Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2003/09/30/and_the_damned_dartmouths_worst.php
Tuesday, September 30, 2003
Andrew Garrod
Education
Many unsuspecting freshmen choose Garrod's Education 20 course because it is hailed in certain circles as ?the best class at Dartmouth.? Others stumble into the class expecting an easy A for mastering Horton Hears a Who. You will, alas, be seriously disappointed if you anticipate either.All assignments are graded by upper-class education minors and required to be continually re-written for little reason.Garrod himself does not apologize for his political biases and is wont to show them, presenting as undisputed fact arguments for his pet liberal causes.
Marysa Navarro-Aranguren
History
A dubious distinction, this professor was featured in the very first issue of The Dartmouth Review?over twenty years ago.She is still causing problems on the Dartmouth campus today.She is perhaps the most notoriously biased grader in Dartmouth's history and a feminist reactionary to the bone.
Lynda Boose
English
How Professor Boose managed to secure a position at Dartmouth is astounding.Nothing good can be said about this lady. She left her English 5 class to sit through more than four weeks of soap operas in place of class lectures. She frequently cancels class with little warning; she once missed class for a whole week because of a toothache. Avoid this nutty professor by any means necessary.
Bruce Nelson
History
According to one black student, Nelson epitomizes the ?guilty white man syndrome.? For evidence of Nelson's liberal pedigree, his bio on the department website says it all: ??Bruce Nelson migrated to California in the 1960s and combined the study of American history at UC Berkeley with participation in the major social movements of that decade.In the seventies, he continued his education on a truck assembly line and remained active in the trade union movement for nearly ten years, before returning to Berkeley to complete his Ph.D. in 1982.?
Brenda Silver
English
An avid feminist critic, Professor Silver reads literature with the firm belief that anything longer than it is round must be a phallus. Silver is addicted to anything anti-male and holds androgyny to be the human ideal. If you enjoy listening to the classics of Western culture being destroyed by feminist deconstruction, then you will love her lectures.
Richard Winters
Government
This former department chair has turned off a number of prospective government majors from even taking a second course in the department with his abysmal performances in Government 3. In one of the first professor evaluations in the Review, author and radio talk-show host Laura Ingraham ?85 wrote of unbearable ?Winters in Hanover.? Nearly two decades later, he's still here, and somebody forgot to tell him that Mondale lost.Winters claims to be an empiricist, but the only support for his assertions are nonsensical, indecipherable scribbles on the chalkboard.He often takes to the chalkboard only to use unfamiliar abbreviations and his scratched ramblings with arrows to indicate causal relationships that are questionable at best. Winters openly jokes about his own exam format?primarily composed of true-false questions?that fails to give students an opportunity to show what they have learned.
Leslie Sonder
Earth Sciences
This department chair teaches the popular gut, ?Natural Disasters and Catastrophes,? over the summer term. The course lives up to its name. Sonder tells painfully corny jokes and sucks the life out of a potentially interesting class.
Thomas Luxon
English
Luxon is Dartmouth's resident Milton scholar, and in fairness, he is generally considered an adequate professor.Check out his ?Milton Reading Room? online at www.dartmouth.edu/~milton. But he has been known to bring his considerable liberal baggage into class at times. Luxon is strongly influenced by feminist readings of literature.He once stormed out of a showing of Alpha Chi Alpha's infamous ?Hell Night? tape when audience members disagreed with his interpretation.
Donald Pease
English
Several years ago, Professor Pease was mentioned in Philosophy and Literature's annual ?Bad Writing Contest? for the following sentence: ?When interpreted from within the ideal space of the myth-symbol school, Americanist masterworks legitimized hegemonic understanding of American history expressively totalized in the metanarrative that had been reconstructed out of (or more accurately read into) these masterworks.? He lectures like that, too.
James Murphy
Government
At least his agenda is clear. Recent publications: a) ?Against Civic Schooling,? in Social Philosophy and Policy 21, (forthcoming, Jan. 2004); b) ?Against Civic Education in Public Schools,? in Constructing Civic Virtue: A Symposium on the State of American Citizenship (Maxwell School of Syracuse University: Campbell Public Affairs Institute, 2003).
Leo Spitzer
History
Spitzer teaches a special brand of revisionist history. Students report that they actually know less after taking Spitzer's course than they did going into it.