Dartblog

My friend Joe Rago picks up the Priya beat in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. A “hostile” environment? Hardly, Joe writes. “[A]t …putatively superior schools, students are spoiled for choice when it comes to professors who share ideologies like Ms. Venkatesan’s. The main result is to make coursework pathetically easy. Like filling in a Mad Libs, just patch something together about ‘interrogating heteronormativity,’ or whatever, and wait for the returns to start rolling in.”

I’ve interrogated heteronormativity; it held up rather well.

The Dartmouth administration, meanwhile, is on a tear about the bad press all of this student and alumni activism is hoisting upon it. Four independent reform trustees, elected? An attempt to rig the trustee-election rules, sunk? A second, more ribald, attempt at same being fought in court? Reduce all the din to its elements and one finds a series of considered criticisms of the actual, real, material quality of instruction and administration at the College. Eliminate those errs and perhaps all the “bad press” will go away. Or are we to blame democratic trustee elections for Priya Venkatesan, too?