May 8th, 2008
Northwestern recently hired an ex-Dartmouth College lecturer who is planning to sue her former students for “harassment and discrimination,” according to The Dartmouth, Dartmouth College’s official paper.
Professor Priya Venkatesan “is threatening to name seven of her former students in a potential civil rights lawsuit against the College,” reports The Dartmouth. She is planning to sue under Title VII, a part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that prohibits discrimination by employers.
Because Venkatesan will be a research associate at Northwestern’s International Institute for Nanotechnology (not at a Weinberg department), she will probably not teach a course here. But when she was a research associate at Dartmouth Medical School, she did end up teaching a freshman writing course.
Before teaching at Dartmouth, Venkatesan held a teaching assistant position at the University of California-San Diego, where she received a Ph.D. in literature as well as what she called “spectacular” teaching evaluations.
At Dartmouth, Venkatesan’s job was, among other things, to teach Writing 5, a freshman introductory course not unlike a Weinberg freshman seminar here. But after giving a class that one student described as “a nightmare,” she decided to file a lawsuit against seven students.
Venkatesan first began feeling discriminated against when students criticized the ideas in her first book, titled “Molecular Biology in Narrative Form,”
One Dartmouth student described the book as “basically using literary criticism in lieu of the scientific method.” She claims that the book, which shows “a connection between molecular biology and French narrative theory,” caused resentment due to the fact that it was successful and was published by a woman of minority descent with a Ph.D.
One of the examples of “discrimination” she cites includes a lecture she gave on the witch trials in the Renaissance. During the class, a student interrupted to express his opinion that it was wrong to, in Venkatesan’s own words, “criticize patriarchal authority on the basis that science and technology benefited patriarchy or men.”
Venkatesan was offended by what happened next. “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,” Venkatesan said. “It was a very humiliating moment to my life.”
Venkatesan acknowledges that “to say that that behavior, that type of disrespect is because I’m an East-Indian female is a little bit, maybe it’s a leap.” Yet she does not think it is “irrational” to consider that behavior as discrimination, citing instances when students would “gossip” about the social ineptitude of certain Indians.
In addition, Venkatesan alleges that her boss was ineffective and possibly incompetent at his job.
“I understand that there are such things as bad working environments—a shithole is just a shithole, and that’s not illegal, and I know that,” she said to The Dartmouth. “But sometimes you have to take time out and address the issue of justice in society and to really implement the values that are so lacking at Dartmouth.”
While Venkatesan knows her legal battle will be hard, she says she remains optimistic.
“I think that I have a good case because there were just so many instances—it was almost an incessant barrage—of hostility, nastiness and anti-intellectualism that I may just in fact have a case, but I’m not a lawyer,” Venkatesan said in an interview with The Dartmouth. “I am going to be the first one to say that is going to be very difficult to prove in a court of law,” she said. “But I think if I get my story out there and tell them this is my assessment of what happened, then I think that’s a social good.”
Venkatesan declined the Chronicle’s request for an interview.
