Lecturer: “What is the most important concept in French Narrative Theory?”
Student: “I give up.”
Lecturer: “No, that’s French Political Theory.”
To be blunt, “French Narrative Theory” is a load of hooey. If she’s dumb enough to actually get up in front of people who haen’t drunk the Kool-Aid and teach it with a straight face, either somebody’s got a gun to her pet kitten’s head or she’s just stupid.
Just be thankful she wasn’t trying to teach radical feminist theory or some such hooey. She’d have been claiming that “two t’s” is slang for titties and that they were sexually assaulting her by saying it.
This argument could be made within French narrative theory without resorting to radical feminism.
DSYoungEsq, I don’t understand why you are asking why Northwestern hired her. By most standards she was qualified for the job. She had a Ph.D. in literature. She had prior experience teaching freshman composition at Dartmouth. At the point they hired her, she hadn’t yet filed the law suit. All that they knew was that she didn’t want to teach at Dartmouth anymore. They were only hiring her for a non-tenure track job teaching freshman composition.
French narrative theory may or may not be nonsense. I’m not an expert on it and neither are you. By most standards though, it’s a generally accepted subfield in literature. If you want to blame anybody for it, you should blame literature departments as a whole for accepting it and blame academia as a whole for allowing literature departments to accept it. Northwestern is no more to blame for it than anyone else.
All that’s happened here is that a person has gotten their Ph.D. and been hired for what is actually a low-level job in academia. Up to that point no one has reported them as having any problems. Suddenly they start displaying strange behavior. You know, that happens sometimes. People who appear normal until their twenties suddenly begin displaying odd behavior, possibly indicating mental disorder.
And that assumes that her behavior really is as strange as it seems. It certainly looks that way from the articles and the interview, but sometimes that can be deceiving. Sometimes such articles can be slanted to make the person’s behavior more strange than it actually is. In any case, if her law suit is as absurd as it seems from what we now know, it won’t get anywhere. If her behavior in her teaching at Northwestern becomes strange also, they shouldn’t continue to employ her.
I just read the article and I confess don’t get the hate for her. I have no trouble believing she was a precious snowflake - but where’s the acknowledgement that her class full of freshmen were also precious snowflakes? Because lots of them are. Lots of freshmen think they know more than the professors, and in subjects like English or philosophy (with no hard, “objective” answers) it’s quite easy for asshole students to tie up well-meaning professors in knots.
It appears to me that they were jerks to her, and the administration didn’t support her, and she got frustrated and overreacted. None of the parties - Venkatesan, the students nor the administration - acted in a particularly respectable manner.
Regardless of your opinion of French narrative theory or ecofeminism, they are recognized subjects within academia and, given that they were provided as content for a writing class (i.e. as ideas to be discussed and analyzed), they seem perfectly appropriate topics to me. I haven’t seen anything indicating that students couldn’t get a good mark by writing a paper explaining why French narrative theory is bunk.
It also appears to me that the media portrayal has been quite unfair. Comparing the first article with the interview reveals a number of inconsistencies (for instance, the different interpretations of her use of the words “fascist demagoguery”). She also notes that she has called off the lawsuit.
I’m saddened by the lack of racial sensitivity displayed here. One thing that makes racism so insidious is that it is extremely difficult for anyone experiencing it to prove to white people. It’s subtle and insidious by its very nature, and by its nature is often completely invisible to those who don’t experience it. In particular, a woman of East Asian descent, working in the old boy’s club of academia, surrounded by know-it-all precious snowflake freshmen, might have a hard time of it.
In the interview she said she felt it and couldn’t nail it down to a single unambiguous incident (which I think is a very common experience for any person of colour). When pressed to do so, her example was pounced upon as another example of her paranoia and idiocy. The TT example sounded extremely stupid, there’s no question. But I have experienced things that had an unambiguous meaning at the time, that sounded extremely stupid in the re-telling. Context is everything, and context often can’t be accurately related after the fact.
I’m not saying she deserves widespread apologies and a tenure-track position. I just ask that you consider what she said in the interview and cut her a little slack. The students and the administration look just as bad to me as she does.
I have to agree with the OP. I can see a borderline nutcase getting a job at a university and going lawsuit crazy because reality doesn’t conform to the voices in her head.
If you’re an administrator at another university this is the kind of thing you read about and say “Thank God she wasn’t working here.” You don’t say “Hey, we’d like some of that action. Let’s hire her.”
So what was Northwestern thinking? Why would anyone knowingly hire someone who’s already shown they’re going to be a big problem for their employer?
She got the job at Northwestern before all the kurfluffle at Dartmouth surfaced. But she’s still a nutter.
At no point in this thread did anyone deal with this in a racial context. Reading it in is your own addition, as is the “lack of racial sensitivity”. The mockery and dismissal of this person is being done entirely on the merits of her apparent mental state and logic failures, and has no connection to her “race”, whatever that might be.
Did you read the disjointed interview? She’s has serious problems talking with people. She has no idea why the students kept asking her to spell words and she has paranoia issues.
I find it difficult to believe she went through a serious job interview.
Magiver writes:
> Did you read the disjointed interview? She’s has serious problems talking with
> people. She has no idea why the students kept asking her to spell words and
> she has paranoia issues.
Did you read my post? What does that have to do with the points I made? Northwestern hired her before the lawsuit was filed. They hired her before she did the published interview. The only things they had to base their hiring on was her work on her Ph.D., the fact that she had experience in teaching freshman composition, and possibly how she came across in an employment interview (although they may not have interviewed the applicants for the job, since being a non-tenure-track job it’s actually rather low-level and low-paid). Unless she came across weird when she was interviewed by the department for the job, they had no reason to suspect she was odd.
Seriously, did you read my post at all? How clear can I make this? Northwestern didn’t know anything about her behavior at all. None of that came out until after they hired her. Departments don’t hire detectives to research the entire history of someone that they are thinking of hiring. Do you think that any kinds of employer are required to know absolutely everything about their applicants, regardless of how difficult it is to figure it out?
She deserves zero slack. Wait, she got slack. She was hired, and she blew it. She was an ignoramus, that abused her authority, and she got busted for it.
I think that calling a student a fascist demagogue is a bit over the top, and hysterical to boot. Somebody in that position cannot do that to a student. I, myself, am a fascist, a REAL one, and find it a bit too churlish, to find somebody, who is not one, being called the same. Fascist is a word that too many ingnorant people use as a label for what they, themselves, do not like, neither can comprehend. This brown person had issues, and cannot articulate them because she is frustrated, and needs a scapegoat for her inadequacy. This kind of racism is quite well known to white people, because, when a ‘minority’ fails, as in this case, we are made the whipping boys. Her students were paying good money for an education so that they could maximize their lives, and were being given shit for the sole purpose of vindicating her failings in life.
Yes, yes I did. And you copied my thread but left out “I find it difficult to believe she went through a serious job interview”, which summarized my point.
Her posted interview was disjointed and filled with paranoia. At some point these qualities should have come out in a job interview. She has real problems in social situations and an interview for a teaching position should draw out those problems. Frankly, I would suspect her Ph.D. credentials given her verbal skills.
This just shows you don’t appreciate French narrative theory. One person says Gattaca is spelled with two t’s because that’s the way it’s spelled. Another person sees the use of two t’s as a personal affront. Why claim one view is better than the other and impose it upon those who disagree?
By the same reasoning, why say that there’s no racial insensitivity just because there’s no evidence of racial insensitivity? If cowgirl believes that there is a lack of racial sensitivity isn’t that as valid as your belief that there is not? You’re just trying to impose your evidence-biased social construct on other people.
I typed in “French Narrative Theory” -dartmouth -Venkatesan into Google, and got a whopping 14 hits, the majority of which referenced this incident. Others are just cheeky comments on blogs using it as a pejorative for a useless university course, like “underwater basket-weaving”.
It’s only the three hits from Google Books that convince me the term is used seriously by people; of course, they’re the kind of post-modernist literary criticism books that cite the most obscure shit they can find in order to look good. It’s perfectly reasonable to say that’s not appropriate for a gen-ed composition course.
Ma’am, the reason she threatened to sue these students was because they said that it was bunk.
Not necessarily. I’m not sure what the interview process for a research assistant position is like, but I’ve interviewed for adjunct teaching jobs in English, and it usually entails nothing more than meeting with the department chair for an hour. Lots of crazy people can fake a veneer of sanity for that long. I even got a job offer without an interview, although it was for a postdoc at the university where I did my graduate work, so presumably they already knew I wasn’t crazy.
If this were a tenure-track position, or even a full-time visiting assistant professorship, she would have to fake sanity for a two- or three-day campus visit, usually involving a teaching demo of some sort, but part-time jobs are easy come, easy go.
That’s fucking awesome, LN! Thanks for the best laugh of the day!
WOW. My last interview was 7 hrs long. They wanted to verify if I had the skills needed for the job as well as the social skills to deal with VP’s and such.
I suppose that’s what tenure is for.
Yah, I have to second how funny that was. I was trying to memorize it for future zingers.
You go to law school. You become a lawyer. You do well. So well they make you a judge.
A judge! The symbol of justice personified!
Them they bring you this case.