In today’s Wall Street Journal, editorial page writer and former Dartmouth Review editor Joseph Rago has the last word about Dartmouth’s most litigious professor, the one and only Priya Ventakesan, and it’s an optimistic one. He acknowledges that “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.” He shares his own shocking “Mad Libs moment,” too:
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.
Xzibit must have been so proud. But take heart:
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.
I’m inclined to agree. All the same, as I noted here, the responsibility can’t rest entirely with the students. If they’re smart enough to spot an incompetent—or all-out demented—professor, what is Dartmouth College’s excuse for letting her slip through the interview process? In any case, the counterrevolution will be a long one, affording us many, many opportunities to be outraged while laughing up our sleeves at the spectacle. The latest from Dartmouth? A panel discussion about the writings of Maurice Sendak. A fitting reminder that we can count on the wild things peeping out from the Ivy for some time to come.
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