Category Archives: Liberal Fascism

From the Wall Street Journal:

Often it seems as though American higher education exists only to provide gag material for the outside world. The latest spectacle is an Ivy League professor threatening to sue her students because, she claims, their “anti-intellectualism” violated her civil rights.

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.”

What were the student’s sins? They questioned some of her assertions in class!

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.”

Oh, the horrors!

After a winter of discontent, the snapping point came while Ms. Venkatesan was lecturing on “ecofeminism,” which holds, in part, that scientific advancements benefit the patriarchy but leave women out. One student took issue, and reasonably so – actually, empirically so. But “these weren’t thoughtful statements,” Ms. Venkatesan protests. “They were irrational.” The class thought otherwise. Following what she calls the student’s “diatribe,” several of his classmates applauded.

Ms. Venkatesan informed her pupils that their behavior was “fascist demagoguery.” Then, after consulting a physician about “intellectual distress,” she cancelled classes for a week. Thus the pending litigation.

Considering the fact that most teachers would be thrilled to have their students so engaged in a lecture that they ask questions, one must wonder what Ms. Venkatesan found so objectionable. Having taken a few literary theory classes himself, the Beast thinks he knows the problem.

Literary theory is crap. When one must teach crap, one gets a little defensive about challenges, because there is no good defense available. This is particularly galling for feminists.

But before we expand on that topic, let’s have a little look into recent history to see if we can find the root cause of Ms. Venkatesan’s case of the vapors.

Back in the 1980′s, feminists ran into a scientific wall. Their assertion that the genders were equal in all things (aside from certain surface physical abilities) began springing leaks when science departments on campus (who had originally been recruited to prove the truth of this) started collecting data that belied this article of feminist faith. Like a series of underground A-Bomb tests, the controversy rumbled below the surface for years. The controversy pitted geeky science profs against hairy-legged feminists (neither likely to get laid by the opposite sex) and became so toxic that womens studies departments even picketed their own science departments. But most of the battle was conducted in faculty meetings, with feminists flexing their political muscle to squelch research projects they now knew were likely to produce results inimical to their faith, or throw heretics out of the bunker (*Cough! Larry Summers!). But the truth eventually leaked out.

With some of their most fundamental assertions now proven irrational, academic feminists went for the only option available to them at the time: they rejected reason. Then they tried to reconcile it.

Witness the birth of “Feminist Science Studies“. Think of it as Gynocratic Creationism.

But there’s a problem. How to bring “Science Studies” out of the backwaters of the Women’s Studies swamp and movie it into the general campus. This is where French narrative theory (more widely known as “Crit Lit”) becomes useful.

From Wikipedia:

Critical theory (literary criticism)

Main article: Literary theory

The second meaning of critical theory is that of theory used in literary criticism (“critical theory”) and in the analysis and understanding of literature. This is discussed in greater detail under literary theory. This form of critical theory is not necessarily oriented toward radical social change or even toward the analysis of society, but instead specializes on the analysis of texts and text-like phenomena. It originated among literary scholars and in the discipline of literature in the 1960s and 1970s, and has really only come into broad use since the 1980s, especially as theory used in literary studies became increasingly influenced by European philosophy and social theory and thereby became more “theoretical”.

This meaning of “critical theory” originated entirely within the humanities. There are works of literary critical theory that show no awareness of the sociological version of critical theory.

So what does this mean? It means that the unwitting student who signs up for this class (and it’s odd that they teach it at Dartmouth as freshman comp) will be given an anchor text and then made to interpret that text within the following guidelines:

Essentially crit lit requires you to take a book, like, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and torture the text for insights into the Plight Of Women or The Plight of Africans, or The Plight of anybody else in the liberal pantheon. This is what Ms. Venkatesan apparently was attempting to do with her “Feminist Science Studies French Narrative” class – get it out of Women’s Studies and into the English Department. This is classic Academic Logrolling, and obviously the students didn’t buy it. Ms. Venkatesan – most likely unaccustomed to challenges and unequipped by the nature of her specialty for defending the indefensible – fell apart under scrutiny.

She has since fled Dartmouth in a snit for the presumably greener pastures of Northwestern. Good luck to them both!