What was Northwestern thinking hiring her???

[DSYoungEsq]

In case you missed it (and I didn’t see a thread on it), Northwestern University has apparently hired a professor from Dartmouth University who was in a bit of hot water. Seems she didn’t like the fact that her students questioned her theories. Here is the full story.

@Wall Street Journal

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.”

Read the story, it’s full of just wonderful stuff.

In short, she was teaching freshman composition. Yeah, basic freshman writing. In the process, she attempted to lecture on her basic theories, such as the concept that “scientific knowledge has suspect access to truth.” This is explained: “Scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct.” When she attempted to assert her ideas on “ecofeminism,” the concept that “scientific advancements benefit the patriarchy but leave women out,” one of her students took issue with her assertions. The upshot was that she ended up taking a week off from lecturing, and has sued the students, and intends to sue the university, for having subjected her to a hostile and discriminatory environment (apparently, just for good measure, she is asserting that the students were being racist, since she is from South Asia).

Now, mind you, after all this brouhaha, you’d think she’d be pretty unlikely to land a good job elsewhere. Not so. She has been employed by Northwestern University the article indicates (it appears from other web pages she’s a research assistant there, which isn’t quite the upward move I originally thought she’d made…). One wonders exactly what Northwestern is thinking.

Mind you, I’m not against professors who expound unusual, even silly theories. In the great marketplace of ideas, even unusual or silly themes need to be listened to and patiently refuted. And undergraduates should hear things that challenge their thinking processes; all too often we go through our whole lives in this comfortable womb of inculcated ideas that is never exposed to the light of day.

But a professor should be able to expound upon such theories and answer criticisms without believing that the challenges to her thinking are impermissible. If this professor thinks that the classroom is simply a place for her to propound concepts to students who, sitting at her feet, will gaze rapturously up at her in awe of her intellectualism, she’s living in much the wrong century (if, indeed, there ever was such a century). A truly secure person would welcome the challenges to her thinking, and calmly refute them in such a way that the students making the challenges were forced into doing some truly new analysis of the subject matter.

Oh well, at least Dartmouth’s students are now “safe.”

[Gaudere]

Isn’t research assistant basically barely-paid slave labor for profs, usually done by pre-PhD students? It seems like she was radically demoted, then, and may not even have much student contact.

[Sunrazor]

Wait a minute, this was freshman composition? You don’t teach French narrative theory (whatever the hell that is) in Freshman comp! You teach paragraphs and transition and basic research and citations and the mechanics of writing a sentence that can be understood by the English-speaking world. And she’s suing students!? Sounds like she was a very inexperienced teacher who let the classroom eat her lunch. She shouldn’t be teaching in a junior college, let alone Northwestern University.

[MsWhatsit]

@Sunrazor

She shouldn’t be teaching in a junior college, let alone Northwestern University.

She’s not. She’s a research assistant. See prior posts.

[Sunrazor]

@MsWhatsit

She’s not. She’s a research assistant. See prior posts.

Yes, I missed that in the OP – it wasn’t mentioned in the original WSJ opinion piece – and **Gaudere ** was posting the same time I was. I had it in my head she was still teaching. Sorry.

[Freddy_the_Pig]

Her precise title at Dartmouth, as reported in this story and confirmed by her own e-mails, was “research associate and lecturer”. I believe that’s what you do if you’re a PhD who hasn’t yet found a tenure-track position. The news media call anybody who gets in front of a college class a “professor”, but she wasn’t one.

It appears that she was given some latitude in the design of the composition class, and chose to call it “Science, Technology, and Society”. Hilarity ensued.

It appears that she’s also a research associate at Northwestern, so it looks like a lateral move. I don’t know if that position will involve instruction. She left Dartmouth in March, the threatening e-mails were sent in late April, and she was already at Northwestern in early May and perhaps earlier. She was probably hired by Northwestern before anybody knew about this.

[MandaJo]

@Sunrazor

Wait a minute, this was freshman composition? You don’t teach French narrative theory (whatever the hell that is) in Freshman comp! You teach paragraphs and transition and basic research and citations and the mechanics of writing a sentence that can be understood by the English-speaking world. And she’s suing students!? Sounds like she was a very inexperienced teacher who let the classroom eat her lunch. She shouldn’t be teaching in a junior college, let alone Northwestern University.

I’d like to think that freshmen at Dartmouth have more or less mastered these, and that whatever students have not are better served in a writing center than in a classroom.

It’s possible I’m wrong, but I teach high school and the kids I send to the Ivy League can all write a passable essay.

[Telemark]

Freshman English at Dartmouth (at least when I took it, many years ago) is a small class of 7-8 students and the teacher. It is more of a creative writing course then a standard composition course, although there was critique on that as well.

Not sure why she felt the need to discuss some of those particular theories but it’s not completely out of left field for that class.

[Chimera]

Sounds to me like she assumed more power than she had, tried to use her opening to make her own points, then melted like a snowflake on a radiator at the first sign of opposition. Now she’s suing because she got her little feelings hurt.

I like this bit;

"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."
This is what happens when a precious little snowflake is confronted with the real world.

Bwa.
Ha.
Ha.

[Fretful_Porpentine]

@Sunrazor

Wait a minute, this was freshman composition? You don’t teach French narrative theory (whatever the hell that is) in Freshman comp! You teach paragraphs and transition and basic research and citations and the mechanics of writing a sentence that can be understood by the English-speaking world. And she’s suing students!? Sounds like she was a very inexperienced teacher who let the classroom eat her lunch. She shouldn’t be teaching in a junior college, let alone Northwestern University.

Depends on the format of the comp program. Some schools have themed comp courses modeled on an upper-level seminar; most require students to read something other than the handbook that tells you how to write a sentence, and instructors often have a fair amount of freedom to choose what their students are going to read. In addition, freshman comp often serves as a general introduction to college-level thinking – it’s where students learn to read analytically and ask questions they’re not used to asking. I can certainly imagine a class in which asking students to read a (relatively freshman-friendly) article about literary theory might be appropriate.

That said, Priya Venkatasan comes across as a paranoid fruitcake (see this priceless interview, in which she accuses a student of conspiring against her by asking how to spell “Gattaca”).

[susan]

I don’t have a problem with what she was teaching, just with her response to students.

[elfkin477]

@susan

I don’t have a problem with what she was teaching, just with her response to students.

Didn’t you read the article? They argued with her opinions! If that’s not hostility, I’m not sure what is.

[ITR_champion]

Based on what I read in that interview and the original article, I can’t say I’m too surprised. The lawsuit may be unusual, but her general attitude is one that’s quite common in certain quarters of the academic world.

[Sunrazor]

@Fretful Porpentine

(snip) Some schools have themed comp courses modeled on an upper-level seminar; most require students to read something other than the handbook that tells you how to write a sentence, and instructors often have a fair amount of freedom to choose what their students are going to read. In addition, freshman comp often serves as a general introduction to college-level thinking – it’s where students learn to read analytically and ask questions they’re not used to asking. I can certainly imagine a class in which asking students to read a (relatively freshman-friendly) article about literary theory might be appropriate.

Great, I want to teach at that college. 'Cuz here at the juco level, we’re apparently teaching the kids who don’t go to **MandaJo’s ** school.

[Snarky_Kong]

@Manda JO

I’d like to think that freshmen at Dartmouth have more or less mastered these, and that whatever students have not are better served in a writing center than in a classroom.

It’s possible I’m wrong, but I teach high school and the kids I send to the Ivy League can all write a passable essay.

Lots and lots of freshman classes cover what students have learned in high school. I go to one of the best engineering schools in the country and they still offer Calc I (and lower courses) even though most students have already had a calculus course.

[Sublight]

@Manda JO

I’d like to think that freshmen at Dartmouth have more or less mastered these, and that whatever students have not are better served in a writing center than in a classroom.

It’s possible I’m wrong, but I teach high school and the kids I send to the Ivy League can all write a passable essay.

I don’t know about Dartmouth, but at Harvard a semester of expository writing was required for every first-year student. An essay test was given during “freshman week” (before classes officially start), and those who don’t demonstrate the essential skills have to take a full year (one semester remedial writing, one semester of the standard expo course). There were several writing courses available, each with a different general focus (lit, debate, science, etc.).

It may be that everyone is expected to be able to do this already, but the purpose is to ensure that everyone’s on the same page and can’t claim ignorance as an excuse later on.

[kittenblue]

Wait…did I read that interview right? Did she say that when the student asked how many t’s were in Gattaca, and the supervisor who was observing answered for her, saying “two t’s”, that that was a code for Tenure Track and that meant the supervisor was warning her that she was not suited for Tenure track? Does she really believe the student and the supervisor set that up as a coded message?

[MandaJo]

@Sublight

I don’t know about Dartmouth, but at Harvard a semester of expository writing was required for every first-year student. An essay test was given during “freshman week” (before classes officially start), and those who don’t demonstrate the essential skills have to take a full year (one semester remedial writing, one semester of the standard expo course). There were several writing courses available, each with a different general focus (lit, debate, science, etc.).

It may be that everyone is expected to be able to do this already, but the purpose is to ensure that everyone’s on the same page and can’t claim ignorance as an excuse later on.

Of course you are going to have Freshman Comp. But it (hopefully) isn’t going to be about how to recognize complete sentences and that paragraphs need topic sentences.

[MandaJo]

@Sunrazor

Great, I want to teach at that college. 'Cuz here at the juco level, we’re apparently teaching the kids who don’t go to **MandaJo’s ** school.

Hahaha. I teach at a comprehensive high school in a huge urban district. We are 65% SES disadvantaged (and we’ve sent SES disadvantaged/ESL students to Princeton, Yale, and Stanford just in the last 3 years). I teach all sorts of kids. I am just saying that the ones that go on to the Ivy League need and expect more than just how to write a paragraph. Freshman comp is not the same everywhere, and that’s ok.

[Tabula_Rasa]

@kittenblue

Wait…did I read that interview right? Did she say that when the student asked how many t’s were in Gattaca, and the supervisor who was observing answered for her, saying “two t’s”, that that was a code for Tenure Track and that meant the supervisor was warning her that she was not suited for Tenure track? Does she really believe the student and the supervisor set that up as a coded message?

kittenblue , you have just mastered French narrative theory!!