quote:


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."



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.

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ORIGINAL: christine1

apparently ecofeminists are spineless?

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ORIGINAL: thornhappy

Stories like this make me groan at best, and swear at worst.  Especially coming from the opinion pages of the WSJ.

Why?  Because some (hell, a lot of folks) think that it's typical of universities today, as opposed to an exception.  I've heard occasional weird onsey-twosey stories come out of the Ivy leagues and then folks jump on the bandwagon and declare all universities to be dens of liberal (aka satan's spawn) iniquity. 

* hrumph *

thornhappy

Well, AREN'T they "bastions of evil"???

quote:

Rich wrote:

So let me see if I have this right.  An authority figure is challenged and questioned by the group.  This is described as fascism.  Between that crap, and the basket cases getting liberal arts degrees in night school with a thesis on their personal victimhood, letters by your name just don't amount to much anymore.

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hottie mczilla wrote:

apparently ecofeminists are spineless?

They're from the jellyfish family.

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ORIGINAL: Alumbrado

Apparently they need the force of the government in the form of courts, lawyers, bailiffs, and so forth behind them...

That's why they support big government, so they don't run out of people to save them.

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Finally, the content of any science is profoundly constrained by the language within which its discourses are formulated; and mainstream Western physical science has, since Galileo, been formulated in the language of mathematics.100 101 But whose mathematics? The question is a fundamental one, for, as Aronowitz has observed, ``neither logic nor mathematics escapes the `contamination' of the social.''102 And as feminist thinkers have repeatedly pointed out, in the present culture this contamination is overwhelmingly capitalist, patriarchal and militaristic: ``mathematics is portrayed as a woman whose nature desires to be the conquered Other.''103 104 Thus, a liberatory science cannot be complete without a profound revision of the canon of mathematics.105 As yet no such emancipatory mathematics exists, and we can only speculate upon its eventual content. We can see hints of it in the multidimensional and nonlinear logic of fuzzy systems theory106; but this approach is still heavily marked by its origins in the crisis of late-capitalist production relations.107 Catastrophe theory108, with its dialectical emphases on smoothness/discontinuity and metamorphosis/unfolding, will indubitably play a major role in the future mathematics; but much theoretical work remains to be done before this approach can become a concrete tool of progressive political praxis.109 Finally, chaos theory -- which provides our deepest insights into the ubiquitous yet mysterious phenomenon of nonlinearity -- will be central to all future mathematics. And yet, these images of the future mathematics must remain but the haziest glimmer: for, alongside these three young branches in the tree of science, there will arise new trunks and branches -- entire new theoretical frameworks -- of which we, with our present ideological blinders, cannot yet even conceive.

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ORIGINAL: TheHeretic

quote:

ORIGINAL: christine1

apparently ecofeminists are spineless?

        Alright, alright.  We'll throw in basement dwelling dweebs with four different engineering degrees if a unisex model won't suffice.

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ORIGINAL: pollux

Level, we need to hook her up with Alan Sokal.

quote:

Finally, the content of any science is profoundly constrained by the language within which its discourses are formulated; and mainstream Western physical science has, since Galileo, been formulated in the language of mathematics.100 101 But whose mathematics? The question is a fundamental one, for, as Aronowitz has observed, ``neither logic nor mathematics escapes the `contamination' of the social.''102 And as feminist thinkers have repeatedly pointed out, in the present culture this contamination is overwhelmingly capitalist, patriarchal and militaristic: ``mathematics is portrayed as a woman whose nature desires to be the conquered Other.''103 104 Thus, a liberatory science cannot be complete without a profound revision of the canon of mathematics.105 As yet no such emancipatory mathematics exists, and we can only speculate upon its eventual content. We can see hints of it in the multidimensional and nonlinear logic of fuzzy systems theory106; but this approach is still heavily marked by its origins in the crisis of late-capitalist production relations.107 Catastrophe theory108, with its dialectical emphases on smoothness/discontinuity and metamorphosis/unfolding, will indubitably play a major role in the future mathematics; but much theoretical work remains to be done before this approach can become a concrete tool of progressive political praxis.109 Finally, chaos theory -- which provides our deepest insights into the ubiquitous yet mysterious phenomenon of nonlinearity -- will be central to all future mathematics. And yet, these images of the future mathematics must remain but the haziest glimmer: for, alongside these three young branches in the tree of science, there will arise new trunks and branches -- entire new theoretical frameworks -- of which we, with our present ideological blinders, cannot yet even conceive.

http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html

Head...... hurts........ brain ooozing.......out now........

quote:

ORIGINAL: christine1

(just bear with me tonight, something's gotten into me.)

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ORIGINAL: JohnWarren

I have to wonder what she would have thought about an incident in one of my classes where a student questioned a statement I had made and I realized that she was right.  I asked her name (it was a class of over 200), noted it down and told her she was excused from the final exam.  She had just earned an A.

Oh, and at an earlier point, I told my socialist professor in one of my doctoral classes who was holding forth on "Scientific Socialism":  "Sir, you do not have a science; you have a religion."

From what I can see, she would have accused you of abdicating the moral high ground, gotten offended, and then sued you.

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ORIGINAL: Alumbrado

Errrrmmm Sokal's 'Trangressing' is a very well known hoax.

Well sure, I knew that.....

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ORIGINAL: Level

quote:

ORIGINAL: pollux

Level, we need to hook her up with Alan Sokal.

quote:

Finally, the content of any science is profoundly constrained by the language within which its discourses are formulated; and mainstream Western physical science has, since Galileo, been formulated in the language of mathematics.100 101 But whose mathematics? The question is a fundamental one, for, as Aronowitz has observed, ``neither logic nor mathematics escapes the `contamination' of the social.''102 And as feminist thinkers have repeatedly pointed out, in the present culture this contamination is overwhelmingly capitalist, patriarchal and militaristic: ``mathematics is portrayed as a woman whose nature desires to be the conquered Other.''103 104 Thus, a liberatory science cannot be complete without a profound revision of the canon of mathematics.105 As yet no such emancipatory mathematics exists, and we can only speculate upon its eventual content. We can see hints of it in the multidimensional and nonlinear logic of fuzzy systems theory106; but this approach is still heavily marked by its origins in the crisis of late-capitalist production relations.107 Catastrophe theory108, with its dialectical emphases on smoothness/discontinuity and metamorphosis/unfolding, will indubitably play a major role in the future mathematics; but much theoretical work remains to be done before this approach can become a concrete tool of progressive political praxis.109 Finally, chaos theory -- which provides our deepest insights into the ubiquitous yet mysterious phenomenon of nonlinearity -- will be central to all future mathematics. And yet, these images of the future mathematics must remain but the haziest glimmer: for, alongside these three young branches in the tree of science, there will arise new trunks and branches -- entire new theoretical frameworks -- of which we, with our present ideological blinders, cannot yet even conceive.

http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html

Head...... hurts........ brain ooozing.......out now........