Professor sues her own students

[bijou]

This is a long blog, so I have just brought ove some extracts.

Former Dartmouth professor Priya Venkatesan has plans to sue both students and colleagues
"One female student was a nose-blower," says Priya Venkatesan, who, until just a few weeks ago, was a professor in Dartmouth's writing department. A 1990 graduate of the College, Venkatesan spent the better part of her twenties earning a Masters in Genetics and a PhD in Literature. But those were different days. Now, Venkatesan finds her thoughts occupied by that student who "incessantly disrupted class with her nose-blowing." Or the one who interrupted her lecture on bioethics with "a real evil look that made me feel very uncomfortable." Or the one who loudly declared that Lyotard was "cheesy."

A casual observer might conclude that Venkatesan is on the edge of a nervous breakdown, frantically trying to confront her demons that sometimes appear to her as students. But Venkatesan has no apparent demons; in fact, she seems like she has had a very normal, undramatic life. Raised halfway between New York City and Albany by traditional Hindu parents, Venkatesan suggests that her heavy inculcation in Indian culture may have played a part in her ardent desire to excel academically (but then again it may not have - such is the nature of the self-described "postmodernist in the laboratory"). Talking with her, one certainly gets the impression that, above all, she has focused her life on scholarship and allows herself to be distracted by little else. So why get tripped up by a little nose-blowing?

...After she graduated in 1990, she moved to California to earn an unusual combination of post-graduate degrees: an M.S. in Genetics from UC-Davis and a Ph.D. in Literature from UC-San Diego. In July 2005, she moved back to Hanover to accept a postdoctoral fellowship at Dartmouth Medical School. Soon thereafter, Venkatesan published her first book, Molecular Biology in Narrative Form, which focused on exploring the link between her two areas of expertise, science and literature (a theme she plans to further develop in her upcoming book, which is preliminarily titled A Postmodernist in the Laboratory).

...Venkatesan didn't get along with her colleagues - who consisted of research associates, Ph.D. students, and other postdoctoral fellows - from the very outset of her tenure at DMS. According to Venkatesan, the entire lab was "hostile to (her) type of academic discourse" (that is, trying to incorporate literary criticism into molecular biology). She alleges that Christine Richardson, a research technician in the lab, treated her with absolute contempt, always responding to Venkatesan's requests for assistance with either dismissive gestures or complete silence. Venkatesan takes particular exception to a sarcastic comment Richardson, who Venkatesan describes as "the kind of person who was always expressing herself," made about wanting "to get down and dirty with (Venkatesan) concerning (her) research."

...When the student asked her how to spell Gattaca, Tom Cormen was visiting the class, and he informed the student that it was spelled with "two t's." In an interview with the Review, Venkatesan insisted that this was Cormen's subtle way of reminding her that she was not a "tenure track" professor. In an interview with the Valley News, Venkatesan claims that Cormen once brought up the subject of racism in baseball to remind her that she could not play baseball because of her race or gender. Before seeing this interview, I had not been aware of Venkatesan's apparent aspirations to play Major League Baseball.
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link
You get the idea, she is a victim with a capital V, the full thing is worth reading if only to see the full extent of the madness available in a college near you.

And for fun ... Post modernist essay generator.

[Wretched Excess]

this woman is truly ill.   

[Chris_]

And for fun ... Post modernist essay generator.

I didn't know they had those back in the days when michelle obama wrote her thesis.  But clearly, they did and it explains her "work."

Oh, wait -- this one does much better English.  And content.

[Tantal]

Ward Churchill's new girlfriend?

[EastFacingNorth]

A moonbat off her meds.  Hardly a surprising phenomenon in academia.

[jendf]

Holy moly. I just read that whole article. If I was working at Dartmouth, I wouldn't go near hear. She'll sue you for looking at her funny! Literally!

I wonder why people like her even bother to get out of bed each morning. If life is so difficult for them...

[Wretched Excess]

Holy moly. I just read that whole article. If I was working at Dartmouth, I wouldn't go near hear. She'll sue you for looking at her funny! Literally!

I wonder why people like her even bother to get out of bed each morning. If life is so difficult for them...

because you can't sue someone when you're in bed?  just a guess . . . 

[jendf]

Holy moly. I just read that whole article. If I was working at Dartmouth, I wouldn't go near hear. She'll sue you for looking at her funny! Literally!

I wonder why people like her even bother to get out of bed each morning. If life is so difficult for them...

because you can't sue someone when you're in bed?  just a guess . . . 

She could sue the mattress company for making an uncomfortable sleeping surface. And you know they just did it because she was South Asian. 

I love in the article how she points out that this isn't about race and yet drops her race in every other quote, just to remind everyone.

[bijou]

Holy moly. I just read that whole article. If I was working at Dartmouth, I wouldn't go near hear. She'll sue you for looking at her funny! Literally!

I wonder why people like her even bother to get out of bed each morning. If life is so difficult for them...

She sounds like a complete liability I bet people cross the street to avoid her.

[Scoobie]

The final line of the e-mail, which is the last thing I have heard from her, seems to encapsulate her entire story in a nutshell: there might be a point in there somewhere, but she isn't doing any favors to anyone trying to figure out what it is. Here it is:

You have helped my case tremendously. Now let's hope the Attorney General doesn't come after Dartmouth, but lest we forget, they are appointed by Bush, so you may have an ally in corruption. The sorry state of our world:-( Cheers, Priya

....complete with the "It's Bush's fault" ending. Good Gawd. 

[The Ocean]

How do these people get to be professors in the first place?

[NHSparky]

Goddammed flatlanders.