Lecturer Sues School Claiming Anti-Intellectual Students Created Hostile Working Environment
The trauma was so intense that in March Ms. Venkatesan quit Dartmouth and decamped for Northwestern. She declined to comment for this piece, pointing instead to the multiple interviews she conducted with the campus press.
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.
Ms. Venkatesan's scholarly specialty is "science studies," which, as she wrote in a journal article last year, "teaches that scientific knowledge has suspect access to truth." She continues: "Scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct."
This can't be the whole story. My gut tells me that she was hitting these kids with material that was too advanced and foreign for them and they flipped out. I belive that being a student requires you to keep an open mind but to also be critical of the ideas you are presented with.
Some students can be so thickheaded and belligerent that they ruin a class. I remember some from freshmen comp that refused--more or less--to acknowledge that symbolism even existed as a literary idea. They adopted a sort of Howard Stern-ian attack mode whenever subtext was mentioned.
This article is woefully incomplete and actively hostile to the teacher. I'd be curious to hear more from her side.