Venkatesan Speaks! …and speaks, and speaks…
Talk about long-winded. The Dartmouth Review interviewed Priya Venkatesan, who babbled for two days straight. (Literally. The interviewer ran out of tape.) She flip-flops on whether or not she'll sue and explains how Writing Program Director Tom Cormen used top-secret alphanumeric codes for covert intimidation:
PV: ...One time Tom Cormen was sitting in the class, and she [a student] asked me, how many T's are in Gattaca. This was the kind of question she was asking, "how many T's are in Gattaca?," and I was about to answer her and Tom Cormen pre-empted me, "two t's." I'll leave you to interpret it.
TDR: No. No, I don't understand that.
PV: I have to tell you: it means tenure track.
TDR: Oh, okay.
PV: Because I wasn't tenured track.
TDR: Oh, okay, yes.
PV: They were trying to intimate that I wasn't ready for tenure track.
TDR: Yes, okay, I didn't realize that's what that meant.
PV: I'm kind of making this leap because this is the kind of subversiveness that was going on in that environment. That [girl x] would ask how many t's are in Gattaca and that Tom Cormen would respond, "two T's" as if I had no grasp on tenure track. ..but with [girl x], something's going on with her. I'm not a doctor, but she's not all there.
This interview is so bizarre, it's breathtaking. Venkatesan repeats every sentence at least five times, which explains why she never had time to answer questions during lecture. I tried really hard to imagine a context in which such loquaciousness would make sense-Dartlog is holding her captive? She is Scheherzade and silence is punishable by death?-but it's hard. The interview is nearly 8000 words long (that's 30 double-spaced essay-pages). And since you probably don't want to read all that, we've got the Cliff's Notes version after the jump.
Privy Venkatesan tells all to the Dartmouth Review.
On her worst student, and the importance of being able to take criticism:
She was probably the most abrasive, the most offensive, the most disruptive student. She ruined that class. She ruined it. She ruined it. ... I was lecturing on morals and ethics and she just gave me this horrible look, and I was pretty disturbed. I just said what is going on here? The problem with [girl x] is that she can't take criticism. She can't take the fact that there is something wrong with her work.
On her teaching evaluations, pre-Dartmouth:
They were all spectacular. They were all positive. I could fax them to you. I don't mind, I could honestly fax them to you
An example of racism:
...there were two students, they were actually the more obnoxious students in the class, they were the impolite ones, who would have a little conversation about how geeky or how socially inept an Indian student was. You could tell that it was an Indian because the name they mentioned was South-Asian, and I know that, because I can recognize South Asian names.
On her book deal and current projects:
I really have a lot of work right now, I have two book manuscripts to work on, that doesn't even include the manuscript about my life in higher education, I have two grants to work on, I have an article to work on, I have three articles to work on, I really have so much work to do and you would not even believe, I really have a lot of work to do. I am not the kind of person who wants to make a big fuss about petty or trivial things. So, I have a lot of things to do that I could be focusing my attention on in very productive ways.
Books always happen. They always happen. I'm [working] with a literary agent right now, I'm waiting to get more responses from them. Dartmouth is just going to be one chapter in the book. But I think like the things I'm telling you right now are going to be in the book.
On her new job at Northwestern:
I am at Northwestern, and I'm really enjoying it now, but word has gone out at Northwestern about my suit, so I don't know if I should tell you... I don't know what's going to happen here, but hopefully, I won't have too much of a fallout. I don't want my career to suffer here, you know.
On whether she'd ever return to Dartmouth:
Right now, I anticipate no. I don't know how things may change, but right now, I don't anticipate coming back to the East Coast. I think it's just a different culture, and my goal is to go back to California, because I really like California.
Go west, young Priya!
Finally, some quick snips:
- Lacan: "almost like a god"
- Dartmouth: "very secluded, very sheltered"
- Feeling about her teaching ability: "confident"
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May 1st, 2008 at 1:31 pm
I think I know who Venkatesan’s “worst student” is, and although she’s rather talkative, possibly to the point that she might be annoying or abrasive, I don’t know that she would be such a bitch as Venkatesan seems to think she is. Another friend who was in the same section of Writing 5 said that the girl brought up legitimate issues - especially technical course-related problems - and Venkatesan just couldn’t handle it. Apparently pointing out that the course website can’t work is harassment.
May 1st, 2008 at 1:42 pm
the armchair psychologist here, this woman needs help. the gattaca thing is totally paranoia, with seeing coded messages and all. then she has some very interesting choice of word repetitions that don’t make sense to a sane person. yikes.
May 1st, 2008 at 2:18 pm
This is DELICIOUS. More please!
May 1st, 2008 at 3:09 pm
I have to echo the armchair psychologist–when you’re first teaching at a fancy ivy league school, it’s normal to have doubts like “am I smart enough to be doing this” and “will my students have respect for me,” but this quickly passes. Unless of course you’re mentally ill, in which case you project these fears and self-doubting thoughts on your students and then sue them. If Priya is reading this, hopefully she’ll realize she needs a psychiatrist.
May 1st, 2008 at 3:11 pm
I have to echo the armchair psychologist–when you’re first teaching at a fancy ivy league school, it’s normal to have doubts like “am I smart enough to be doing this” and “will my students have respect for me,” but this quickly passes. Unless of course you’re mentally ill, in which case you project these fears and self-doubting thoughts on your students and then sue them. If Priya is reading this, hopefully she’ll realize she needs a psychiatrist.
May 1st, 2008 at 4:12 pm
armchair psychologist again here.
obviously academics have their doubts at times. i’m a grad student and i do as well from time to time. but, mind you, priya is dartmouth class of ‘90 so she’s going on 40 and should be past the point of “am i smart enough to be doing this.”
what really concerns me is her constant repetition of very similar sentences. like she’ll say a sentence and then repeat it in passive voice. and most of the adjectives used to describe the situation don’t fit. she uses ’strange’ and ‘weird’ to describe what happened to her with a high frequency. it is as if she is grappling with a reality that she can’t quite understand.
at first i got a good deal of lulz out of this story, but reading this new interview makes me think some serious help is in order.
once again, i’m just an armchair psychologist, so any real psychologists can call me out on bullshit.
May 1st, 2008 at 4:16 pm
“I’m not a doctor but she’s not all there.”
May 1st, 2008 at 5:12 pm
I am a psychoanalytic candidate and I can tell you that she is paranoid. I read that paragraph several times and I wondered when she would pull out the ball bearings and start muttering about the strawberries.
I hope Dartmouth will expunge the grades of, and rebate tuition to, the poor students who had to suffer from this woman’s rantings.
May 1st, 2008 at 5:14 pm
HELLO! She’s suing her students over a fucking writing lecture. Disregarding for a second the fact that most English students are mental, you need to be really insecure to think suing your students is a viable recourse for recovering your sense of self worth. So now she’s fucked up her career at Northwestern too, no one in their right mind would do this. You know what this totally reminds me of, is that teacher from Horace Mann… except she was less crazy.
http://nymag.com/news/features/45592/index1.html
Have these people never read, A Separate peace, The Sound and the Fury, ect, or seen sent of a Woman? You don’t fuck with children of the Good and the Great. If the school has to choose between its students and this chick, guess who they’ll choose?
May 1st, 2008 at 5:31 pm
Jim:
This lady is nuts. but why would a student be asking her how to spell gattaca? I mean what is this 3rd grade? As a student who once went to the administration to get a (incompetent) lecturer fired, I can attest that just because she’s paranoid doesn’t mean the students weren’t out to get her.
May 1st, 2008 at 5:51 pm
It’s like an extra-long version of the “wrong Guy” incident!
http://tinyurl.com/65cjrb
May 1st, 2008 at 6:00 pm
I think the student asked her how to spell Gattaca because they had watched the film in class or for class. So it’s a legitimate question, particularly in a writing class on science and technology.
May 1st, 2008 at 6:26 pm
“You could tell that it was an Indian because the name they mentioned was South-Asian, and I know that, because I can recognize South Asian names”
Um, hello? You’re suing students for being racist when you made an extremely racial remark/assumption yourself! As if everyone can tell a person’s race based on their name. Furthermore, so they called this person a nerd. Who cares? Why does she assume they are making this statement based on race?
May 1st, 2008 at 6:37 pm
I get annoyed just READING this woman. I can’t imagine how her students felt listening to this shit several hours a week.
May 1st, 2008 at 7:16 pm
Yeah, maybe. Was this student from some sort of 4th world country without access to google? I think the last time I asked someone how to spell something was 1995.
May 1st, 2008 at 8:13 pm
I would love to mock her, but it seems really clear that she’s having some kind of schizophrenic episode.
May 1st, 2008 at 8:20 pm
I would love to mock her, but it seems really clear that she’s having some kind of schizophrenic episode.
May 1st, 2008 at 8:21 pm
Don’t the kids up in Hanover know how to Google?
Gataca — Gattaka — Gatacca - Gattaca!
May 1st, 2008 at 8:38 pm
Cayuga:
What a perceptive observation. You’d think someone on this blog populated with ivy league students would have made the observation by now…. some say at 7:16. Which perhaps is evidence to Priya’s argument. After reading the whole interview, I think the problem is that she hold’s her position in too high regard. I’m not above the things she accuses her students of. In fact I have done them before, I would have loved to see this woman some how end up in a class at Wharton. Just because she happens to be teaching freshman comp (a class I blissfully tested out of) doesn’t mean she’s earned any kind of respect. I mean freshmen who thinks they’re going to be the next Daniel Webster are not likely to hold much regard for a 40 year old non tenure track lecturer in freshman English.
The problem is that she herself lacks the maturity to sidestep the intellectual aggression of her students. And the lawsuit, I mean what was she thinking? Again, these self righteous liberal arts types study so long that they lose touch with the reality of how people actually behave. The whole point of literature is to give insight into the human condition, that is why we study it. And yet Priya seems to have no such insight. I’m not saying her students weren’t flawed and arrogant. I’m saying a good lecturer would have used that insight to maintain control of the class.
May 1st, 2008 at 9:21 pm
In all fairness, South Asian names are pretty obvious. Not many non-South Asians give their kids Indian or Pakistani names, unless they’re celebrities.
May 1st, 2008 at 10:19 pm
Bootmaker:
For the record, No one thought they would be the next Daniel Webster. The class is not an elective; all students who scored under a 770 on the verbal section of the SATI must take it.
You give the impression that you imagine the class as a bunch of quasi-intellectual, pretentious wannabe’s. Your assumption seems to be based on stereotypes and is very inaccurate.
The class was actually the most science based of any of the intro Writing courses. I don’t think their was a single English major in the bunch.
May 1st, 2008 at 10:53 pm
I’m only basing it on myself and how I behaved in my freshman classes. I thought I was going to be the next Hank Paulson and I certainly wouldn’t have respected some 40 year old lecturer teaching intro english, the very fact that she’s teaching that class probably tells you she’s not worth listening too. I mean I wouldn’t have tried to get her fired or anything, unless she gave me a shitty grade because she thought I was “Bullying, aggressive, and disrespectful” None of those things have anything to do with the subject matter. And, there’s no law that says she’s entitled to respect. PhD or no PhD she has to submit her ideas for consideration just like everyone.
Again, thankfully, I tested out of any such nonsense.
May 2nd, 2008 at 8:06 am
But Gattaca is a code! It’s nucleobases, but it can’t be parsed properly: GAT TAC A… the adenine is left hanging like a noose on her door, unless the thymine is part of a code, standing for terror or torment or something.
May 2nd, 2008 at 1:14 pm
you wanted to be hank paulson when you were a freshman? that’s really freaking weird.
May 2nd, 2008 at 1:20 pm
I think I’ve cracked the code. T is for thymine. Thymine is unique to DNA (as opposed to RNA). RNA also has strands of nucleotides, but in RNA, U(uracil), not thymine bonds with adenine. Thus, if Ms. Venkatesan has no T in her code, she’s probably an RNA virus.
That’s definitely it.
Oh, and viruses can’t get tenure.
May 2nd, 2008 at 2:01 pm
This is a systematic problem that is mirrored at all Ivy Leagues. It has probably been fermenting at Dartmouth for a while and the English dept. should have responded to student concerns (if they did exist) and evaluations about PV when they came in. I know a lot of Depts at my school have professors who are smart, but incompetent. Just because you hold a great degree and have published books/papers does not mean that you can command the respect of your students or even teach well for that matter.
May 2nd, 2008 at 2:46 pm
dartmouth independent had an interesting take (http://www.dartmouthindependent.com/archives/2008/05/post-9.html)
May 2nd, 2008 at 4:03 pm
She was a post-doc instructor from DMS, NOT a professor in the English department. This has nothing to do with English, rather the writing program.
May 3rd, 2008 at 12:42 am
@ JMS:
Funny, I would love to mock her PRECISELY BECAUSE it seems really clear that she’s having some kind of schizophrenic episode.
May 4th, 2008 at 1:56 am
This is why you should never let a PhD in literature near anything real.
May 4th, 2008 at 2:06 am
This is why you should never let a PhD in literature near anything real.
May 4th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
this chick is flat out crazy. the worst part is that dartmouth is getting a bad rep now for having hired her…i’m curious to see how long it is before Northwestern cans her….
May 4th, 2008 at 9:54 pm
Looking at the SA course guide, it seems like this weird psychotic break occurred only since she had been hired. Fall term the only course that has reviews in it gave her a B-, which, while it isn’t fantastic, didn’t sound like she was going to SUE them/go batshit. Winter term was when she started to get the D-/E ratings.
Although you have to sift through a LOT of crazy-ass babble, the Review interview with her suggests that the writing program is less-than-rigorous in orienting its professors or providing them with a solid basis for teaching. Considering Dartmouth’s writing program has professors from ALL departments teaching writing and not just English or Writing professors, this should probably be looked into. (Also the fact that this woman was teaching in the first place.)
May 4th, 2008 at 10:11 pm
As you point out, she seems to have run into problems in winter. When they hired her, she probably seemed fine.
In five years of grad school, I’ve seen three colleagues flip out — between 5% and 10% of the PhD students. Thankfully, their failures were more graceful and undergrads were unaffected. Dartmouth just hit the trifecta on this one. Random “luck.”
May 5th, 2008 at 9:44 am
10 bucks says the dartmouth 11 who linked the TDI article is jamie berk. i want you to know that you are a huge toolish pile of crap. and that this is a widespread opinion of you.
May 5th, 2008 at 11:49 am
nice. very intellectual. reaffirm dartmouth’s reputation as a gossiping extension of high school. its really great to slander people on a public forum - so much fun.
May 5th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
@@dartmouth: Jamie Berk wrote the tdi article. Not that he/she’s not a tool, of course.
May 5th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
yes, i realize that; how is an appropriate response to an article to call the person a “huge toolish pile of crap” in a public forum? 10 bucks says the person who wrote that is a huge toolish pile of crap that makes him/herself feel good by dissing people he doesn’t know on ivygate, and chances are that that’s a widely held opinion
May 5th, 2008 at 3:16 pm
“I didn’t say my wife was insane. I said she was fucking Goofy!”
May 5th, 2008 at 9:09 pm
“She ruined it. … I was lecturing on morals and ethics and she just gave me this horrible look, and I was pretty disturbed.”
Tracy Flick?
May 5th, 2008 at 9:12 pm
“She ruined it. … I was lecturing on morals and ethics and she just gave me this horrible look, and I was pretty disturbed.”
Tracy Flick?
May 6th, 2008 at 6:31 pm
I honestly picture her trying to lecture and the students being really hard on her because she is Indian and also because some douchebag dude thinks he has a legitimate point to make despite just wanting to seem like he knows what he’s talking about. I’ve seen it happen at my school. At Dartmouth, I’m sure there is no lack of respect for faculty that doesn’t have the accent you want them to have.
May 8th, 2008 at 11:15 am
Really rizzy? Did you read the “tenure track” stuff? How about the “horrible look” that “just ruined it”? Don’t you think there might be a little paranoia at work here? Since the class clapped at his remarks, maybe the “douchebag” did have a legitimate point to make - I doubt the class would have responded that way if he was just posing.
May 15th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
I find it pretty hard to believe you “tested out” of anything to do with English. Your English fucking sucks. Re-read your goddamned post.
May 20th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Someone commented on how long it would be before Northwestern fires this one.
Please. While the students may be normal, don’t forget about Arthur Butz, the Holocaust denier, Bernardine Dohrn, the former Weather Underground fugitive, and Jerry Springer giving the commencement address to the law school this year.
Either NU is a magnet for cranks, or they actively seek them out. I doubt she’ll be fired, though, except if she tries to sue us all, or something.
May 20th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
She has to have an accent just because she’s Indian/Indian-American? That’s kind of racist of you, don’t you think? I didn’t see mention of an accent anywhere. And in four years, the only time I heard grumblings about professor’s accents was in an early am intro math class when the Spanish/Latin American professor was mildly unintelligible.
May 21st, 2008 at 12:07 am
Springer’s speech was actually intelligent and moving. That leaves you with two data points — which is enough to posit a trend, I suppose.
P.S. If you read later interviews with the woman, administrators at Northwestern do seem to be putting pressure on her. Or she thinks they are.
June 13th, 2008 at 5:30 pm
Oh no, she might come to California! Do not come to Berkeley. If you’re reading this, Venkatesan, I threaten to use my evil eyes to coerce you to madness!