Wednesday, April 30, 2008

How Do People Too Stupid To Find The Courthouse Manage To File So Many Suits?

OK, so this first one is probably more a case of delusional than stupid, but Priya Venkatesan has threatened to sue Dartmouth and some of her ex-students who disagreed with her in the classroom. She sent emails to a bunch of faculty and students on the campus announcing her plans.

"I regret to inform you that I am pursuing a lawsuit in which I am accusing some of you (whom shall go unmentioned in this e-mail) of violating Title VII of anti-federal discrimination laws," she wrote in a message that contained several typos.

"I am also writing a book detailing my experiences as your instructor, which will 'name names,' so to speak. I have all of your evaluation and these will be reproduced in the book. Have a nice day."

First problem here is that it's pretty hard to sue students under a statute that protects against employment discrimination.

The article doesn't say whether she was fired or left Dartmouth on her own, but she's now teaching at Northwestern. Just sayin'.


Second Stupid: Juicy Couture (an oxymoron if I ever heard one), is suing Victorias's Secret for daring to slap their Pink logo across the ass of sweatpants. I may be missing something here, but is Juicy claiming that they thought of printing tasteless shit on clothing asses and that no one else can do it? If that's the case, I'm the one who thought of putting stuff on the backs of T-shirts. The front is OK; someone else came up with that, but anyone printing stuff on the back of T-shirts owes me a ton of money.

4 comments:

Janiece said...

Freshman Dean Gail Zimmerman told students not to open any more of Venkatesan's e-mails.

I'm sure THAT'LL happen. Because really, who wouldn't intentionally give up an opportunity to ridicule and blog about an English Professor who can't write and believes she's entitled to sue her students because they dissed her?

Duh...

Eric said...

Nor does it help that the "discrimination" was the students' failure to respect her auth-or-i-tai! Do you know they had the gall to actually ask her questions in class? Ye Gods!

It's worth going to the Dartmouth school paper's blog and reading the follow-ups, including an interview Professor Venkatesan gave to one of the writers, in which she comes off as slightly less stable than Commander Queeg in The Caine Mutiny.

Nathan said...

Yeah Eric, she's a hot topic.

I've had about 50 hits from people searching combinations of her name, Dartmouth and Northwestern.

I think there are lots of Northwestern students wondering what kind of vetting the school does.

John the Scientist said...

Nathan, schools do no vetting.

First of all, the damn lawyers make sure that if you say something bad in a recommendation, you can be sued for defamation. So recommendations are useless.

Second, when asked, the previous institution lies through its teeth. The only way to un-tenure a prof is to prove plagiarism or sexual harrasment. If you can convince a troublesome one to leave, they aren't going to screw the pooch by being honest.

We had a prof when I was a 1st year TA who was a certified NUT. Students went to his clue booth with half a clue and came away with a clue deficit. The previous institution gave him glowing reviews. After he was forced out, someone called a prof back there informally. The informal post-facto reaction was: "you interviewed THAT nut and still hired him? His handlers must have made sure he was on his meds during the interview."