Dartmouth Professor Sues Students?

An irate Ivy League lecturer says she is suing her freshman students because they were mean to her in class...."Class Action", Emma Haberman, Cynthia Fagen, NY Post, 4/30/2008 -- no link

Heh-heh-heh....

Few of the professor's students deny disliking her; they just say it had nothing to do with race, gender, or any other federally-protected characteristic. Rather, the lecturer embodied that special brand of neurotic pedagogical tyranny that includes making rules against questions, refusing to interact with students, and cancelation of class for a week after the class applauded a student who contradicted Venkatesan’s opinions about post-modernism...Putting the Class in Action, Ivygateblog.com, 4/30/2008

It had to come to this sooner or later, eh? We already know from Wonker's history, which is a paradigm of what it's like to work in academia if you're not on the Left, how professors treat each other -- ad hominem attacks, lawsuits, denial of tenure assaults, usually regarding preposterous and unprovable claims about racism, sexism or homophobia. The list of lawsuits and other mean stuff surrounding those disputes is campus legend. It only follows that, sooner or later, professors would start treating their students the same way. Still, as Ivygate's writers note:

Spontaneous applause during a class on literary criticism? Obviously, there is something very wrong with this picture, so outrageously shocking as to shake Venkatesan to her very core: In a class at an Ivy League university, students were paying attention. Worse: They were engaged, and they cared....Putting the Class in Action, Ivygateblog.com, 4/30/2008, cont'd.

An obvious extension to this -- trial lawyers, take note! -- is to sue parents for allowing their children to have wrong opinions.

Luther