunatic), I’m struck by how weak the claim is. I’d think she’d have better luck with IIED than hostile work environment. Hostile work environment requires proving that the harassment took place because the person belongs to a protected class. Bat-shit crazy is not a protected class. Asian is…but I think Dartmouth would have no problem showing lack of a causal connection between her race and the outcome.
May 7, 2008 at 4:12 pm |
Janet,
Don’t you understand? Disagreement with liberal ideologies is an actionable tort!
You are allowed to agree.
Disagreement obviously shows that you are either 1) part of a privileged group that wouldn’t ever understand, 2) some kind of “-ist”