The blogosphere is alight with the story of a (former) professor at Dartmouth named Priya Venkatesan. Teaching is a tough job and I have the highest regard for some of the amazing teachers I’ve had the privilege of learning from over the years. Priya, however, is apparently not quite in that class (pun intended).
The WSJ provides one summary of the case –
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.”The trauma was so intense that in March Ms. Venkatesan quit Dartmouth and decamped for Northwestern. She declined to comment for this piece, pointing instead to the multiple interviews she conducted with the campus press.
<
p>What praytell were these unruly students doing to our poor teacher? And, aside from her personal ethnicity, is there a desi angle to the story?
<
p>First, it appears that the students in her class shared a good chunk of my aversion to the PostModernist deconstruction of Science –
Ms. Venkatesan lectured in freshman composition, intended to introduce undergraduates to the rigors of expository argument. “My students were very bully-ish, very aggressive, and very disrespectful,” she told Tyler Brace of the Dartmouth Review. “They’d argue with your ideas.” This caused “subversiveness,” a principle English professors usually favor.Ms. Venkatesan’s scholarly specialty is “science studies,” which, as she wrote in a journal article last year, “teaches that scientific knowledge has suspect access to truth.” She continues: “Scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct.”
In my book, folks like this deserve much of the same scorn as Creationists. One finds a benevolent God having begat a weird brand of science; the other a malevolent Rich / White / Old / Male power structure. All the while, neither seem to have problems with the products of said science ranging from airplanes, to the Internet, to medicine.
A few students’ course evaluations are online and highlight a toxic classroom environment –
If she teaches here… don’t take this course. Period. She defines a terrible prof, she is offended when people ask questions about her lectures and does not grade/give feedback on papers. Grade based solely on if she likes you/ you writing reflects her “sophisticated” ideas.
…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”.
And, one particularly brave student sounds like he had enough. Priya – to her credit – tells the tale in a blog interview –
[Priya:] I made the argument that in many cases science and technology did not benefit women, and if women were benefiting science and technology, it was an aftereffect. It was not the goal of science and technology.
…But there was one student who really took issue with this–and he took issue with this, and he made a very–I’d call it a diatribe, and it was sort of like, well–science and technology, women really did benefit from it, and to criticize patriarchal authority on the basis that science and technology benefited patriarchy or men, was not sufficient grounds for this type of feminist claim. And he did this with great rhetorical flourish; it was very invective, it was a very invective sort of tone. And I think what happened afterwards was that some people–I can’t name them, and I don’t know how many there were, but it was a significant number–started clapping for his statements. It was a very humiliating moment to my life; it was extremely humiliating, that my students would clap against me,
Priya goes on to describe how that student caused her to have some sort of breakdown that sent her to the (womyn-friendly?) hospital and miss a week of class. Personally, if I could find that student, I’d contribute to his college beer fund.
What took the crap to a level beyond a run-of-the-mill student teacher disagreement, however, was Priya’s truly bizarre response. She threatened a lawsuit in widely circulated emails to her class –
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
<
p>And she’s already promised a tell-all book –
[I’m] writing a book detailing my experiences as your instructor, which will ‘name names’ so to speak. I have all of your evaluations and these will be reproduced in the book.”
<
p>The Desi angle? As Harvard’s Crimson reports, that card was introduced by Priya –
Last week, a few students in the Dartmouth writing class “Science, Technology, and Society” received a nasty shock. When they checked their inboxes, they learned that their professor, Priya Venkatesan, was planning to sue them for discrimination. Later investigations revealed that she also planned to sue the College and several faculty members, not referring to any particular episode, but mentioning the “hostility” she felt during her time as a professor and saying that “maybe it has something to do with my ethnicity or my gender.”
Let’s be clear – there absolutely are real instances of ethnic and gender discrimination in the world. However, Priya’s screed is a fantastic example of the “race to the 3rd rail” caricature of the argument. When racism/sexism becomes a reflexive, defensive rush for cover, it raises the burden of proof for other folks in other cases where the argument might actually hold merit. Still, I suppose for Priya Venkatesan, PhD, there’s a certain consistency in claiming ethnic/sexual victimization when so much of her teaching is basically about… well… victimization.
[PS – it’s worth noting that the lawsuit appears to have been dropped…]
101 · Nayagan said
common nayagan, you can hear what “barck hussein obama” means but can’t see the priya point? give the PoMo’s credit when they get something right then move one. your support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again.
boston_mahesh: interesting
You know, there is so much cronyism and fuedalism in academia, sometimes it’s hard knowing if you are treated like crap for being a junior faculty, or for some other more insidious reasons. Seriously, that was one of the reasons I left Boston. It wasn’t harassment based on gender or color, it was the garden variety ‘give all the work to the junior faculty, except for my protege and game the system as much as I can’ mentality that is a part and parcel of academia that made me leave. I got tired of making a ton of money for an institution that I didn’t respect. I simply lost respect for a certain institution that shall not be named…..
And people with guns in small towns are supposed to be bitter 🙂 I never met bitter-er people than academics.
103 · Manju said
manju, i just ate brinner. Thanks so much for the link. Impeccable timing.
I used to be a full-fledged “alternatives to history” Nandy-bot not too long ago–you should try it for the perspective.
couldn’t students just drop the class? And if she was so bad, wouldn’t “informed consumers” who these kids probably think they are, not take her class. I went to a small college in Georiga, just for summer school, had to get approval from a prof to get into a class. He was a foreigner, who had the worst reputation on campus (his daughter failed his class), and I wasn’t taking his course but need a prof from the business school to sign off on it. He questioned me, grilled me, why I waited last minute, blah blah. But, because I was respectful, despite his rep and language issues, he took care of things for me. High school chemistry, had an Indian teacher, oh man, he had some language issues, but he’d spend half the class dealing with kids who would make fun of him, and it did frustrate him. This woman has indicated she’s suffered, yet everyone wants to rip into her. Yah, go interview a battered-wife, and then criticize her if she acts incoherent during an interview. Yah, she probably made it all up too, or she was a nutjob and had it coming to her, right? I’m so done reading this site. She could be a nutjob, but judgemental behavior, the hallmark of desi society, continues to live on.
106 · Global Sanskrit said
You disapprove, eh?
At least she’s hot.
very common situation in the desh. Although dissent is not normally tolerated in classrooms, one would expect that in the IIMs alternative POV would be acknowledged as a legitimate position. Faculty that teach ‘poet’ subjects (Social Economics / OB/ HR ) consistently refused to consider consider alternative view points. Wonder why?
As far as this faculty is considered – what a stuck up loser.
What seems to have happened is a classroom disaster stemming from the clash of pampered private school student arrogance and the insecurities of a (minority?) professor. I seriously doubt, despite accusations on both sides, that any party was “not all there” or mentally disturbed. What is disturbing is the subtle insidiousness of the entire situation and how it snowballed into what it is now. Priya needs confidence. Her students need humility.
Why does she look so miserable in her photograph?
turnip – read her e-mails. There is something not quite right there.
40 · Pravin said
Perhaps she (and other “weak” teachers you have had in the past) should have carried an AK-47 so she would not appear weak and wimpy. Then the students and everyone else would have become very agreeable to her original ideas very quickly.
Must have made a mistake with the quotes in my last sarcastic post. Sorry about that.
In related news it seems that the grades she handed out are being reviewed and adjusted by the Associate Dean of Faculty, http://thedartmouth.com/2008/05/06/news/venkatesan/
The lack of respect for student opinions and different viewpoints is what gets me about her. I don’t particularly doubt she had emotionally trauma. It’s unnerving to teach but if you can’t handle it, you are in the wrong profession. I had a lit. professor exactly like her (non-desi), but I was the only one who she directed all her hostility towards. Everytime I made a comment in class that contradicted her point, she would be openly dismissive. None of the other students ever had problems w/ her (that I know her), mostly because nobody really talked in class or challenged her interpretation of the text. It was a really frustrating experience.
67 · razib said
The first is a good point. Science always has a direction, it’s just never been the same direction since its inception, though it has not been entirely random, either. It has certainly been more use-oriented than a variety of other paradigms, to use the Kuhnian lingo.
Everything science produces is culturally conditional, because there is no science outside of language, which is always conditional. Of course, it does, as you say, tend to beat out random expectation, which is undeniable, but that’s because it’s expectations are a-priori to its work. There’s no such thing as an objective study.
Nature may well be real, but that does not preclude and isn’t mutually exclusive with it being a social construction. The moment you even introduce the concept/say the word “real”, you are entering into the world of the social. I think the distinction between the operational and the ontological is a false one, as the subjective always precedes notions of operation.
Of course, as I’ve already said, that doesn’t mean science is inherently bad or worthless; far from it. In fact, I would argue that the logical conclusion of the scientific paradigm, the only way to truly embrace materialism, is to understand that there is no such thing as objective perception or knowledge. I certainly would not have come to that conclusion without the scientific paradigm in the first place (which is why I think most Science Studies people are also scientists.)
I also find it odd that some Science Studies folk are arrogant…the primary point of SS is that all knowledge, even your own, isn’t the absolute truth. I guess I would say something similar for many scientists who lose their skeptic edge over the years, which, as you rightly point out, shouldn’t happen in theory.
How would, say, the polio vaccine be culturally conditional? I’m just trying to understand your pov. How would electricity?
M. Nam
I’m guessing that the PoMo “answer” here is that a different culture might have built a teleporter, rather funded Salk’s research. . . . 😉
Yeah Right and Emmanuel
R u for real ? If there is no objective truth, then your statement is also BS. Although I did not make the comment on Priya getting laid – I am happy to tell it to her face. Why just tell her – happy to provide the service 😉
Probably I need to get out more but how come I dont meet persons who spout such idiocy in real life.
116 · MoorNam said
I think there are many different ways of explaining their conditionality, but they are all rooted in our inability to know these objects apart from language, which itself differs culturally. Some cultures have concepts, and words for those concepts, that don’t exist in other cultures, but that doesn’t make the former culture more knowledgable about reality, it means that they choose to structure it differently. Therefore, the realities they are describing are not simply objective external things, but mental projections of those things, with all the conceptual map- baggage of culture attached.
So for the vaccine example, our way of schematizing diseases, our specific concepts of health, and our specific concepts of medicine, and the connotations of the word vaccine (all of which are historically/culturally contingent,) shape the way in which we view and speak of the vaccine as an object. The same goes for electricity. In different languages, the word vaccine might have different connotations. In those cases, we cannot say that all of those words from different languages are speaking absolutely of the same object, since they are all perceiving their different connotations and cultural connections along with the object (they can’t be separated). Of course, there is almost always crossover, too, which is why you can say that the word for vaccine in Italian and the word vaccine in English roughly mean the same thing, for the sake of communication, which is very, very important (how else would we able able to communicate at all?) Still, you can never say those two words mean the exact same thing in an absolute sense.
Another example, from a different angle: A traditional Sikh man has a name for what he wears on his head. An Arab, bedouin man has a name for what he wears on his head. In English, we call both turbans, right? But that’s because the word turban is defined in such a way that it includes different kinds of cloth that are wrapped around the head. If you asked the Sikh if he would use his word to describe the bedouin’s headgear, he might not agree. This is because the concepts and appearance for those items vary culturally. They have different utilities, the specific wrapping methods are different, the fabric might be different, etc. Therefore, calling them both turbans (or anything else) isn’t an absolute reality, it’s that they correspond to a categorical structure we’ve created (which might be useful for our purposes, but cannot be said to be “true” in the external world.)
Another one: In Sanskrit, the word Sunya is used, in a Hindu context, to indicate the “Ultimate Reality”. In English, that word is often translated as “void”. In English, as in early German Indology, the word has a negative context, and so philosophers like Schopenhauer had a very depressing and pessimistic view of Hindu Ultimate Reality. In Sanskrit, however, the word has a positive connotation, implying infinite possibility and openness, so their conception of the Hindu Ultimate Reality is a much more positive one. Both are attempting to speak of the same thing, but both end up speaking of two different things because of cultural connotations.
Sorry for my rambling and sloppiness; there are so many ways of going about it, and I wish I could think of better examples.
Ignoring your addition to the sexism in this thread (not really, since I mentioned it. How snarky of me):
118 · melbourne desi said
Correct, though I wouldn’t use the word BS, because then you’re saying that your own viewpoint is BS, too, which I don’t think is absolutely true. Think about this for a second: Can you speak of an absolutely objective truth? Try and name one.
118 · melbourne desi said
that’s the connundrum. how is he able to achieve the objectivity necessary to make that claim in the first place?
the answer is either you can’t and you therefore descend into the insanity that is Nietzsche’s philosophy, or you can–meaning only you or an intellectual vanguard that sees an invisible superstructure that others can’t–and you descend into the rigid authoritarianism that is Marx.
you can see signs of both in the good professor.
120 · NYC Akshay said
i think therefore i am?
NYC Akshay – I don’t think I understand. Are you saying theories about gravity and the elements or the atom are not discoveries of what is already there? There is no need to make science out to be a caricature of objectivity. Your toaster pops doesn’t it? Airplanes fly and telephones ring. I find people who claim science is just another construct are usually being dishonest (exclude Kuhn and Quine of course). The implications of such thinking are that scientific knowledge is derived by negotiation and the winners are not those with the best evidence, arguments or methods, but those with the strongest social power. Concepts such as “truthâ€Â, “evidence†and “fact†are merely rhetorical tools used to win debates. The even more sickening implication of such thinking is that pseudo-sciences like astrology, social sciences and psychiatry (which you very wrongly used as a counterexample in your #37) have the same status as real science. Do you really buy this? So what if there never can be objective knowledge. People have known this since 3000 B.C. No big deal. In any case, the model now is inference to the best explanation. You are totally entitled to come up with a better theory of why your phone works or airplanes fly. Science is not so narrow-minded as to not acknowledge that it was wrong and that you have a better explanation.
Based on your rules, everything is BS. Pray, why be a prof then ? To spout BS ? If we are all dealing in BS, why bother with anything at all. Very surprised to learn that someone would say that science is a social construct. I cant but laugh and the dismissive tone of Vinod’s post is quite appropriate. Do folks donate money to private colleges for this dubious propaganda.
Sad story. Prof with mental illness.
34 · NYC Akshay said
And perhaps let him do a guest post on SM. It would be an improvement over this one.
You and others are spewing a little too much scorn on her. It’s not like she’s one of the Sabhnanis.
Perhaps YOU GUYS need to get laid.
104 · Global Sanskrit said
Well, some students like to stick it out as a challenge as well. I’ve registered for more than a couple of classes where people said,”You’re crazy, drop the class.”
I stuck it out and it was tough, but in all cases while the professors were weird and tough academically compared to their peers who taught the same classes, they were fundamentally good teachers. They put in hard work, and as a result of the effort and work they put in class, it made me and students around better educated as a result.
In graduate school I argued a whole bunch with one particular professor, specifically because part of the class was sitting around a table and dissecting academic papers. It wasn’t a large class by any means and some people thought I needed to “lay off”, but I didn’t. I thought she was going to slaughter me at one point and in the end wind up with a lower grade. It wound up being just fine because that’s what the professor was looking for – a lively and tough discussion.
Reading through this on the web, I’ll agree with MD here. Something just doesn’t seem right. When one is an educator, it’s incumbent upon you to find a way to deliver the message and teach. If this lady had a hard time teaching college age students, what about teachers who are given the keys to elementary or middle school? The teacher needs to look at the goal and evaluate/adjust their methods based upon the cards they’ve been given. Dynamics of classes changes, some people get a classroom full of note takers, in other cases, one gets a lively bunch, most of the times its a good mix. Who knows, either way, you’re getting paid to teach and as an adult you’re supposed to figure out how to do it.
For lord’s sake, these kids must have SOME redeeming qualities for school to have accepted them. Overall, the professor had some of the better (at least on paper) students to work with from an academic point of view.
The plaintiff clearly has a valid complaint here. However, she has mixed up a couple of issues into a potential single lawsuit, and said combination is not viable. (1) From the examples cited in the interview about conduct at the lab, it appears that there could be merit to posit that it was a hostile work environment. (2) When she complained about what could be inappropriate behavior (the alleged romance between a supervisor and a subordinate), she appears to document intimidation and threats; if the alleged romantic relationship and lack of investigation of a valid complaint could be established during discovery, this count has a good chance of prevailing. (3) It could be argued that the employer is liable, especially if the plaintiff’s complaints of harassment in the classroom are ignored or not formally investigated. There is sufficient precedent in case law to support these counts. Where she likely screwed up was to email students threatening a class action against them; she could, with sufficient proof, file charges of slander or harassment against them individually, and see what sticks.
Yes, I think you’ve re-framed it properly from the legal perspective–as presented, it was pretty much off the rails! It’s really impossible to weigh in on likelihood of success w/out having a more concrete set of the actual facts.
NYC Akshay # 119 I don’t buy your arguments,
one counter example there is nothing subjective about the speed of light in vacuum it is a universal constant. If you can prove otherwise, you could get a Nobel Prize and change our understanding of the Universe.
Yogi, NYC Akshay, Priya and others dont live in the same universe as us. In their world, everything is subjective.
24 · Srini Sitaraman said
“
I find most all of those activities distracting & disrespectful too. However, if someone has to blow their nose into a tissue during class, what do you suggest as an alternative? Dripping snot on a desk is not helpful when taking notes and is more distracting. Some people have uncontrolled allergies or sinus/upper respiratory infections, and skipping class may not be an option during the allergy/flu season. Allergy/cold medicines don’t work for everyone.
Now back to topic. Certainly, if a teacher is perceived as a weakling, many students will take advantage. I have seen it happen all the time in middle and high school and it is disgusting. My fourth grader recently told me all but 4 kids misbehaved with a substitute teacher in her class. Even the normally “good” kids can go bad. It depends on the situation. (I am proud to say she was one of the four well behaved kids and not on the substitute’s “naughty little badasses” list.) So even the very young can spot a wimpy/weak person. I think boot camp instructors should be substitutes at the elementary/middle/high school level!
I guess there are 2 sides to every story. Certainly, at the university level I have not witnessed teachers/profs/assistants getting bullied. After reading this post, I guess my experience is very limited and university/college educators do get harassed by students. It sounds like Venkatesan was a bit too strict (not allowing different opinions to be expressed) and her students’ behavior was not respectful.
“Scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct”
I can try to answer this question from an anthropological perspective. The premise is that scientific “progress” is a cultural construction that is contingent on a cultural definition of health. Hence, the scientific “fact” that is modern medicine can be considered the antithesis of progress when viewed in the realm of, say, ayurvedic medicine. Also, there have been numerous incorrect theories that have been justified under the veil of science in the history of the Western world. Due to social and religious forces is was held to be true that the bodies of the solar system revolve around the earth.
while i don’t think the law has evolved quite to the point bholsaalebhol does, i do think ant-discrimination and sexual harassment law are on a collision course with the first amendment and other aspects of the bill of rights. notice how the professors feeling of uncomfortalbleness over a romantic relationship between her colleagues is enough to raise the spectre of a hostile working environment. is freedom of association or even a right to privacy possible under this paradigm?
Politicized PoMo’s reconcile the epistemological conundrums we’ve been discussing by giving the self-described victims privilege. only They can see the invisible knapsack and hear the dogwhstles. their interpretations, their feeling of harassment, are the ones that count. after all, there is no objective reality anyway.
the law is especially vulnerable to postmodernism and a living constitution gives it an opening. but under this new intellectual regime, individual rights as we know thm will disappear…as they have been on campus.
I’ll chime in and split the diff in a manner of speaking.
The speed of light has been measured by us to a certain degree of accuracy. That doesn’t mean that we Know the speed of light in an Absolute sense. Instead, we have an estimate of it that gets continuously refined everytime someone comes up with a new experiment that gets us that last millionth of a second of accuracy.
Still, there is a big difference between accepting the this view and the one espoused at the PoMo extreme. The extreme PoMo says that because the speed of light is never 100% Objectively / Absolutely known, everything must be relative, equivalent, and the product of social construction. In that view, what makes us choose one model vs. another is power structures, narratives, etc. (e.g. Rich / Old / White / Men (ROWM) game science to their benefit)
One alternate view of science is critically different in that it, unlike the extreme PoMo school, is willing to make judgement calls. It says that while the lack of Absolute knowledge means that multiple views can potentially exist, we are nevertheless able to make judgement calls about which view is better (more prescriptive when used in tech or more falsifiable when tested against nature) than another and is thus More True.
it’s worth repeating that we aren’t saying that one theory is Absolutely True; only that it is Better than alternate theories. So, 299,792,458 m/s is “better” speed of light estimate than 3×10^8 m/s and the ROWM are pretty limited in their ability to game the system between those 2 theories – if at all.
So, rather than gaming between competing human agendas as PoMos would assert, science is a game against nature to find progressively more explanatory theories…
The problem, of course, is that if much of your aspiration to Power is based on ROWMs victimizing you & gaming humanity by gaming science….. then the idea that Science finds better Truth regardless of who’s in Power takes some of the wind out of your sails.
Manju, I agree that the objective reality is that the postmodernists are clearly taking over the world. Will you be there to protect us by answering the phone at 3 am?
9-11 9-11 9-11
The only social construct I see in science is that who(or what) gets funding. 🙂 Whatever our “subjective” understanding of science, we understand nature through it sufficiently to manipulate and consistently deliver things we want. Well, “what we want” can be social construct, but apples do fall on ground irrespective of my understanding of gravity or my wanting/observing them.
If certain cultural conditioning is pre-requisite for scientific development, I don’t see how independent civilizations across the world developed their own technology.
135 · Manju said
Romantic interludes between supervisors and subordinates is likely to result in favoritism, at a cost to other subordinates reporting to that supervisor. Therefore, most enterprises have policies prohibiting such relationships (They also expose the enterprise to charges of sexual harassment, which is a primary reason for such policies). Right to privacy and freedom of association cannot be at the cost of discrimination in the workplace.
In any event, in this particular case, the complainant reported her suspicions to her supervisor (who also allegedly happens to be one of the parties in the relationship). However, instead of directing HR to investigate the merits of the report, the supervisor allegedly ignored the report. While the alleged intimidation claimed by the plaitiff may be refuted or may be difficult to prove, if it can be established that there is no record of an investigation of the complainant’s accusation, and worse, if said romantic relationship did actually take place (can be established during discovery), the complainant has a reasonable likelihood of prevailing in a lawsuit; the precedent from current caselaw will support this thesis.
118 · melbourne desi said
Melbourne Desi, how can you refute that that there is no science without language??
to say that there is no objective truth means that we are limited by our sensory perceptions and observational instruments/techniques in what we perceive. if we say something is ‘red,’ it’s because we have the agreed that object that we see with our eyes with certain optical properties are ‘red.’ there is no such thing as a platonic concept of ‘red’ that exists a priori. we’ve chosen to call a particular sensory perception ‘red.’ so there are local contingent truth which are true if we agree that their premises are true. if that ball appears to be the color of santa’s outfit, and if santa’s outfit is red, then the ball must be red also. now imagine an animal which is color blind. can that animal know what red is? will red exist in its version of the ‘truth?’ this is what people mean when they say there is no objective truth. it doesn’t mean that we cannot decide if a statement is locally true or false. you may have noticed, for instance, that even post-modernists can tell if it is raining outside or not. their answer generally matches yours. but schizophrenics who have some defects in cognition may perceive an event differently than either of us. we can say they are mistaken, but it obviously true that they have their subjective version of the event and you have yours.
wow, melbourne desi sounds like a victorian psychologist. she’s got a mental illness? psychological troubles? well, let’s get her laid. guess who’s behind on the science now. venkatesan may have mental health issues of her own, but those of you advising her to get laid badly need some counseling too.
HMF, where are you now? wanna call out your fellow men on their patronizing, sexists, and insensitive treatment of a sad and unfortunate woman?
mirror, mirror on the wall…?
140 · anti-anti-intellectual said
<
blockquote well, let’s get her laid.
According to the interview (in the dartmouth blog) she is married. Read the part where her husband asks her to go to the doctor.
So mutineers, all is well (most likely) in that department.
122 · Manju said
manju, i’m laughing (i’m hoping you are kidding). you’re quoting descartes here whose most famous philosophical musing was whether all reality was actually a dream. christ, has no one here heard of solipsism (and its critiques)? oh, you skipped philosophy 101 for remedial algebra? yeah, cuz you’re better than the humanists?
111 · gm said
Actually, if are going to be loco, it pays to be loco “all the way”. Sadly, pouncing on the weak is a fact of life. As I mentioned, I like to needly the hardass idiots but it is tough to get a mass bullying going on when the guy is a white male who is not effeminate or has the demeanor of a hippie in our society. Or she has to be really weak where there is no fun to bully her for more than a couple of occasions. Even your average brat finds it tough to make fun of a teacher who looks victimized. But this lady with her attitude just kept feeding the flames. At some point, it gets out of control and she loses benefit of doubt even during those times whhere she might have a point.
Her problem is that she projected the way she behaved as a student on her students. She thought they would just be deferential , no questions asked, to their professor and she probably was shattered emotionally when her dreams of being in that position of being listened to were shattered after she paid her dues as a student.
Her parents probably sheltered her too much. She seems perplexed by the world.
136 · vinod said
is that your subjective version of pomo, vinod, that you’re treating us to? or is that the objective truth? i might hate how the postmodernists write, but you’re reconstruction of deconstruction is a not even wrong caricature.
Your making my point. constitutional rights take precedence over state and federal law in our regime. ant-discrimination law is trying to turn this bedrock principle on its head.
she told a colleague that his consensual relationship bothered her. i don’t think that constitutes a formal complaint of sexual harassment and i doubt an employer is legally required to investigate. but the more disturbing problem is how does a romantic relationship become a hostile working environment for someone not even in the relationship? i don’t se how our right to association can survive if the law requires private employers to enforce this theory.
you realize we are talking about a woman who thinks dissent constitutes a hostile working environment, don’t you?
Actually it’s not only the estreme PoMos. See “A time varying speed of light as a solution to cosmological puzzles“, by two leading young physicists at Imperial College. John Moffat, one of Canada’s leading physicists based at the Perimeter Institute proposed a similar solution in the 1990s.
Well, I don’t know how we might adjudicate this dispute, 😉 , but, in defense of Vinod I might say that I got an “A” in “LitCrit” as an undergrad by basically downloading what he just said.
139 · bholsaalebhol said
you know i always wondered why this was never bought up in the clinton-lewinsky scandal.
i think, bholsaalebhol, you have to make a specific allegation of favoritism (though i know of no case law) in order to receive compensation under the civil rights act. the prof simply “reported” a reltionship with no specific allegation that she was harmed. obviously, the civil rights act cannot ban a relationship in and off itself (for various constitutional reasons), though private employers are free to do as they wish.
There are too many specific arguments, misinterpretations, and absurd accusations directed at me to address without clogging up this thread, so if anyone seriously wishes to discuss those specifics further, they can email me, because I do have responses to all of them, and in my “Nietzschean insanity” and “idiocy”, actually enjoy robust discussion (somehow I doubt anyone will.)
I’ll attempt one more explanation from scratch, from a more logic and science-oriented angle, as simplified as I can atm:
Thought = Language. We think in language (symbolic structures), without which there could be no thought. This doesn’t just mean language like “english”, it means language as in a broader system of symbols, of images and concepts.
Language = Symbols. The word “table” is not a table, it’s a word/concept we choose to symbolically represent an external object with no inherent connection to that word. The thought of a table is not a concretely existing table, either, because it’s a mental construct. Now when we perceive a table, as neuroscience (among other disciplines) explains, we are internalizing and codifying external stimuli in a way that is recognizable to our mental language, which takes some work and operates in several steps. Thus, when perception occurs, it is not exactly the table we are perceiving, but an interpretation of the table using our mental language that does not exist completely separate from our minds.
Symbols /= Reality. A metaphor is symbolic representation; therefore, it is not the reality it represents. Symbols and their referents are two different things. As I stated before, the word table is not a table. It’s a symbol. They are two different things, but one attempts to represent the other completely (which is impossible, can an apple completely, accurately, and directly represent an orange?)
Therefore, Thought-Language /= Truth. It is always imperfect, there is something lost in perception, as neuroscience tells us, because of the way perception works, hence the lack of access to complete, objective reality. This does not mean there is no external world, it means we can never have direct access to it, or speak about it in a way that is directly, absolutely true.
Look, that’s one position in the philosophy of language, but it’s not the predominant one, and for good reason. Why are you avoiding analytic philosophy?