Educational Follies

[Richard]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1209...n_commentaries

Dartmouth's 'Hostile' Environment

Often it seems as though American higher education exists only to provide gag material for the outside world. The latest spectacle is an Ivy League professor threatening to sue her students because, she claims, their "anti-intellectualism" violated her civil rights.

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."

Richard

[lksteve]

Originally Posted by Richard

Dartmouth's 'Hostile' Environment

She'd really love the University of Wyoming...

[kgoerz]

She is higher educated. No one said she was smart.

[Richard]

http://www.ivygateblog.com/blog/tags/priya_venkatesan/

Venkatesan Speaks! ...and speaks, and speaks...

Talk about long-winded. The Dartmouth Review interviewed Priya Venkatesan, who babbled for two days straight. (Literally. The interviewer ran out of tape.) She flip-flops on whether or not she'll sue and explains how Writing Program Director Tom Cormen used top-secret alphanumeric codes for covert intimidation:

Dartmouth Review
Interview 4/30/08

http://dartlog.net/2008/04/tdr-inter...venkatesan.php

TDR: Moving on to the issue at hand, could you comment on Tom Cormen [Chairman of Dartmouth's Writing Program]?

PV: Sure, I am like, I really have a lot of work right now, I have two book manuscripts to work on, that doesn’t even include the manuscript about my life in higher education, I have two grants to work on, I have an article to work on, I have three articles to work on, I really have so much work to do and you would not even believe, I really have a lot of work to do. I am not the kind of person who wants to make a big fuss about petty or trivial things. So, I have a lot of things to do that I could be focusing my attention on in very productive ways.

TDR: I can understand that. If you like, I can just ask you a different question if you want.

PV: To your question, Tom Cormen was consistently rude to me and he was very unsupportive of my teaching in the Writing Program. I am perplexed as to why he would give me an offer to teach four sections in the Writing Program and then show absolutely no support, no professional support, and I wasn’t even looking for personal support, no professional support or guidance, and trying to do my best job to be a writing instructor. Now to give you the background, I taught writing in my graduate school at the University of California San Diego. I was what they call a teaching assistant. The students get graded by teaching-assistants in the research universities, not like Dartmouth where the professors grade the students. I was a teaching assistant at the University of San Diego, and I have three teaching evaluations. They were all spectacular. They were all spectacular. They were all positive. I could fax them to you. I don’t mind, I could honestly fax them to you, but no professional support or guidance from the beginning. But, I was confident in my ability to teach expository writing, so I went about it with very little support or direction from the department. That is, in itself, very unusual to have a writing program that does not have a structured orientation program for its new writing staff. Very, very extraordinary. Very out of the ordinary. Very unusual.

This lady is a nut job...and she's influencing young minds. Try reading the following book - The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America by David Horowitz. I was amazed to learn that Angela Davis is a professor at UC Santa Cruz.

Richard

[nmap]

Originally Posted by Richard

They were all spectacular. They were all spectacular. They were all positive. I could fax them to you. I don’t mind, I could honestly fax them to you, but no professional support or guidance from the beginning. But, I was confident in my ability to teach expository writing, so I went about it with very little support or direction from the department. That is, in itself, very unusual to have a writing program that does not have a structured orientation program for its new writing staff. Very, very extraordinary. Very out of the ordinary. Very unusual

Sir, I agree about the gag material. Gag in both senses - gag as a joke, and gag as a physical reaction.

If I might add a few observations...

1) Student surveys tend to be positive. It takes spectacularly bad teaching to get large number of bad surveys.

2) Surveys are easily manipulated. A little grade inflation, maybe bringing in food toward the end of the semester, and the numbers go up nicely.

3) The lack of an orientation program is quite normal. For example, a certain research university placed a particular teaching assistant in front of 250 students. Preparation consisted of a copy of the text book.

As pointed out, she is a nut case. The problem is - she (apparently) went through the process of getting a doctoral degree, taught as a teaching assistant, and was hired by Dartmouth as faculty. Which suggests that either the screening process is badly flawed, or she isn't particularly divergent from the norms.

By the way - costs for college increased by 110% from 1981 to 2001. Median family income increased 27%. This from: Education Commission of the States. (2008). Affordability
http://www.ecs.org/ecsmain.asp?page=/html/issuesPS.asp

[Guy]

Originally Posted by Richard

[U][url]Dartmouth's 'Hostile' Environment

Richard

I sit my ass in the back! Out of sight...out of mind.

"SIR! I paid $130 for this text-book and there is nothing in it about; the Bush administration..."

Stay safe.