http://www.amazon.ca/Science-Leonardo-Inside-Genius-Renaissance/dp/0385513909/ref=pd_ts_b_3/701-5689592-5610715?ie=UTF8&s=books
capra book I bought
----- Original Message -----
From: "marika" <marika5000@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
Newsgroups: alt.usenet.legends.lester-mosley
Sent: Friday, May 16, 2008 7:44 PM
Subject: women and be positive
> tracing back titles isn't unique to New Orleans
>
> I had to do it regularly in Philly
>
> what's unique is the post Katrina mold
>
> and the difficulty post Katrina in getting insurance on Louisiana
property
> to enable one
> to go to settlement
>
> and the need to have a beef flavored milkshake
>
>
>
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120995103004666569.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries
> Dartmouth's 'Hostile' EnvironmentBy JOSEPH RAGOMay 5, 2008; Page
A13Often
> 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."The trauma was so intense that in
> March
> Ms. Venkatesan quit Dartmouth and decamped for Northwestern. She
declined
> to
> comment for this piece, pointing instead to the multiple interviews she
> conducted with the campus press.Ms. Venkatesan lectured in freshman
> composition, intended to introduce undergraduates to the rigors of
> expository argument. "My students were very bully-ish, very aggressive,
> and
> very disrespectful," she told Tyler Brace of the Dartmouth Review.
"They'd
> argue with your ideas." This caused "subversiveness," a principle
English
> professors usually favor.Ms. Venkatesan's scholarly specialty is
"science
> studies," which, as she wrote in a journal article last year, "teaches
> that
> scientific knowledge has suspect access to truth." She continues:
> "Scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to
a
> social construct."The agenda of Ms. Venkatesan's seminar, then, was to
> "problematize" technology and the life sciences. Students told me that
> most
> of the "problems" owed to her impenetrable lectures and various
eruptions
> when students indicated skepticism of literary theory. She counters that
> such skepticism was "intolerant of ideas" and "questioned my knowledge
in
> very inappropriate ways." Ms. Venkatesan, who is of South Asian descent,
> also alleges that critics were motivated by racism, though it is unclear
> why.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
> cl***** for a week. Thus the pending litigation.Such conduct is hardly
> representative of the professoriate at Dartmouth, my alma mater. Faculty
> members tend to be professional. They also tend to be sane.That said,
even
> at - or especially at - 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 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.Where
the
> standards are always minimum, most kids simply float along with the
> academic
> drafts, avoid as much work as possible and accept the inflated grade.
Why
> not? It's effortless, and there are better ways to spend time than
> thinking
> deeply about ecofeminism.The remarkable thing about the Venkatesan
affair,
> to me, is that her students cared enough to argue. Normally they would
> express their boredom with the material by answering emails on their
> laptops
> or falling asleep. But here they staged a rebellion, a French
> Counter-Revolution against Professor Defarge. Maybe, despite the
> professor's
> best efforts, there's life in American colleges yet.
Mr. Rago is an editorial
> page writer for the Journal.
>
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