Breaking news: it looks as though unhinged post-modernist and writing professor Priya Venkatesan will or will not be pursuing legal action against Dartmouth College. Trying to stay in the news despite her rapidly fading 15 minutes, Venkatesan contacted Dartblog and The D yesterday to say that she was dropping the suit. Never mind, though. Within 24 hours she re-contacted them to say that she will indeed be pursuing legal action. What seems most likely, however, is that Venkatesan, despite her claims to the contrary, has not seen a lawyer.

The D has one pithy student’s take on the whole matter:

If Venkatesan followed through with her lawsuit the same way she followed through with grading our papers, no one would have had anything to worry about,”

Meanwhile, the Dartmouth Administration seems more bemused than angry, exasperated that Dartmouth’s spam-blockers can’t shoo Venkatesan away. Here Gail M. Zimmerman, the Dean of First-Year students, pretends to care about Venkatesan’s legal action:

Robert Donin, Dartmouth’s General Counsel, was present at yesterday’s meeting. He advises that we do not believe there is any merit to a potential lawsuit and he does not feel it necessary for students to retain their own legal counsel at this time…

Questions arose as to our ability to block Prof. Venkatesan’s emails. Whether that ability exists or not, it would not likely stop her emails from reaching your inbox given the dearth and ready availability of other free email systems such as hotmail, gmail, and yahoo. If these emails are distressing, please don’t hesitate to forward them to me unopened. I would request you to forward any emails to me regardless of whether you read them or not so that I can be apprised of and assess how best to respond and support you.

After the jump: we analyze Venkatesan’s academic work.

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Our commenters aren’t known for taking the high road. Our boards tend to devolve into a sort of “my school is better than yours but at least we can all agree that Cornell sucks” type mentality. But people, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Gaylies extraordinaire Akash and Victor - or maybe just their campaign “surrogates” - are duking it out, JuicyCampus-style, on our comment boards. Despite all sorts ofpseudonums, most of the comments come from the same IP addresses, posting again and again. Both Victor and Akash claim they are not the posters, only to follow up their denials with juicy tidbits more or less proving that they are in fact Victor or Akash or close friends. Did Akash lie to get into Yale? Did Victor ruin his life? Who knows?

Highlights: “cc” calls Akash a “psycho-loser” and “midget,” and writes with glee about how Akash will soon be “raped and beaten in prison for 25 years.” “ha ha” responds, calling Victor a “cross eyed bipolar, trailor trash freak” and insinuates that Victor may have had sex with his uncle as well as underage children - and that his mom supposedly had an affair with an illegal immigrant. It only gets worse from there. In all likelihood, none of these things are true - but to see the horrific results of love gone awry is nothing short of incredible.

After the jump: the flame war continues. How about a cease-fire, guys? We’d happy to engage in some shuttle diplomacy.

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At college, you can do anything. You could learn a new language, play a new instrument, start a blog! You could even to learn to juggle, and find dozens of like-minded juggle-people to toss bricks and balls and bowling pins through the air with you. And that brings us to the most glorious YouTube channel I have ever encountered, PJuggling, home of Princeton’s official juggling team.

To whet your appetite, I present first a promotional video for a PJuggling show apparently themed on Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. A boy in a plaid shirt wanders into a men’s lavatory, only to find every stall occupied by a short man tossing tiny balls in the air, a creepily knowing smile dancing across his lips. The boys attempts to leave the lavatory, but the ball-tossing man blocks the exit! A cornucopia of bizarre imagery later, the boy awakens and finds a phallus in his bed.

After the jump, however, things get even better. How could such a thing be possible, you ask? Clues: Simian Mobile Disco’s “I’m a Hustler Baby.” Lip syncing. Break dancing. Yo-yo. The robot.

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The D reported yesterday on lecturer Priya Venkatesan (also undergrad ‘90 and a Med School researcher) who, in a series of strangely passive-aggressive group emails, announced a plan to sue her students for workplace harassment based on “intolerance of ideas.” The emails-reported first in Dartlog and forwarded to a zillion email lists within seconds-also contain info on Venkatesan’s upcoming Academy X rip-off where she plans to “name names.” Venkatesan tapped into the email list from her Winter 2008 Writing 5 class:

Date: Sat, 26 Apr 2008 20:56:35
From: Priya Venkatesan
Subject: WRIT.005.17.18-WI08: Possible lawsuit

Dear former class members of Science, Technology and Society:

I tried to send an email through my server but got undelivered messages. I regret to inform you that I am pursuing a lawsuit in which I am accusing some of you (whom shall go unmentioned in this email) of violating Title VII of anti-federal discrimination laws.

The feeling that I am getting from the outside world is that Dartmouth is considered a bigoted place, so this may not be news and I may be successful in this lawsuit. I am also writing a book detailing my eperiences as your instructor, which will “name names” so to speak. I have all of your evaluation and these will be reproduced in the book.

Have a nice day. 

The phrase “anti-federal discrimination laws” made me think she was emailing drunk; follow-up messages and press statements indicate that Venkatesan is, in fact, serious.

Few of Venkatesan’s students deny disliking her; they just say it had nothing to do with race, gender, or any other federally-protected characteristic. Rather, the lecturer embodied that special brand of neurotic pedagogical tyranny that includes making rules against questions, refusing to interact with students, and, according to the D,

cancelation of class for a week after the class applauded a student who contradicted Venkatesan’s opinions about post-modernism

Spontaneous applause during a class on literary criticism? Obviously, there is something very wrong with this picture, so outrageously shocking as to shake Venkatesan to her very core: In a class at an Ivy League university, students were paying attention. Worse: They were engaged, and they cared.

“I was horrified,” Venkatesan said. “My responsibility is not to stifle them, but when they clapped at his comment, I thought that crossed the line … I was facing intolerance of ideas and intolerance of freedom of expression.” …She canceled class because the incident caused her “intellectual and emotional distress,” she said.

Then again, being outsmarted by a room full of eighteen-year-olds must be pretty humiliating. A kinder choice would have been emitting a spontaneous snore or two, then preoccupying themselves with a more innocuous form of disrespect, like text messaging during class or ostentatious yawning.

Possibly awesome turn of logic: If the students’ crime was “intolerance of ideas,” and the idea in question was post-modernism, does that mean post-modernism is Venkatesan’s religion? In which case academia has finally curled so far inward as to truly out-po-mo itself. “Where everything is possible and almost nothing is certain,” indeed!

After the jump: More emails from Venkatesan and Dartmouth authorities, and a sample of Venkatesan’s evaluations.

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So remember when Brown student / enraged leftist Margaree Little pied Tom Friedman in the face and some of us thought it was awesome and others were like, no, I love semi-retarded columns about globalization?  Well, we finally have a visual on her, people. Let’s just say it makes her seem a little less like an adorable hippie and a bit too much like a real revolutionary. In retrospect, Tom Friedman got off easy. Up against the wall, motherfuckers.

Okay, so we all know this was a big week in for the Democratic primaries. But the number of Obama/Clinton/McCain cartoons printed in the Ivy League this week was absurd. Nine out of the 26 (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9) cartoons printed in the Ivy dailies this week were related to the Democratic primary (that’s more than a third). I’ve made this complaint before… and I got to thinking, what’s so bad about it? So perhaps it’s time for a little explication of the standards by which I judge these cartoons - an ars cartoonica, if you will. And, of course, I’ve still got a couple of bad ones, just after the jump.

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• Brown: “‘How many kinds of ketchup are there? Really only two, Heinz and Hunts,’ Norton said. ‘It’s kind of a duopoly.’”
• Dartmouth: Cheating scandal rocks Hanover - Hanover High School, that is.
• Penn: Get your pocketbooks ready, parents! Disgraced ex-Dean of Admissions Stetson to start college consulting firm.
• Harvard: Harvard gets more money from a Rockefeller.

–James Yu

Princeton’s dukes of drunk, Mike and Will, continue the 24-beer Newman’s Day challenge, with live  and increasingly messily typed updates after the jump. For the morning liveblog click here. For an explanation as to why anyone would ever do such a thing, click here.

4:50PM: Pikes by the Pool

Mike: With Will in class, I’ve been looking for someone else to talk to about Newman’s Day. Luckily, I ran into a friend who told me Princeton’s Pikes were set up outside a dorm with a kiddie pool, grilling, and shagging golf balls down between the other residence halls.

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Since no Bonesman is allowed to ‘fess up to being one, the organization is, by necessity, unable to denounce frauds. Consequently, it is really easy to play jokes on them. Yale pre-frosh Princeton Ji Chang (not to be confused with Princeton freshman Princeton Kwong; apparently there was a bubble of Princetons born around 1990) stumbled across a group of “Bonesmen” offering photo-ops during Bulldog Days:

So here I am, young, impressionable Princeton Ji Chang, walkin’ round Yale during orientation week [Bulldog Days] when — suddenly and without warning — a bunch of cloaked Skull-and-Bonesmen came up to me! Apparently they were holding a fundraiser: $2 polaroids, and $0.25 autographs. So, of course, I totally took a picture with them in front of their creepy building (i think they call it a tomb or something?). Anyway, the picture’s great. But the whole thing struck me as a little odd - does Skull and Bones really need to be doing fundraising? And do they always wear such creepy clothes?

Nah. Usually they just pop the collars on their vampire capes and call it a day.

ivyTunes is back! This week, Penn audiophile James Yu checks in with Filligar. If you are in or know of a band worth covering, send links and/or MP3s to tips@ivygateblog.com.

A somewhat telling admission: since November 27, 2006 - the date Filligar appeared on our very first installation of ivyTunes - “Venice World’s Fair (c. 2138 AD),” a catchy, deliberately nonsensical song off their earlier album, has played a whopping 61 times on my computer. That puts it easily within the top twenty of my most played tracks.

And with good reason. Filligar, composed of Dartmouthian brothers Johnny (’11), Teddy (’09), and Pete Mathias (’09), and childhood friend Casey Gibson (Hamilton ‘09), is fun and clever, but never nauseatingly so. Like Vampire Weekend, the Columbia band that rode the blogosphere to become the indie rock darlings of 2008, Filligar has the chops to explode into the next big thing.

The amount of positive exposure these four Chicagoans have received is impressive, especially in light of the fact that they are all full-time students in the wilds of New York and New Hampshire. They’ve been reviewed by the Chicago Sun-Times, have seen airtime on major radio stations such as WXRT Chicago and WFNX 101.7 Boston, and have had their song “Big Things” play on this season’s premiere of MTV’s The Real World.

All the Same - Filligar

After the jump: More review, and two more tracks. 

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