The Venkatesan Affair

On April 30 of this year, The Dartmouth Review published a lengthy interview with a former Dartmouth professor and alum, Priya Venkatesan, when it became known that she was planning to sue seven students from her four sections of first-year writing for aggressive, abusive, and disrespectful behavior in class. She has since decided not to sue, but the incident has received a lot of press, including this in thedartmouth.com and this in The Wall Street Journal. A detailed profile of her is here.

Who knows what really happened here. The students say Prof. Venkatesan blathered on and on in an impenetrable jargon and would not allow questions, and exploded with anger if anyone disagreed with her; Venkatesan says that the students were arrogant and full of their own importance and treated her disrespectfully. The superficial impression Joseph Rago offers in the WSJ piece is that Venkatesan considered disagreeing with her disrespectful; Venkatesan herself says that she is always happy to explore differences of opinion, but that the incessant questions were interrupting her lecture (in a first-year writing class!?) and some students really wanted to learn from her, so she made a new rule: no questions during the lecture; all questions will be held till the end.

There is a wealth of interesting material here. Venkatesan is Indian, and suggests that her predominantly white upper-class students reacted badly to her out of racism; she admits in the interview that she has no real evidence of that, but suspects it. Given the nature of her English in the interview, I'm guessing there may have been a certain amount of xenophobia in students' reactions to her accent and syntax; at least down here in Mississippi any foreign instructor, no matter how wonderful his or her English is, is subjected to this. "I can't understand a word she says!"

What interests me most in the incident, though, is Venkatesan's commentary on her interactions with Tom Cormen, director of Dartmouth's first-year writing program:

Tom Cormen was consistently rude to me and he was very unsupportive of my teaching in the Writing Program. I am perplexed as to why he would give me an offer to teach four sections in the Writing Program and then show absolutely no support, no professional support, and I wasn’t even looking for personal support, no professional support or guidance, and trying to do my best job to be a writing instructor. Now to give you the background, I taught writing in my graduate school at the University of California San Diego. I was what they call a teaching assistant. The students get graded by teaching-assistants in the research universities, not like Dartmouth where the professors grade the students. I was a teaching assistant at the University of San Diego, and I have three teaching evaluations. They were all spectacular. They were all spectacular. They were all positive. I could fax them to you. I don’t mind, I could honestly fax them to you, but no professional support or guidance from the beginning. But, I was confident in my ability to teach expository writing, so I went about it with very little support or direction from the department. That is, in itself, very unusual to have a writing program that does not have a structured orientation program for its new writing staff. Very, very extraordinary. Very out of the ordinary. Very unusual. Usually if you go to schools that have established writing programs or institutes for writing they will give you a two to three day orientation that introduces you to teaching that gives you some pointers, some advice, some suggestions on how to be the most effective teaching instructor. These orientations are not meant to dictate your teaching philosophy or ethics. They are meant to orient you, to guide you in the teaching process to be an effective expository writing teacher. There was no orientation. That in itself is questionable. It is very questionable. It raises flags about the quality of the writing program. I did approach some administrator saying where’s the orientation. She gave me this blank, actually it was a phone conversation, so I can’t see a blank face, but it was like a blank expression over the phone, like I don’t know what you’re talking about. There was no orientation.

She's right, of course: properly run writing programs do offer consider professional support and development. A presemester workshop is the absolute minimum.

She goes on:

So Tom, when the students started complaining about me to Tom, Tom did bring me to his office a couple of times and said, “Tell me how things are going.” But what is unusual about what Tom did as a professor, as a writing program director, is that he did not side with the colleague. That is also very, very strange. That is odd. In any professional academic setting it is not academic de rigueur to go against a colleague when students are bitching about them. I don’t know how else to put it. ... Tom did not side with me. He did not show any official support for me. When incidents happen, when suspect incidences were happening, he would essentially try to dictate my teaching philosophy. He used very strong language in telling me what I needed to do to meet the needs of the students. I think yeah, you need to meet the needs of the students. But sometimes students have a different agenda than just learning. Who knows, what the agenda of the students are. I can’t read their minds. That is very strange because when I talked to my colleagues in California, they came back to me and they said, “Why isn’t your boss supporting you?” And I said, “I don’t know.” That is really strange that the boss doesn’t support you, we’re colleagues.

Here I start to have qualms. It's the WPA's job to support the instructor blindly? The WPA has no responsibility to the students, or to the program as a whole? Venkatesan obviously has an us-against-them mindset here, and is angry at her WPA for not sharing that mindset.

Obviously, I wasn't there when Tom Cormen "would essentially try to dictate my teaching philosophy," or when he "used very strong language in telling me what I needed to do to meet the needs of the students." Was he shouting at her? Was he using foul language? And what exactly does she mean by "essentially try to dictate my teaching philosophy"? That word "essentially" suggests to me that he wasn't trying to dictate how to teach, but was trying to push her in a certain direction, which she experienced as trying to dictate how to teach. There is this widespread ethos that says "my classroom is my kingdom, I do what I want and nobody dictates to me," which makes the WPA's job difficult. Grad students typically don't have that attitude yet--I'm guessing Venkatesan didn't have it when she taught as a GI at UC San Diego--but adjuncts often do, and professors almost always do. If the WPA's job is to look out for program coherence and fairness and evenness, and to push on everybody to keep improving and expanding their pedagogical strategies, and the instructors' attitude is "don't dictate (and anything you do to push me past what I'm already doing will count as dictating)," there will be problems.

And it looks very much as if Venkatesan was "teaching" first-year writing by lecturing and then answering questions. No exercises or group activities. No brainstorming on paper topics. No freewriting. No peer-review or peer-editing. Lectures and "discussion"--I'm guessing, here, but I threw those scare quotes up around "discussion" because all too often "discussion" is construed (by the instructor who likes to lecture) as a series of leading questions to which the students provide the right answers, all in the service of the instructor's lecture. "Discussion" in this sort of case is a sham, a way of pretending to be open to the students' ideas and opinions while actually simply dictating to them. If in fact Venkatesan did and does think this way, and did and does teach first-year writing this way, then obviously real questions and critiques from the students would come across to her as aggressive bullying. I'm supposed to be in charge of this class!

One of my colleagues from San Diego told me, and I’m not sure I agree with it, but she told me, and please don’t quote me with saying that I agree with this, don’t take it out of context, but she said the classroom is not a democracy and the way she runs her classroom is with an iron fist. I’m not like that. I’m not the iron fist, but I think my genuine attempt to teach them—I think they tried to take advantage of some of my ability not to be this iron fist. I think a lot of professors are like, I’m the boss of the classroom and you listen to me, and that’s probably the norm. I’m a little more lenient, I’m a little more liberal, and I think this was kind of taken advantage of. I think also that many times when I was lecturing, many of the students would take over the class.

While they took over the class, the students that were questioning me would not question the student, but they would consistently question me. In other words, in that setting, the student had more authority than me. Usually the student that questioned me was a white male. When this white male spoke he was given more authority of knowledge, more respect than I was given.

The thing about authority, though, is that sheer institutional authority is never enough. Students outnumber you in the classroom. If you really want to dominate them, cow them into submission, you need a gun; you need armed guards ready to bludgeon them into silence. Barring such police-state tactics, if you can't coopt their resistance, they will dominate you, either by "taking over the class" or by checking out, staring out the window, doing the crossword, texting each other, chitchatting. If you really want to dominate them, you have to do it by stealth, by coaxing them into complicity with your authority.

And of course in some sense all teaching is social regulation. The instructor is in charge, is hired by the university to lead the students through a series of steps from less understanding and fewer skills to more, and to assess their performance along the way and at the end. But there are lots of ways to stage that regulation, some more iron-fisted than others. Venkatesan complains that Tom Cormen is a computer science professor: "My first response is what is someone who has a computer science background going to know about teaching writing? What are they going to know? They haven’t been trained in literature or composition rhetoric." By implication, of course, Venkatesan has been trained in "composition rhetoric." But if she has, surely she has heard about Peter Elbow, and the idea of writing without teachers? Utopian as Elbow's idea from the early seventies undoubtedly is, it's an important landmark in the field, but one that Venkatesan has apparently never heard of--or else, perhaps more likely, has heard of but dismissed as too soft, not rigorous enough.

Ultimately an instructor's most important pedagogical tool is her or his own personality. Whether that personality is shy or bold, domineering or self-effacing, serious or funny, it has to be crafted into an effective teaching tool, or the teacher will fail. My sense, frankly, is that Venkatesan doesn't yet know how to do this. If she wants to run her classroom in a more or less authoritarian style, fine--but she has to learn how to do it so that students go along with it. She can't just expect them to submit to her, just because that's what she did when she was at Dartmouth.

And it's the WPA's job to help instructors feel their way from this sort of fumbling and stumbling to an effective mobilization of their own personalities for classroom use. This is not "essentially dictating my teaching philosophy"; it is professional development. I would personally prefer a more egalitarian classroom, but if an instructor really wants to be the sole authority, it's my job to help him or her develop pedagogically effective strategies for doing so.