via: No Quarter

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 expos, which she promises will “name names.”

An article about some whiny, thin-skinned professor (no doubt, an affirmative-action hire) at Dartmouth. This, though, was my favorite part:

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.

(If you’re not familiar with “Pimp My Ride,” it’s a program where people nominate either their own, or a friend’s beater of a car. Then a team of automotive specialists—who are very good at what they do—descend on it and rebuild it from the wheels up, topping it off with a custom paint job and enough video and audio gear to annoy other motorists from five blocks away.)

Via this comment at SDA

the blog québécois

Andrew says: Needless to say the Guardian, the Independent and the BBC are having a good bash as well.

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On your can buy our previous CD in the same place:

Oh yes and there is always my book.

Andrew says: Alas, people like Al Gore probably won’t take any notice of these facts. Not like he and his kin have ever let them get in the way before.

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