White Males Strike Back: On Suing Your Students.
May 11, 2008 by Mikhail Emelianov
UPDATE II: Now this is just hilarious, I need to stop following all the links, but apparently there are some e-mails that surfaced - here’s a great example:
Dear Student:
As a courtesy, you are being notified that you are being named in a potential class action suit that is being brought against Dartmouth College, which is being accused of violating federal anti-discrimination laws. Please do not respond to this email because it will be potentially used against you in a court of law.
Priya Venkatesan, PhD
“Potential class action” suit? I bet she thought something like: “These kids were so misbehaving in my class! There must be a law against it! Let’s see, I will google “class” + “action” + “lawsuit” and come up with a “class action suit”!!! Now I am going to file some “class action” suits myself.
And more discussion here.
UPDATE: Apparently Priya Venkatesan is going to Northwestern. Good luck with that! And some more links covering the story: College On The Record, Gawker 1, Gawker 2, Wall Street Journal Editorial.
Former Dartmouth professor Priya Venkatesan has plans to sue both students and colleagues.
I know many of us who read this subtitle in The Dartmouth Independent probably went: “It’s about fucking time!” But wait till you read the rest of this rather interesting story. It is not about your annoying students, but about your sensitive professor who claims she was harassed and discriminated against because she did not happen to be a white male, and we all know how glorious it is to be a white male, of course:
“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?
Nose-blowing, you ask? How about some students actually trying to sleep, or text-messaging, or forgetting to turn off the freaking phone, or walking out to go to the little boys/girls room right in the middle of my sentence, or [add your story here]? So this particular professor is Indian and she claims that all those things happened to her because he was not a white male - I know plenty of white males who had experienced even worse types of disrespectful behaviors, but what are you going to do about it, right? Well, for one, you can sue the students!!!
Venkatesan claims that her students’ overall treatment of her created a hostile work environment, one that she would not have faced as a white male. According to her, Dartmouth turned a blind eye to this situation and further refused to afford her the respect that a similarly accomplished white male would have received. As a result, the College and several of its youngest students now face a potential lawsuit alleging harassment and workplace discrimination.
Ok, so she was not respected by her students, as she claims, I understand how frustration in the classroom can lead to some strange conspiracy theories, who hasn’t had an experience of thinking that one student is doing it on purpose? But this story goes even further. Apparently not only the students, but also the colleagues were hostile:
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 Venkatesan confronted Lowrey about this incident, she claims that Lowrey responded, “How do you think you’re making Christine feel by mentioning all these names of these big philosophers?”
Now wait a second! Conflict between a junior postdoctoral fellow with innovative ideas and a person at a school/lab where the new student just started working? Cannot be! Impossible! I thought academics were all nice and respectful toward one another: “How is your wonderful research going, Dr. Smith?” - “It’s moving along quite smoothly, we’re testing on the monkeys next month. What about your recent book on the worm-like fidgeting of semiotic poststructures?” - “Oh well, thanks for asking! It’s going quite well, Dr. Jones” - “Shall we get a snifter of brandy then, Dear Colleague?”
The story goes on and on about how this woman felt uncomfortable every single second of her life and is clearly a nutcase, but the question then is: Can I sue my students because they make me feel uncomfortable or miss my class? Well, so far the situation was only about the relationships in the lab, now enter the students - if you thought things were bad with the colleagues, imagine what happens when you add the students - here are some awesome highlights:
One of her students was “constantly correcting” her and “being belligerent.” Venkatesan describes another as “inappropriately aggressive in trying to get me to look at her writing.” Venkatesan continues: “I would try my best to give her my attention, but she was so demanding - every time I tried to explain something, she would counter with a trivial question, something she should have known for someone who got admitted to Dartmouth. She was the kind of student that needed to be spoon fed.”
Then there was the nose-blower, who apparently teamed up with another girl in the class who was coughing all the time in order to disrupt class.
A student in her afternoon class would … “who would incessantly ask the most trivial questions that in no way enhanced the quality of the class.” Though the students began to perceive a reluctance or inability on Venkatesan’s part to answer questions, Venkatesan insists that “the nature of (the) questions were like, ‘How do you spell cat?’ I wouldn’t know how to answer them because to me they’d be apparent.”
…things spiraled out of control after an incident where the students of her afternoon class applauded one of their peers for raising a point of contention with a theory Venkatesan was suggesting. It may be the one thing Venkatesan and the students agree on. Though one student in the class described the question as the first coherent thing he had heard about the subject, Venkatesan was devastated. Feeling humiliated, Venkatesan says she left the room in tears and went to see a doctor, who recommended that she take off the following week in order to regroup from her “intellectual and emotional distress.”
Looking back on the incident, Venkatesan says she “can’t believe they’d clap against me after all I’ve tried to do for them. They don’t even have a B.A., yet they were trying to break down a professor who is relatively well accomplished and well degreed. That was way crossing a line of respectful academic discourse.
Now the bullshit: “Venkatesan believes that, had she been a white male, the students would have respected her time by asking questions and coming to her for help more selectively.” C’mmon now! Really? I’m not saying that there is no discrimination in our universities and that everything is great and all, but thinking that students are disrespectful only because you’re not a white male is just plain stupid! Most of the students’ comments show that this woman was a patronizing bitch to them and even though students do exaggerate occasionally, I have to say that in this case I would have to side with them… In any case, there’s probably not going to be any legal action as there’s really no basis for it, as the article suggests, but what we do have is another product of graduate school that does not prepare students for the realities of academic life - who would have thought that academia is so concerned with rank and position? students being arrogant and dismissive? at Dartmouth?
For more details on this story, read an article from New York Daily News. I’m pretty sure this woman is going to have a great carrier as she clearly knows how to behave around both colleagues and students…
She has a point, though - from my own experiences I’d say students argue a lot more in the classes of female lecturers than seemingly “authoritive” white, older males. Heck, I do it as well.
Not sure it’s worthy of a lawsuit but it’s certainly not a trivial issue if it fits in so well with the power systems.
I disagree - saying (as a casual observation minus actual statistics) that students “argue a lot more” in the classes taught by females than males is pretty sexist, don’t you think? it’s like saying: because women are more emotional and helpless, they cannot control the classroom as well as men - I find it to be rather ridiculous. What exactly is her point? That students can be disrespectful? Duh. You can tell that that was her first teaching experience, she wasn’t very good at “crowd control” or presentation or several other pedagogical basics - notice that nowhere does she ever doubt her teaching abilities, never does she say: Well, Dartmouth kids are certainly tools, but maybe teaching isn’t my thing, maybe it’s partly my fault for being a bad teacher?
P.S. I’ll take an arguing student over a silent student any day.
Mikhail, you’re so right. I spend much of my professional life trying to prod students into an argumentative state. That’s Teaching Moment 101 and if women teachers get to it more easily, I’m jealous.
Btw, I learned a lot from my female fellow TAs in grad school about the distinctive challenges to professorial authority women (and minorities) experience in the classroom. But I’ve had to take their word for it, because obviously they’ve never been men and I’ve never been a woman, so a direct experiential comparison is tricky. Our perceptions of other people’s experiences can be so unreliable, neh?
As I’ve been out in the world teaching now for some years, I notice that some women (and some men) experience authority problems in the classroom. They really do, I can tell by their anguish. And some women (plus of course many men) do not. The funny thing is that the situations we all describe seem awfully similar. The students do not immediately fall gratefully to their knees in the presence of our great wisdom.
I’m gradually wiggling toward the hypothesis that in this, as in so many other spheres of human interaction, interpretation has something to do with it.
My personal theory is that short people have much harder time controlling the class - they can’t really see over the podium, easy to run from, and let’s face it look quite ridiculous in their pathetic attempts to project any kind of authority…
I think the problem, as I see it, is the fact that there’s in most cases absolutely zero education in our PhD programs when it comes to the pedagogical skills - the idea seems to be that you can simply pick it up by watching others do it. I have taken exactly one class in my graduate school on how to teach and I remember nothing except being annoyed with some of my fellow students and than sharing this annoyance over a beer with a fellow sufferer.
In Russia, for example, there’s a whole institution parallel to the university system - pedagogical universities (institutes) - in same cases as competitive as “regular” universities - you study the subject matter and a whole pedagogical angle - these schools mainly prepare school teachers and I’m sure there’s something like this in the U.S. The fact is, in most PhD in humanities like history, English, philosophy, religious studies etc etc people know perfectly well that they are going to end up in the “academia” which, for the most part, will involve a lot of teaching - how many are really educated to do so? It seems to me that our approach to pedagogy, if compared with other seemingly “easy” things to do, would come out as somewhat naive - imagine therapists in training only getting to observe the others and getting their first experience only when they start practicing? Therapy is easy, right? All you do is talk to people about their problems and know your Freud or whatever theory you’re applying…
Venkatesan’s experience - though hilarious in its utter disastrousness - is by no mean an unique experience, but it is not an experience of a South Asian woman instructor, but an experience of a person who had to learn how to teach in the actual teaching setting, of someone who had no idea what students are like or can be like. Of course, there’s a difference between “enthusiastic” or “argumentative” and “disruptive” but there are plenty of ways of dealing with those that do not involve paranoia, whining or suing…
You’re right about all of this. Just to fill in some thoughts around the edges, the thing that most strikes me about both Venkatesan and my own similarly-inclined colleagues is the sense of entitlement. They really have no idea how to teach but beyond that, they don’t wanna and don’t think they should haveta. The students “should” be different and that’s that.
There’s a kind of autism at work that fascinates me. I’ve seen analyses of Venkatesan that capture this. So often it’s the bookwormy teachers’ pets who end up staying in school through the doctorate. The few who learn well from lectures. And they’ve always done the work and hung on every word, so completely enchanted by the process going on in their own little heads that they utterly fail to notice the other students around them resisting and failing in various ways. When they wake up in front of those same students they expect the same worship they offered their teachers, which is pretty close to insane, and get all hurt and outraged when they don’t get it. In terms of their own experience, the students are much more disrespectful nowadays and some explanation other than the ordinary dynamics of the classroom must be sought.
And who’s going to tell a proud professional intellectual that they’ve got their head up their ass?
What, observations about discrimination are themselves sexist?
I didn’t read your comment as an “observation about discrimination” - you say:
“from my own experiences I’d say students argue a lot more in the classes of female lecturers than seemingly “authoritative” white, older males.”
Which could be interpreted - I’m not saying you do - as saying: Because it seems that students are arguing more with female teachers, there’s something about being a female teaching that causes this - this would be sexist, I think, because it would be making an essential conclusion about “female lecturers” based on your observations - if I said something like: Because there’s a large number of African-American men behind the bars, it means that there’s something about being an African-American man that makes you prone to criminality - that would be pure racism.
My point was, without denying that there is discrimination against women in the academy, this particular story seems to be more about a pedagogical failure, not gender-based discrimination - again, basing my point of view of the information provided by the interview and other sources of information about what happened. But I’m not saying there were no sexist or racist elements either - look at some of the comments to this story - some are quite intolerant… However if you look at what students are saying - I know, I know, we can’t always trust their point of view completely - she was telling them to stop arguing because they don’t have a degree yet and she has a PhD, she took student disagreement as a personal attack, she was a bad lecturer that didn’t explain things and did not do a good job giving feedback on papers, etc etc - where is the discrimination here? Plus, she was new to the academic world and probably had a very rosy picture of how colleagues help each other and fight together against the common enemy: disruptive student. Did I mention that this woman is supposedly a ‘postmodernist”? Arguing with postmodernists? Who would have thought!
Yes, male teachers on the whole seem more “authoritative.” Ding-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling! You’ve won a prize! An epiphany — that most people have known from the beginning of time. Men are generally bigger and more aggressive due to that nasty “T” word, testosterone. This translates into authoritativeness. Is it justified? Who knows. but it is primal. This authoritativeness cuts across every culture and every time so please don’t tell me about cultural influences.
Your comment is so manly and authoritative, Rufus, I really have nothing to add, even if I wanted to point out that some cultures at some time had matriarchy and polyandry..