TDR Interview: Professor Venkatesan

By Tyler R. Brace | Sunday, June 8, 2008

Editor’s Note: The following are excerpts from our interview with Professor Priya Venkatesan ’90. For the full interview, see our website.

The Dartmouth Review: Could you comment on Tom Cormen [Chair of the Writing Program]?

Prof. Priya Venkatesan: Sure, I am like, 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.

TDR: I can understand that. If you like, I can just ask you a different question.

PV: To your question, Tom Cormen was consistently rude to me, and he was very unsupportive of my teaching in the Writing Program. I am perplexed as to why he would give me an offer to teach four sections in the Writing Program and then show absolutely no support, no professional support, and I wasn’t even looking for personal support, no professional support or guidance, and trying to do my best job to be a writing instructor.

Now to give you the background, I taught writing in my graduate school at the University of California San Diego. I was what they call a teaching assistant. The students get graded by teaching assistants in the research universities, not like Dartmouth where the professors grade the students. I was a teaching assistant at the University of San Diego, and I have three teaching evaluations. They were all spectacular. 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, but no professional support or guidance from the beginning. But, I was confident in my ability to teach expository writing, so I went about it with very little support or direction from the department. That is, in itself, very unusual to have a writing program that does not have a structured orientation program for its new writing staff. Very, very extraordinary. Very out of the ordinary. Very unusual. . . . It raises flags about the quality of the writing program.

I did approach some administrator saying “where’s the orientation?” She gave me this blank, actually it was a phone conversation, so I can’t see a blank face, but it was like a blank expression over the phone, like I don’t know what you’re talking about. There was no orientation.

So Tom, when the students started complaining about me to Tom, Tom did bring me to his office a couple of times and said, “Tell me how things are going.” But what is unusual about what Tom did as a professor, as a writing program director, is that he did not side with the colleague. That is also very, very strange. That is odd. . . . He used very strong language in telling me what I needed to do to meet the needs of the students. I think yeah, you need to meet the needs of the students.

But sometimes students have a different agenda than just learning. Who knows what the agenda of the students are? I can’t read their minds. That is very strange because when I talked to my colleagues in California, they came back to me and they said, “Why isn’t your boss supporting you?” And I said, “I don’t know.” . . . Why is someone who is in computer science [Tom Cormen] given the directive to promote the interests of writing at Dartmouth? My first response is what is someone who has a computer science background going to know about teaching writing? What are they going to know? They haven’t been trained in literature or composition rhetoric. They have no training in that.

I’m not even going to give you the rumors that were circulating about Tom, that’s just gossip. I’m not going to get unprofessional. I’m just going to give you my personal assessment of Tom Cormen as my supervisor and as director of the Writing Program. I’m not going to go in to rumors.

TDR: You mentioned how your students maybe expected someone who was white, in talking to them and reading their evaluations, you don’t really see anything referencing race. What do you have to say about that whole aspect?

PV: I think that’s a really good question, and I kind of have to step back and say that I think, and this is really the only comment that I’m going to make, is that I think that discrimination is very hard to prove, and I think that my claim is going to be very hard to prove because I think that discrimination is very subtle. I think that right now because there are so many laws out there, slavery is outlawed, we have the Civil Rights Act, we have all these laws in place to protect minorities, to protect women, to protect the elderly, so we have these laws in place. No one made a comment about my ethnicity. That did not happen, and I have to say that it did not happen. So what is the basis of my claim? I think that the basis of my claim is that the behavior, like I said in which the tables were turned around, was partially motivated by race.

TDR: So with regards to the racism allegation, would you say this is more of a general feeling than any specific event?

PV: There were a couple of events. There were a couple of events.

TDR: Could you elaborate for us?

PV: I think at one point when I was reading a paper during the writing workshop, 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. That was one example. In terms of any other specific incidences, it may be more difficult to prove. To say that that behavior, that type of disrespect is because I’m an East Indian female is a little bit, maybe it’s a leap, but I don’t think it’s an irrational belief. I think it could be based on reality.

TDR: Is the book definitely going to happen?

PV: 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.

TDR: You mentioned how the students were bullying you, saying certain things, were there any incidences when you might have done that? Several students told me that once you came in the room and were calling them fascist demagogues. Do you deny that?

PV: Not true. I never name-called any student in that class. I never name-called any student in that class. What happened was that I went into class after that whole clapping incident, and I said; “What you did was horrific. What you did was really bad.” Not bad, I didn’t accuse them of being bad, I said what you did was unacceptable. They started arguing with me. I said fine. You think you know everything. You think you know everything without the knowledge base to boot, without the training, you think you have a command of all the knowledge in the world at this stage in your life, then I’m sorry, that is fascism and that is demagoguery. When I made the two words fascism and demagoguery I looked at the picture on the wall.

I made sure that I did not look at the students, and that I did not make any personal attacks on them. The fact of the matter is that by being so arrogant about their command of knowledge about arguing with me about every point that I was making and that’s really arrogant. That’s very arrogant because frankly, and I’m not trying to be an academic elitist, but frankly, they don’t even have a B.A. They’re freshmen. They’re freshmen.

TDR: In one of the many course reviews of your classes, and through talking to some of your students, I’ve heard them say you’re not open to other opinions. For example, you banned questions in class. I was told you said something about them not having their Ph.D., B.A., Master’s, etc.

PV: This is a total misrepresentation. I don’t know what is motivating their behavior. I am not out to get them. I gave them mostly very good grades. I don’t know what the issue is to why this absolute, demonification of me, I don’t understand that. Rarely have I encountered this. The sense that I’m being demonized by a community that I had nothing against and with good intentions of joining, anyway that’s an aside, what I did was for the majority of my two sections between fall and winter before this incident, I permitted questions during lecture.

But I noticed that many students were dissatisfied with that because some of them really did want to learn from me and hear my lecture out but that these questions were de-railing the lecture, so I basically said to the students after this incident that I was not going to permit questions during lecture but right after lecture we would have a discussion section or if we have a class that is more discussion oriented then you’re permitted to ask questions. One of my colleagues from San Diego told me, and I’m not sure I agree with it, but she told me, and please don’t quote me with saying that I agree with this, don’t take it out of context, but she said the classroom is not a democracy and the way she runs her classroom is with an iron fist.

I’m not like that. I’m not the iron fist, but I think my genuine attempt to teach them—I think they tried to take advantage of some of my ability not to be this iron fist. I think a lot of professors are like, I’m the boss of the classroom and you listen to me, and that’s probably the norm. I’m a little more lenient. I’m a little more liberal, and I think this was kind of taken advantage of. I think also that many times when I was lecturing, many of the students would take over the class. While they took over the class, the students that were questioning me would not question the student, but they would consistently question me. In other words, in that setting, the student had more authority than me. Usually the student that questioned me was a white male. When this white male spoke he was given more authority of knowledge, more respect than I was given. I think that was an example of racism. So this kind of thing was going on. It made me feel very uncomfortable.

But I did not ban questions. I just said leave them for the lecture, because what was happening was that people were asking questions that would just derail the lecture, and a lot of people did not like that, so I said questions after lecture. This demonification, this criminalization of very rational behavior, is very disturbing that it takes place. I don’t know if it’s just endemic to Dartmouth. Dartmouth is the only place I experienced it.

TDR: There is one specific incident where I heard from one of the girls in your class who was pretty outspoken. One day she hadn’t spoken for a while and you said, “Could we have a round of applause for this girl, she hasn’t spoken in ten minutes?”

PV: She was probably the most abrasive, the most offensive, the most disruptive student. She ruined that class. She ruined it. She ruined it. That class actually had a lot of potential, there were some really bright kids there, but every time she would do a number of things that were very inappropriate. For instance, I had basically gotten a hold of Blackboard technology, but I was making some mistakes too because I was new to the system, and every time that some link was wrong or some link wasn’t set up right, [girl x] in the beginning of class would point this out to everybody. Then what happened was—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. Now, some people are like that, a lot of people are like that, unable to take criticism, but the fact of the matter is that I have the Ph.D. in literature; I make the assessment if someone has talent for philosophy, literary theory, and literary criticism. . . .

One of the things that she did, this is also really interesting, was that she would always ask me how to spell things. That was her thing. She would say how to do you spell this? How to you spell that? I mean—what am I supposed to do?—so I would tell her. One time Tom Cormen was sitting in the class, and she 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: Um, 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, yeah.

PV: He was trying to intimate that I wasn’t ready for tenure track.

TDR: Yeah, 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—

[Editor’s Note: At this point, Mr. Brace’s ran out of tape. What follows is from a second interview conducted the next day.]

PV: I’ve decided not to pursue any litigation with regard to my grievances at this point, and I have also decided that if sources outside of Dartmouth approach me, that I will respond by saying that this is, you know, what I’ve said, and not prefer to comment on this matter. I know that right now that I don’t want my family to suffer, and I don’t want people to work with in this community to be affected by what I’m doing, so it is as much in my interest as it is theirs to withdraw pursuing a legal avenue.

TDR: So, are you still going to be pursuing the book?

PV: Definitely. Probably the way to go—you know, I think, I just don’t feel like the courts are the way to address this issue. I feel like by getting my narrative out there about my experiences, and then leaving the interpretation open to the reading public, that would be great. If people are interested in my story, you know, then I would be more than delighted to share it with them. But right now, the legal road is probably causing more harm than good.

TDR: I have a few questions about your educational background and how it relates to the courses you teach, and some other specific questions. Yesterday in a lot of the interviews you granted, you referred to “the clapping incident”, and I was just wondering if you could explain to me what exactly that was.

PV: Sure. It’s basically we were talking about The Death of Nature by Carolyn Merchant. I believe I talked about how the scientific revolution—what effect it had on women of the period. In the context I brought up the witch trials of the Renaissance, and I was trying to make to make the claim—it was kind of a paraphrasing of Merchant’s argument, it’s not necessarily. . . . I made the argument that in many cases science and technology did not benefit women, and if women were benefiting from science and technology, it was an after-effect. It was not the goal of science and technology. It was a very feminist claim, and you may not agree with it. But that was Merchant’s argument; it wasn’t my argument, and I’m not a feminist scholar, so I was really making an argument that wasn’t mine and paraphrasing.

But there was one student who really took issue with this—and he took issue with this, and he made a very—I’d call it a diatribe, and it was sort of like, well—science and technology, women really did benefit from it, and to criticize patriarchal authority on the basis that science and technology benefited patriarchy or men, was not sufficient grounds for this type of feminist claim. And he did this with great rhetorical flourish; it was very invective, it was a very invective sort of tone. And I think what happened afterwards was that some people—I can’t name them, and I don’t know how many there were, but it was a significant number—started clapping for his statements.

It was a very humiliating moment to my life; it was extremely humiliating, that my students would clap against me, when all I was trying to do was talk to them about arguments and argumentation, in the light of what I had been trained with. In other words, it’s kind of interesting that when you are trained in graduate school, it’s sort of like, you know, you’re trained in this kind of—I don’t want to say it’s political—you must be aware that most college campuses are very liberal, right?

TDR: Oh yes, certainly.

PV: Yeah, and the training which you receive, it’s very much slanted toward a particular political point of view. And it’s almost unstated—I’m not saying that this is good or bad, I’m just saying that this is the case—but certainly political framework is absorbed into academic material, and you must be aware of that by reading, you know, arguments by academics. You know, they talk about things such as Marxism—that’s just the intellectual way of thinking about it. But maybe to the general public, these are issues that are not considered objects of general discussion. You know what I mean?

TDR: Okay. Tell me if I’m wrong, but after the incident, you didn’t attend class for the next week. Why was that?

PV: I was on doctor’s orders.

TDR: What did the doctor say?

PV: I went to the doctor because over the weekend I had basically been—I don’t know how to put it—I had basically been crying to my husband, and he said “Why don’t you go to the doctor, see what she can do for you. Maybe this is something you could talk to the doctor about, get some advice.” So I did, and what she recommended was not to attend class for—she recommended not to go back for a full week, and I said no, I wanted to go back on Friday. . . . I scheduled class on Friday, and I got a lot of complaints that said “This is Winter Carnival weekend, you can’t hold class on Friday.” And I said “Okay, I’ll schedule class on Monday.” And this is how the thing went, back and forth, it was like any time I was trying to enforce any kind of goodwill or good-naturedness or anything like that with the students, they were just so like, um, demanding, they just demanded more.

TDR: Couldn’t it be said that an important part of the educational process is this kind of back-and-forth questioning of ideas, and many would argue that that’s very important, and that professors’ ideas should be questioned. What do you think?

PV: Yeah, I think professors are not immune from being questioned. I’m not saying that these scholars I’ve studied should not be questioned, but the comments I was getting on my papers were like “Oh, this thinker is like, the worst writer in the whole wide world,” or “This thinker thinks they know everything,” and I would be getting irrational things from them. These weren’t thoughtful statements; they were irrational.

TDR: One thing I heard today from several students was that during one class when you got frustrated that you said something along the lines of that the students weren’t fit to be Ivy League students.

PV: No, I never said that. On what grounds would I say something like that? I’m not on the Admissions Committee, all right? I can’t say that.

TDR: So you deny that?

PV: Yeah, of course! I never said that.

TDR: And just one more question—and now that you’re withdrawing your suit [she is now pursuing legal action], would you like to take this time to apologize to the set of students that you named?

PV: Absolutely not. Absolutely not. This is not to absolve them of the wrongdoing that they did—they did a real number on me. They did a real number on me. I can talk at length about postmodernism and stuff, but they should treat me as a human being; if they can’t realize that at this stage in their life, then that’s really disturbing. I’m not apologizing to any member of the Dartmouth community; I still have the same grievances. I am showing the same indifference to the Dartmouth community as they showed to me. It’s like, what comes around goes around. And it’s not vindictive, but that’s rather just the way it is. You show indifference, then that indifference gets returned. And this is because I don’t want my family to suffer. I don’t want my family to get dragged into this, and I don’t want any other place that I go to get dragged into this.

TDR Interview: Professor Venkatesan

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