Here’s an interesting op-ed from The Wall Street Journal. A Dartmouth professor is “threatening to sue her students because, she claims, their “anti-intellectualism” violated her civil rights.” Here’s more from the article.
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.”
Students can get pretty hostile, but if you’re trying to argue that scientific knowledge is a social construct – you’ve laid the stages for a debate.
What I don’t understand is that – I hope that my students will argue with me – and I think the last paragraph of the op-ed sums this thought up nicely.
The remarkable thing about the Venkatesan affair, to me, is that her students cared enough to argue. Normally they would express their boredom with the material by answering emails on their laptops or falling asleep. But here they staged a rebellion, a French Counter-Revolution against Professor Defarge. Maybe, despite the professor’s best efforts, there’s life in American colleges yet.
Where do these people come from? I hate to give Aristotle or Plato or whomever came up with the “eels come from the mud” theory, but people this dumb surely spawn from muddy waters, right? How have you been raised if you think argument is grounds for a lawsuit?