. . . because nobody would believe you. Well, sadly, I guess those of you who are in college now or have recently been there probably would, because stories like this one seem to be turning up all over academia. (Scroll down if necessary to the "OMG" caption -- for some reason Blogger's making me link to the main page rather than to the post.) It's the remarkable tale of an English instructor who wants to sue her former freshman writing students at Dartmouth, along with the college itself, for harassment. The grounds of her suit? The students wrote negative things about her in their evaluations and, if you can imagine this, argued about ideas in her class. The college apparently failed to prevent the students from doing these shocking things, and that makes all of them bullies.
The teacher in question, one Priya Venkatesan, is, according to Dartlog, a former postdoctoral fellow at the Dartmouth Medical School. She has a 1990 undergraduate degree from Dartmouth, where she double-majored in biochemistry and comparative literature, along with a master's degree from U.C. Davis in genetics and a PhD in literature from U.C. San Diego. In the course of acquiring all those degrees, she apparently managed to miss out on the concept of what an education is supposed to be. Not only that -- and possibly worse, given that Dartmouth hired her to teach writing -- she failed to learn the difference between "who" and "whom."
She left Dartmouth in a huff and is now at Northwestern -- which means there's hope. With any luck at all, Christina will get her hands on her!
12 comments:
Here I am commenting on my own post, but I just can't resist. I've been following some of the links on this story and I ran across an interview the teacher gave to the Dartmouth Review. It's some of the most entertaining reading I've encountered in months. Here, for example, is a specimen of her prose (from, remember, a writing teacher with a doctorate in literature):
The fact of the matter is that by being so arrogant about their command of knowledge about arguing with me about every point that I was making and that’s really arrogant. That’s very arrogant because frankly, and I’m not trying to be an academic elitist, but frankly, they don’t even have a B.A. They’re freshmen. They’re freshmen. The maturity that they had, and I think that’s what it is, I think it’s a lack of maturity, I don’t think it’s any character flaw, I just think it’s a lack of maturity and when they grow up they’ll find that it’s really tough to succeed in the real world and I really will start respecting my professor.
See what I mean? You can't make this stuff up!
In the same spirit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Haven_school_Skittles_incident
Now you COULD make THIS up, and as a matter of fact, someone did. George Orwell.
http://buttle.wordpress.com/2008/05/05/this-is-just-creepy/
Background:The BBC requires payment of a licence fee if you have a television in GB. You better pay it.
The UK government is remarkably creepy. It's not somewhere I'd ever want to live.
I'll run that professor's name by Kate. How does someone get advanced degrees in biochemistry and english??? And...why??
I can't see the BBC story at work, for some reason, but the Skittles story is . . . well, I'm speechless. Dartmouth seems to have behaved quite reasonably in the incident of the loony writing teacher, but I guess you can't expect the same of the public schools.
I did, however, love the part where the candy company gave the student a lifetime supply of Skittles. Now THAT'S inspired public relations.
"Ms. Venkatesan also informs Dartblog that she is 'pursuing a legal suit against members/former members of the Dartmouth community,' those being Christopher H. Lowrey of the medical school and his four-person research team. 'Another faculty member,' Ms. Venkatesan tells us, 'that figures prominently in my list of grievances…is Thomas H. Cormen, Ph. D., Director of the Writing Program (now the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric) and Professor of Computer Science.'"
Tom Cormen! He worked with James when James was at Dartmouth. Might have been his advisor?
COntinuing in the vein:
http://www.tampabays10.com/news/local/article.aspx?storyid=79533
The insane are running the asylum
Heh, I just read that a few minutes ago.
Most of the time when I read stories like the toothpick one I don't believe them. The guy's probably a loon, and the local news is looking for an "ohmigod" story. This line says it all:
"Picular had other performance issues, including "not following lesson plans" and allowing students to play on unapproved computers."
His last name is Picular, for crying out loud.
Meanyface. I got the name from the section I copied and pasted, which contained a typo. Nyah.
Whatever butthead.
Good memory, Lucy; Tom was my advisor.
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