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."

The agenda of Ms. Venkatesan's seminar, then, was to "problematize" technology and the life sciences.

I do believe that she is eminently qualified for a position with the Discovery Institute!

Maybe her students should sue her for "intellectual distress." It appears as if her lectures interrupted their sleep and personal lives. But I think the author has misinterpreted the students' "rebellion" as any form of intellectual engagement. When I was in school it was purely a matter of principle to antagonize and the frustrate the teacher out of pure boredom and juvenile frustration.

That said, even at "“ or especially at "“ putatively superior schools, students are spoiled for choice when it comes to professors who share ideologies like Ms. Venkatesan's. The main result is to make coursework pathetically easy. Like filling in a Mad Libs, just patch something together about "interrogating heteronormativity," or whatever, and wait for the returns to start rolling in.

I once wrote a term paper for a lit-crit course where I "deconstructed" the MTV program "Pimp My Ride." A typical passage: "Each episode is a text of inescapable complexity . . . Our received notions of what constitutes a ride are constantly subverted and undermined." It received an A.

No comment needed.

I felt sorry for her and tried to keep the jocks in line, but it was no use. She made a target of herself and they exploited it. Still, I got an 'A' (she never gave a test) because I tried.

Psychology teacher was a whole other case. He was the track coach, didn't know anything about anything but chewing tobacco and being a jerk. Passed out a textbook written in 1942 (no kidding), said the weekly test was at the end of each chapter, don't ask any questions.

What we learned about psychology was what we learned about this guy. Got fired at the end of the term for trying to molest one of the teens on the track team. Nobody was surprised.

As a general rule, I have found that serving students with legal complaints or subpoenas tends to undermine the teacher/student relationship.

Intellectual distress

Oh the pain these types feel when anyone has the nerve to dispute their orthodoxy.

And "fascist demagoguery." Sounds like a phrase out of the USSR's Pravda. But the article ended on this hopeful note:

The remarkable thing about the Venkatesan affair, to me, is that her students cared enough to argue. Normally they would express their boredom with the material by answering emails on their laptops or falling asleep. But here they staged a rebellion, a French Counter-Revolution against Professor Defarge. Maybe, despite the professor's best efforts, there's life in American colleges yet.