Students justified in harassing feminist professor
My friend Michelle just forwarded this editorial from the Wall Street Journal to me. Apparently a professor at Dartmouth tried problematizing some things for her students and trying to enlighten them about feminism/ecofeminism, and the response seems to amount to heckling and bullying from the students. The quote, from author Joseph Rago, apparently a Dartmouth alum (Class of ‘05?), pretty much summarizes the blatant sexism and ignorance of the entire piece:
After a winter of discontent, the snapping point came while Ms. Venkatesan was lecturing on “ecofeminism,” which holds, in part, that scientific advancements benefit the patriarchy but leave women out. One student took issue, and reasonably so – actually, empirically so. But “these weren’t thoughtful statements,” Ms. Venkatesan protests. “They were irrational.” The class thought otherwise. Following what she calls the student’s “diatribe,” several of his classmates applauded.
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.
That said, even at – or especially at – putatively superior schools, students are spoiled for choice when it comes to professors who share ideologies like Ms. Venkatesan’s. The main result is to make coursework pathetically easy. Like filling in a Mad Libs, just patch something together about “interrogating heteronormativity,” or whatever, and wait for the returns to start rolling in.
Problems with (eco)feminism, questioning established “knowledge” and suggesting that “interrogating heteronormativity” is all just a joke… Smells like a temper tantrum backlash to me.
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The criticisms of my students would serve as a good warning to visitors of Seeworthy: she talks too fast, she's too hard on us, she assigns too much work, and you have to be a dyke to get a good grade.
In other words, I'm a big, fat, queer, feminist meanie, and I am totally out to get you. Graaagh!
I would need more information to judge this situation. I have had an educational professor who was very progressive and forward thinking. But bless her heart she couldn’t teach or make a convincing arugment to save her life. She was always vauge about what she expected from us, and you would get lower grades for simply disagring with her on matters of educational philoshpy. It lead to hositle enviorment simliar to the one described. We can’t assume either group is on the side of the angels.
I have to disagree, Steve; I find that, generally, when someone says there’s racially motivated hostility being directed towards them, I’m going to believe them (over the predominantly white students who would no doubt say otherwise).
Beyond that, though, there’s the overall tone of the article; even if Rago wanted to give both sides the benefit of the doubt, the things he said and the way he said them came off as starkly anti-woman, anti-feminist and, frankly, opposed to a lot of innovative, contemporary research and thought in academia (feminist and otherwise).
Sexism is a huge problem. So is harassment. I’ve been the victim
of harassment but a sick, sad man from New York who won’t leave
me alone. Now, I believe that he’s trying to kill me. If you
look into my past and look at the school I went to, you’ll see
who it is and he’ll never come at me directly. He’ll send
someone else to do his dirty work for him. That someone else
could be black, white, an animal, car accident or house burning
down or something else. He pretends to like me but he really
doesn’t. He’s a snake. If something happens to me, check out
the school I just left.
Rago’s bias is clear. But that doesn’t change our lack of information about the actual situation. I don’t think the professor has an epistemologicaly privileged postion to deem what is racial hosilitly in ambigious cases like this, (the white students don’t have the epistemologicaly privileged either, but this goes without saying).
I am not dimissing the suffering Ms. Venkatesan has experinced. Precived discrimnation is tramutic experince even if there was no actual act of discrimnation.
From what I have read about the case, the problem is more that Venkatesan is kind of crazy. She probably has some legitimate points, but she also thought that two students were conspiring against her by sneezing and coughing. And that her superior was putting her down by saying how Gattaca is spelled after a student asked. The article I read is here–http://www.dartmouthindependent.com/archives/2008/05/post-9.html. Now, do some of her complains seem legitimate? Certainly. But mostly, it would appear as if she crazy.