by From the Wall Street Journal:
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.
Ah, the old "Disagree with me and I’ll sue you for being a facist anti-intellectual" trick. I guess defending the ideas that she expected to imprint on her students was too much for the good instructor.
Pithy quote from Venkatesan that says it all:
"Scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct."
Hilarious. More from the WSJ:
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.
Indeed. Perhaps the new anti-intellectualism that the would-be elites fear so much is simply a generation of people who are willing and able to think for themselves.
