In the Name of Academic Freedom
Reading The Week today I came across a surreal article that reported a Professor Priya Venkatesan is suing students of Dartmouth College for what amounts to robustly questioning her opinions. The natural response to such an article was a healthy dose of skepticism combined with disbelief. I ventured on to find out a bit more about the case to see whether or not this was misrepresentative scandal-mongering, or a situation so daft you couldn’t make it up. An interview with the professor herself bears out the accusations. Her complaint stems back to an incident in which a student challenged a theory of eco-feminism that she was presenting, and was applauded by classmates (predominantly female) for the effort. After this ‘disturbing’ exercise of independent thought and research, the Professor felt the need to take a week off to ‘recover’, and is now taking legal action as a means of restitution. The history of frivolous litigation has hit a new low when a professor sues her students for disagreeing with her. Professor Venkatesen not only deserves to lose the case, but ought to be banned from holding any form of teaching position whatsoever for her shocking attitude towards academic freedom, debate and inquisitiveness.
I say “teaching” rather than “academia” as I am not fully qualified to question the intellectual capabilities of Professor Venkatesen. I have no desire to dismiss her PhD or other academic pursuits, and I have little specialist knowledge of the areas and disciplines she covers to be able to mount a full of criticism of her theories. Academic skill and teaching ability are not linked: I have been taught by Professors who are fantastic teachers as well as gifted academics, but I have also sat in lectures by distinguished professors whose utter inability to teach resulted in lectures on fascinating subject matter becoming as interesting as watching paint dry, as engaging as a concrete wall, and as rewarding as going to the dentist. The question at stake is not her intellectual capacity: she is probably an intelligent and successful academic (even if she cannot construct a sentence properly). The issue is whether or not she is fit to teach undergraduates, and, based on her own words and the experience of others, one can only conclude that she is not.
The first, and most obvious, reason is that she is a poor lecturer. She has been reported to have gone completely off-syllabus on several occasions. She is alleged to have used an introductory first-year (US) course to lecture students about her own academic interests and theories rather than teaching students the course they were supposed to receive. Furthermore, she has a significant number of complaints made against her by students that she responded to by means of intimidation. In the words of her former students:
Aside from the fact that I learnt nothing of value in this class besides the repeated use of the word “postmodernism” in all contexts (whether appropriate or not) and the fact that Professor Venkatesan is the most confusing/nonsensical lecturer ever, the main problem with this class is the personal attacks launched in class. Almost every member of the class was personally attacked in some form in the class by either intimidation or ignoring your questions/comments/concerns. If you decide to take this class, prepare to NOT be allowed to express your own opinions in class because you have “yet to obtain your Ph.D/masters/bachelors degree”. We were forced to write an in-class essay on “respect” (and how we lacked it) because we expressed our views on controversial topics and some did not agree with the views of “established scholars” who have their degrees.
Additionally, your essays will (at most) receive 2 lines worth of feedback, along with a miserable letter grade.
All in all, there are much better ways to understand science, technology, and society than to suffer through ten weeks of emotional battering.
What this further indicates is an attitude utterly unacceptable for a teacher in a learning environment. She possesses a narrow-minded and condescending view of her students and detractors that innoculates her against all criticism and stifles debate. She dismisses her students as narrow-minded bigots with some ineffable “agenda”. She claims that she didn’t like their ‘arguing with me about every point that I was making’, dismissing them on the grounds that ‘frankly, they don’t even have a BA’. Any student of logic will know that this is an ad hominem fallacy that has no place in sensible debate. She claims that such questioning ‘totally undermined the whole academic system… because it never became about the students meeting my expectations’. Such is her hubris that she banned questions in class and dismissed numerous complaints about her incompetence as just ‘oil and water’ tension. Her paranoia is such that she makes allegations of racism despite stating ‘no-one made a comment about my ethnicity’. She claims that a student asking how “Gattaca” was spelt was a swipe at her non-tenured status, hatched in connivance with her boss, and accuses her detractors of immaturity and mental illness. She makes numerous accusations that are little more than assertions backed up with flimsy, questionable or no evidence. At no point does she demonstrate any form of engagement with criticisms raised.
To claim that the role of a student is ‘to meet his or her [Professor's] expectations’ is to encourage such sickening sycophancy as to discourage the curiosity and disagreement that is the spirit of academia. Rather than accusing students who counter her claims with researched opinions of ‘fascism [and] demagoguery’, she should be applauding their initiative to research, their intellectual curiosity to challenge assumptions, and their courage to stand up and criticise the ideas of others. Critical reflection and engagement with ideas presented is considered one of the key goals of any student at the college I go to, and one of our professors congratulated students for “challenging received wisdom”, encouraging them to continue to do so. The unpolished first engagements with complex ideas by a freshman student should be encouraged, not dismissed because the proponent doesn’t have their degree yet. To be so condescending about one’s students suggests that Professor Venkatesan does not really understand that teaching is about nurturing those initial sparks of criticism and initiative, not snuffing them out because you don’t happen to agree with them or they aren’t expressed in the most advanced manner.
All this would be bad enough on its own, but what worsens matters, and leads to the conclusion that she should be banned from teaching, is her attempt to pursue a lawsuit against her former students. To resort to such crass intimidation of first-year students, extending to writing a polemical book in which she threatens to ‘name names’, demonstrates further contempt for her students and an unwillingness to use the very reason that underlies the academic tradition to persuade her critics to accept her point of view. This cynical use of the very laws supposed to protect one’s freedoms represents an attack on free expression, inquisitiveness and discussion. It is made all the more galling in that it is being pursued by an academic claiming that she wants to uphold such freedoms. The case is an insult to the law; a legally illiterate example of crying wolf and wild exaggeration in such a way that demeans the genuine cases of discrimination that occur in academic institutions. Though she claims she is ‘not the kind of person who likes to make a fuss about petty or trivial things’, this gross overreaction and display of sore losership is a disgraceful form of arrogant bullying. That it is being done by a professor against first-year students only worsens matters.
Such litigious bullying and condescencion in place of rational academic debate and the free exchange of ideas is behaviour entirely unfit for any academic, let alone a teaching one. One can only hope that Professor Venkatesan’s case is rapidly thrown out of court and she either sees the error of her ways and changes, or never teaches again.
