Former Dartmouth professor Priya Venkatesan has plans to sue both students and colleagues
“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?
This question, oddly enough, may eventually be at the center of an intense legal battle. For Venkatesan, the nose-blowing, “evil” glances, and off-handed remarks added up to something bigger – something bordering on discrimination by her 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.
Though Venkatesan’s recent comments, which cite few explicitly discriminatory events, may give the impression of a person waiting to claim racism at every turn, she hardly considers herself a lifelong victim. She describes her hometown as a “small South Asian community” near Poughkeepsie, NY, where she was “extensively exposed to Indian culture.” She attended high school in Poughkeepsie, a relatively cosmopolitan city known partially for its universities. Though she claims she didn’t experience any discrimination during her childhood and teenage years, she says now that she felt like she was constantly “straddling between two cultures.” She paused a bit, though, when I asked her to describe the cultural makeup of her upbringing – I got the sense that her description of “straddling between two cultures” was more of an “after the fact” social commentary by a postmodernist than it was a central feeling during her childhood. Really, Venkatesan’s youth sounds like it was pretty much the same as any minority’s, struggling to negotiate her identity without knowing it, placing one foot in her parents’ East India and the other in the nearby Big Apple, trying to figure out which way to lean.
When it came time to choose a college, she opted for the woods instead of skyscrapers and headed to Hanover, NH, to begin her undergraduate studies at Dartmouth. She says she “got into academics” at Dartmouth, but this seems like an understatement. She says she “adapted well” to the Dartmouth undergraduate environment and avoided any feelings of “(racial) uneasiness” because of her focus on academics (translation: she was a bookworm). She recalls her strong desire to impress her professors with a combination of effort and respect. Venkatesan’s positive undergraduate experience would later serve as the impetus for her desire to teach at the College, as she wanted to “simulate (her) experience for (her) students.”
After she graduated in 1990, she moved to California to earn an unusual combination of post-graduate degrees: an M.S. in Genetics from UC-Davis and a Ph.D. in Literature from UC-San Diego. In July 2005, she moved back to Hanover to accept a postdoctoral fellowship at Dartmouth Medical School. Soon thereafter, Venkatesan published her first book, Molecular Biology in Narrative Form, which focused on exploring the link between her two areas of expertise, science and literature (a theme she plans to further develop in her upcoming book, which is preliminarily titled A Postmodernist in the Laboratory).
As her first book was going to press, though, Venkatesan began noticing what she calls “inappropriate and unprofessional behavior” from her colleagues in a molecular biology lab at the medical school. According to Venkatesan, the supervisor of the lab, Dr. Christopher Lowrey, attempted to make Venkatesan uncomfortable by showing blatantly preferential treatment to her female colleagues, “very deliberately, with intention to harm.” Venkatesan insists that there were between 15 and 20 instances of such behavior.
Venkatesan isn’t simply guessing at the number. In fact, she is in the process of constructing a chronology of the inappropriate treatment she claims to have received at Dartmouth Medical School. According to Venkatesan, this chronology is the first step in her lawsuit against Lowrey, the medical school, and four of her research colleagues. Venkatesan is adamant that she “would not have been exposed to such demeaning behavior if (she) were not female, of South Asian decent, and high-achieving.” Venkatesan continues: “I had a book published. I had a scientific paper published, which is almost unheard of for someone with a doctorate in literature. I was being published in journals all over the world, and there was resentment. If I was a white male, I would not have seen that resentment. I would have been treated with respect. I don’t know if I can prove that in a court of law, but I can try.”
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?”
Venkatesan took this as a major slight. Her exchange with Lowrey was contentious, but not nearly as heated as when she approached him about an incident when the group was together at a conference. According to Venkatesan, Lowrey told Richardson that her “beauty will attract people to her poster” at the conference (Venkatesan further alleges that Lowrey later “made bedroom eyes” at Richardson when the two entered Venkatesan’s bedroom to get their coats during a party at Venkatesan’s house, a look Richardson apparently returned with a smile). Venkatesan submitted a formal complaint about the incident but withdrew it when she determined that a complaint against her boss could put her job in jeopardy. When Venkatesan told Lowrey that she was uncomfortable with his comments to Richardson, Lowrey apparently “went into a rampage,” accusing Venkatesan of “wreaking havoc wherever (she) goes.” Venkatesan recalls Lowrey telling her that he called Richardson pretty because she was pretty. She also remembers Lowrey “slamming a bunch of coke bottles and files into a garbage can during this rage.” Insisting that “inappropriate displays (between Lowrey and Richardson) were always present,” Venkatesan concludes that the two were having an affair and were using it to “make (her) feel belittled.”
Venkatesan also feels that she was ethnically discriminated against. For this claim, she cites the behavior of Rachel West, another research technician in the lab. West, who Venkatesan describes as “an aggressive and competitive personality…that always wanted to know what everyone else was doing without conveying anything about her work,” allegedly was demeaning and disrespectful toward a number of South Asians, including one to whom she made a sarcastic comment (“That would be smart”) when he visited the lab to help with a procedure. In another incident, Venkatesan claims that when a South Asian graduate student approached West with a birthday card for a fellow researcher, West took the card and flung it across the room. Venkatesan thinks that West did this “deliberately in my presence to impress upon me that I’m Indian…and don’t belong.” Venkatesan further accuses West of trying to constantly assert her superiority over her by reminding Venkatesan that she had perfected certain experiments first (for reasons that are unclear, Venkatesan confided her frustrations with West to Richardson and Michael Green, another member of the lab who Venkatesan is considering legal action against; Richardson apparently agreed that West had been disrespectful). Venkatesan also strongly implied to me that she thought Richardson was racist: when she told me that she knew a Ph.D. student in another lab who could “confirm in a court of law” that Richardson engaged in “certain research misconduct,” Venkatesan went out of her way to tell me that this Ph.D. student is Chinese (presumably, the student “confided” in Venkatesan to show sympathy with Venkatesan’s dislike for Richardson).
Venkatesan is also planning on naming Dr. Michael Green, who made a joke in the laboratory that Venkatesan had at some point received shock treatment, in the lawsuit. Venkatesan claims that Richardson burst out laughing in response to the joke and that Lowrey would later defend her despite not being present for the incident. The fourth member of the lab who Venkatesan plans on suing is Rodwell Mabaera. When I asked what Mabaera did to warrant legal action, she merely responded that he was an “abrasive, sometimes rude” personality, but then confusingly added that “sometimes you have to give some slack.” She is also accusing Lowrey of violating National Institute of Health regulations by, as of yet, refusing to publish Venkatesan’s research, which, according to Venkatesan, takes away from the credibility of her upcoming book (the NIH, according to Venkatesan, requires projects that they fund with grants to publish all their research in a timely manner). Unfortunately, none of the members of the lab returned requests for comment.
Whether she has a legitimate legal claim or not, it is relatively clear that, for the rest of Venkatesan’s time at Dartmouth, thoughts of her experiences in the medical school remained in the back of her mind and framed the way she perceived whatever difficulties she encountered. Citing “many instances of white women climbing the career ladder,” Venkatesan believes that the discrimination she faced at DMS is “institutionally encouraged by the medical center, which does not promote the interests of minorities, much less minority women.” She also told me that some South Asian medical professors have confided in her that they were mistreated. She says that even though she entered DMS with optimism, at Dartmouth, such a “positive outlook gets raped from you if you’re a minority.” Given such strong feelings about the institutionally racist nature of Dartmouth, it seems somewhat odd that she pursued a professorial career here. Regardless, she took a position as a lecturer in the writing department and began teaching a course on science, technology, and society in Fall 2007.
Though she describes her fall term as “relatively benign,” she says that some red flags began going up. 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.”
When the term ended, the latter student wrote what Venkatesan describes as a scathing evaluation: “30 sentences…it was like War and Peace.” Though student evaluations are anonymous, Venkatesan says that the specific situations this student mentioned clearly revealed her identity. As such, Venkatesan plans on naming the girl in the suit. When she got wind of this evaluation from Thomas Cormen, the Chair of the Writing Department, she recalls first getting the impression that Cormen was “taking sides with the students.” Venkatesan would get this feeling again.
She claims she went into the winter term “with a good attitude…looking for a better set of evaluations.” Her attitude soon soured, though, when a female student in her morning class began uttering “very deprecating statements of the philosophers of the books we were reading, like Lyotard doesn’t know anything.” This was the same student who would later give Venkatesan an “evil look” during a lecture on bioethics. 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. Venkatesan claims that these “disciplinary problems” persisted in her morning class when another girl asked the spelling of Gattaca, a movie they were studying. This same student was the one who called Lyotard “cheesy.” Venkatesan says she would further disrupt class by loudly proclaiming that Venkatesan’s homework had been electronically inaccessible the night before or by asking the names of books that Venkatesan only knew the authors of off-hand (apparently, the student would then search the internet for the title and interrupt class again by loudly declaring it). A student in her afternoon class would engage in similar behavior, “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.”
When these students “lacked good judgment of what to address” and asked “trivial, stupid questions that don’t belong in a classroom of the caliber of Dartmouth,” Venkatesan perceived disrespect and, eventually, undertones of discrimination. She looks back upon her experience as a student and remembers never wanting to do things in class that “should be done via Blitzmail,” like asking about spelling or errors in the syllabus. 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. She says she went to Cormen with these concerns, but he was unresponsive.
Most of the students have quite a different take on the situation. Many now claim that they asked questions of Venkatesan because the subject matter was complicated and foreign to them. Some maintain that, to this day, they do not understand the concept of “postmodernism,” even though Venkatesan would apparently throw it around as a buzzword quite frequently. Things only became contentious, the students claim, when Venkatesan refused to coherently answer their questions about concepts like postmodernism.
The students were also highly dissatisfied with the level of feedback in the course. One student showed me two rough drafts of his essays (the only rough drafts that were ever returned to the class). On one, all that was written was the word “excellent,” twice, once on each of the first two pages. Another was returned with four checkmarks, the word “progressive” circled, and a few sentences of praise for his ideas at the end. This student was thus dismayed when he received a B+ on one of these, and further yet, a B+ at the end of the course, even though the only other grade he was ever returned was an A. The students were also upset with Venkatesan’s treatment of them in class, which they describe as often demeaning and patronizing. They take particular issue with an incident where she asked the students to applaud a fellow pupil for being so quiet (she was normally, according to an interview Venkatesan had with the Dartmouth Review, an obnoxious troublemaker).
During this time, Venkatesan was attempting to obtain a grant to continue her research on the connections between science and literature, research she says the students disrupted by wasting her time with trivial questions. She claims, though, that her grant requests were met with an unusual degree of resistance by Tom Cormen, who was required to sign-off on them. She alleges that Cormen inexplicably delayed her application by, like her students, taking issue with trivia. To prove this, Venkatesan forwarded me an e-mail from Cormen that, as she claimed, raised five seemingly trivial objections. First, he thought the National Science Foundation would not be receptive to her research, a claim Venkatesan refutes by saying that her contact at the NSF assured her that it would be reviewed by “science and society scholars” who, in fact, would be very interested in her research. Second, he stated that a building Venkatesan’s proposal preemptively refers to as “new” would probably not be built by the time her grant ended. Third, he said that, while her budget lists three international trips, her “narrative” made no mention of them (Venkatesan counters that the trips accounted for an extremely small percentage of the budget). Fourth, Cormen claimed that the “budget numbers do not add up. Perhaps they do with the 5% annual cost increase, but you don’t explain how you’ve factored that in” (an e-mail Venkatesan forwarded to me from Robyn Hadlock, the grant manager for the writing department, confirms, though, that the budget Venkatesan submitted to Cormen adjusted for 5% inflation in a manner consistent with how other grants are processed). Finally, Cormen objected that the office space Venkatesan listed on the application could not be confirmed for the next term, to which Venkatesan replied that the NSF would be highly unlikely to care about this technicality. Cormen concluded his email by saying, “Sorry to come off so negative, but I do have 15+ years of experience with NSF.”
To Venkatesan, Cormen’s interference was DMS all over again. Like Rachel West, he was constantly trying to remind her of the pecking order. Like Christine Richardson, he was showing contempt to her field of study and dismissing her endeavors because of it. Though Cormen granted an interview to the local Valley News, he unfortunately refused to comment for any student publications (it can be assumed, though, that Cormen would assert that he, like Rodwell Mabaera, did nothing wrong). Venkatesan claims that she was informed by Robyn Hadlock that Cormen’s behavior, especially his request to see the content of her proposal and his subsequent objection to it, was highly unusual for a department chair. Venkatesan asserts that Hadlock found the situation so disturbing that she said she “lost sleep” over the matter. When reached for comment, though, Hadlock originally had no recollection of Venkatesan whatsoever (despite what Venkatesan remembers as detailed verbal interactions and several e-mail conversations that were subsequently forwarded to me). After some pressing, Hadlock referred me to Thomas Jack, the Chair of the Biology Department, whose sole relationship with Venkatesan was through his denial of her request to teach a course on the history of molecular biology, a rejection that Venkatesan perceives as yet another instance where she was given the bureaucratic runaround in order to stymie her efforts. Jack did inform me, though, that Hadlock’s poor memory probably results from the hundred of grant requests she does yearly, and that any comments Hadlock may have made about the abnormality of Cormen’s behavior stem from institutional differences between the grant process in the writing department and the biology department, for whom Hadlock does most of her work and faces much less involvement from the Chair. Eventually, Venkatesan’s grant request was approved when she went over Cormen’s head to Lindsay Whaley, the Associate Dean for Interdisciplinary Studies, who was apparently supportive, though Venkatesan describes him as “unapproachable.”
In the midst of Venkatesan’s grant battle, 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.” Venkatesan sent the students an e-mail saying that since the class had “de-evolved (sic) into the Jerry Springer show.” The students then received another e-mail from an administrator stating that the next few classes were cancelled. 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. Tom Cormen did nothing.”
After returning from her week-long leave, Venkatesan explained to her afternoon class how she had been hurt by their behavior. When they allegedly began arguing with her, Venkatesan asked the students to write an essay on “what respect means to them.” When the respect exercise failed to produce a notable change in the classroom’s behavior, Venkatesan prohibited the students from asking questions until the last five minutes of class. The students perceived this “change in methodology,” when accompanied by Venkatesan’s lack of feedback (in an introductory writing seminar, no less), as creating a classroom setting that was not conducive to learning. When Venkatesan referred to her afternoon class as “fascists” and “demagogues,” the class went to Cormen with their complaints. Though Venkatesan denies that she was name-calling and insists that her comments about fascism were an attempt to describe the kind of culture that evolves when a group of people thinks it has “command of all knowledge without having any credentials to show for it,” Cormen is alleged to have sided with the students. “I remember showing respect for my professors,” Venkatesan says. “Maybe that’s just Indian culture.”
Venkatesan became very upset that the students went to Cormen with their issues instead of her. She says that only a quarter of the students showed up when she offered to meet with them one-on-one to get to know them and discuss whatever they wanted. Venkatesan thinks that the students’ instinct to quickly go to Cormen stemmed from the fact that hers were the kind of students who “just wanted the grade and would do any kind of bullying tactic to get it.” The students did eventually get the option to take the course for “credit” (meaning the grade Venkatesan assigned would not appear on their transcript), an extremely unusual occurrence at the College. They were granted a review of their final grades because the college made the rare judgment that the grades were arrived at in an unfair manner.
Venkatesan claims that if students had approached her with requests for more feedback or justifications for grades, she would have happily granted them, though she admits that she may have been somewhat less inclined to help students who she felt didn’t respect her feedback. When one student asked for comments (via her preferred method of e-mail) on a rough draft, though, her February 21st (two weeks after her leave of absence) response was four lines long:
Strengths: Good use of references Weaknesses: confusing thesis statement
When the same student asked for feedback for his third essay a couple weeks later, Venkatesan responded in a March 6th e-mail, “Do you have any specific questions I can answer?” When the student responded that he would just like the paper graded and returned, Venkatesan e-mailed the class that she “just realized you need feedback prior to handing in your last essay–so I will be returning essays on Wednesday.” Venkatesan claims that her attempts to return the papers were stifled, however, when Tom Cormen demanded that she return her school-issued computer, which she had the essays on, two weeks before the end of the term; Venkatesan claims that she then lost the ability to return the essays (it is unclear why she did not just print them using the school-issued computer and grade them by hand). She says that she offered to buy the school a new computer and keep the school-issued one, but Cormen declined. Once the term was over, despite the fact that Venkatesan claimed she would return feedback, Venkatesan did not respond to a student’s e-mail asking for grades and comments.
That’s probably because, by then, she was beginning to concoct a legal claim against the College, the Medical School, and students at each for employment discrimination and harassment. The legal basis, at least for such a claim against the students, is shaky at best. Venkatesan practically admits as much when she professes her ignorance of the legal doctrine surrounding Title VII, the section of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which she, in an e-mail to her former students, claims as the bedrock of her case. Though the media has so far been quick to denounce her legal acumen, it is hard for me to believe that anyone who has spoken with her actually thinks that, for Venkatesan, this is about the lawsuit. She consistently qualifies statements about the potential case by saying, “I don’t know my legal rights here, I’m not a lawyer…I’m writing down these events and bringing them to the attention of an attorney, and it is his judgment whether I have a legal claim over discrimination in the workplace,” or “I don’t know the law in this regard, but my goal is just to pursue a legal claim; whether I have one or not is unknown.” Rather, she thinks she is doing a “social good” to publicize her story, and one gets the impression that she thinks attaching a legal claim to her story is the best way for it to make it into the mainstream news (probably an accurate assessment – a disgruntled teacher is one thing; a disgruntled teacher suing her students is quite another).
She is writing a book about her experiences as well, but, to me, she does not give the impression that this is all just a publicity stunt. She seems to genuinely believe that her “civil liberties were trampled upon.” Though her reasoning is unclear, she also claims that “the more I get my story out there, the less likely I will be to suffer from emotional distress.” Perhaps this claim is related to her stated intention of showing other minority teachers that they are “not alone” in their struggles. Mostly, though, her lawsuit seems like a last-ditch effort to prove the validity of her field of study to the Christine Richardsons and Tom Cormens of the world once and for all: though she acknowledges that discrimination will be very difficult to prove in a courtroom, as she has few explicit examples of it, her claim centers around the kind of discriminatory behavior that is unintentional, “normed” into people by generations of instinctive racism. That is, just as she has tried to reveal how hidden social processes underlie supposedly objective scientific experiments, she is now trying to apply the same “narrative criticism” to the culture of the classroom and, subsequently, the law. The Postmodernist in the Laboratory is about to enter the courtroom.
Given such a philosophical approach to reality, it is thus no surprise that Venkatesan sees people out to get her wherever she looks. After all, Michel Foucault, one of the leaders of the postmodernism movement, describes his flagship concept of “biopower” as a kind of fluid power over life that works behind the scenes to influence every relationship we have. In Foucault’s schema, the essential task of the intellectual is to, at every step, point to and reveal previously hidden instances of “biopower.” It is clear that Venkatesan views herself as the epitome of Foucault’s ideal intellectual, using discrimination as an analogue for “biopower” and uncovering the nasty relational structures that underpin Dartmouth College.
It is also clear that when Venkatesan hears a student call one of the pillars of postmodernism “cheesy,” she takes this as a personal attack as well as an affront to intellectualism. So far, media coverage on this story has focused on funny typos in Venkatesan’s e-mails and has made the “easy” conclusion that she is a nut who cannot handle criticism, with an unhealthy obsession with postmodernism to boot. Such a conclusion is reasonable given the facts surrounding the case. It would be a mistake, though, to ignore the ways in which Venkatesan might raise a valid point. As a lifelong scholar who has dedicated herself to upholding the legacies of thinkers like Lyotard, she naturally perceives flippant dismissals of Lyotard’s work by students as flippant dismissals of her own work as well – after all, if Lyotard is a “moron,” she must really be a moron for spending her entire life studying him. Furthermore, she has a point when she chastises students for thinking they gave her thesis a real zinger when really they were just making a relatively unfounded, anecdotal claim to put up against years of experience and scholarly research.
She is correct that it is antithetical to the goals of any institution of higher learning for students to assume that they have the capabilities to dismantle hundreds of years of Western philosophy in five minutes, pulling just from their anecdotal memory of history; she is further correct that such a belief in unfettered access to “pure knowledge” is the basis of fascism and demagoguery. This is not to say that she handled the students appropriately in these situations, or in any situation for that matter. But repeatedly trumpeting one’s qualifications seems like a much more reasonable reaction when one feels like her credentials are constantly being challenged by administrators and students alike, and when, at the same time, one feels like she is institutionally being made to feel that she doesn’t belong via subtle racism and sexism.
Furthermore, it is easy to see how she could have felt backed into a corner. Since the writing seminar consists only of freshman, a case could be made that the underside of easing the transition from high school to college is that students fail to realize that there is a distinction at all. Putting a bunch of same-aged teenagers together into an introductory course replicates the high school dynamic in a college classroom. Each individual’s desire to feel oppressed, rebel, prove the teacher wrong, or be the class clown is magnified by the fact that the other people in the class are likely to express the same feelings, while there are no older students there to set an example for appropriate demeanor in a college-level course (in any other class, chances are that there are at least a couple of students pursuing a major or minor in the subject and thus are interested in maintaining a fairly serious and intellectual environment in the classroom). The applause from the students was inappropriate by any measure and is the epitome of the mob-mentality that young students can exhibit when lumped together. One might disagree with Venkatesan’s conclusion that “things are going on in this school that are very troubling and disturbing,” but one certainly should be able to at least understand how Venkatesan came to the conclusion that a class may have been more wary of applauding a student who argued with a white male professor. It seems reasonable that we should at least make an attempt to understand what caused an alumna to want to change all her prior publications to list her current institution, Northwestern, instead of the College she once loved.
That being said, those that approach Venkatesan’s story with more skeptical eyes are not without good reason. She claims she is “not trying to be vindictive,” yet, during my interview with her, she wasted no time giving the names of the offending students, even though I did not ask for them; in this way, she certainly lends credence to those who think that she is using a frivolous lawsuit to garner press attention which she can then use to badmouth certain students. Furthermore, the implications she has drawn from certain interactions are absurd, to say the least. When the student asked her how to spell Gattaca, Tom Cormen was visiting the class, and he informed the student that it was spelled with “two t’s.” In an interview with the Review, Venkatesan insisted that this was Cormen’s subtle way of reminding her that she was not a “tenure track” professor. In an interview with the Valley News, Venkatesan claims that Cormen once brought up the subject of racism in baseball to remind her that she could not play baseball because of her race or gender. Before seeing this interview, I had not been aware of Venkatesan’s apparent aspirations to play Major League Baseball.
Doing possibly the most damage to her credibility, though, is the on-again-off-again nature of the lawsuit. In addition to frequently changing her mind about who the subjects of the suit are, she issued a statement to The Dartmouth saying that she was withdrawing her claim, but then retracted this statement only hours later. Before she retracted her statement, I e-mailed her asking if she had anything to say to wrap up the case. She e-mailed me back soon after, informing me that she had changed her mind and was pursuing legal action after all. Nine minutes later, before I could even reply to this turn in events, she sent me another e-mail, the full text of which was, “Who are you?” Confused, given that I had been interacting with Venkatesan over the phone and e-mail for several days, I responded simply with an ellipsis (“…”), the online equivalent of a blank stare. A couple hours later, I received one of the most cryptic, confusing e-mails that I have ever gotten, where she accused me of helping her case against Dartmouth and “reporting” (with the quotation marks). I later learned that she was apparently reacting to an off-handed remark I made about the Review‘s unfavorable coverage of her. I still am at a loss for why she reacted the way she did to a tongue-in-cheek comment that was unquestionably harmless, even though I would not repeat it if I had the luxury of going back in time armed with the knowledge I now have. The final line of the e-mail, which is the last thing I have heard from her, seems to encapsulate her entire story in a nutshell: there might be a point in there somewhere, but she isn’t doing any favors to anyone trying to figure out what it is. Here it is:
You have helped my case tremendously. Now let’s hope the Attorney General doesn’t come after Dartmouth, but lest we forget, they are appointed by Bush, so you may have an ally in corruption. The sorry state of our world:-( Cheers, Priya
