Dartmouth students get e-mails from former teacher claiming disrespect
HANOVER, N.H. --A former Dartmouth College teacher and medical school researcher sent e-mails to some of her former students saying she plans to sue them because they "harassed, compromised, abused or discriminated against" her.
Priya Venkatesan, 39, who received her bachelor's degree from Dartmouth in 1990, last week e-mailed the former students in her Science, Technology and Society course with the news that she is pursuing a federal civil-rights lawsuit against some of them.
Venkatesan, now at Northwestern University, said in an interview with the Valley News that she is still searching for a lawyer to take her case and would name as many as 15 students as defendants. She said Dartmouth itself and two professors also might be named.
"My intent was to do my job, but it got met with a lot of hostility," said Venkatesan, who quit her teaching post in March. "The way I read it is that maybe it has something to do with my ethnicity or my gender. Possibly both, I dont know."
Dartmouth officials quickly dismissed her complaints as groundless.
"It has come to our attention that a former faculty member has e-mailed some undergraduates and faculty members mentioning the possibility of legal action," Robert Donin, the colleges general counsel, said in a statement. "We have determined that there is no basis for such action, and we have advised the students and faculty members of this."
Thomas Cormen, director of the Dartmouth Institute for Writing and Rhetoric and Venkatesan's former boss, was named in the e-mails as a possible defendant. He said he and other college officials had met with a group of Venkatesans students, who were nervous about the e-mails. "Youre an 18-year-old away from home, and your professors threatening to sue you. Id be anxious," Cormen said.
Venkatesan, who is Indian, said she has a masters degree in genetics from the University of California, Davis, and a Ph.D. in literature from UC San Diego. College spokesman Roland Adams said she began working at Dartmouth in July 2005.
Dan Choi, a 19-year-old freshman who took Venkatesans writing course and received one of her e-mails last weekend, said many of his classmates had been frustrated with the dense reading material and her teaching habits. However, he said he had never noticed any discriminatory behavior among his peers.
Choi said he personally "was fine" with most aspects of the class, but that Venkatesan hadnt offered him much in the way of feedback to improve his work.
He said the e-mail about potential litigation was an unpleasant surprise.
"It definitely shocked a lot of students," Choi said. "It scared a lot of students, in terms of what they say to professors from this point on."
Venkatesan said Choi is not among those who might be named in a lawsuit.
She said the students had not made overtly racist or sexist remarks to her, but that she suspected the disrespect some of them showed her may have stemmed from her ethnic background or gender. In one instance, she said, a student contradicted her during a lecture on feminism and science, drawing applause from some of his classmates. Venkatesan said she was "horrified" and canceled class for a couple of days.
Venkatesan said she was disturbed when Cormen shared stories about a class he had taught where students examined the issue of racism in baseball.
"Its not that it explicitly offended me, it just made me feel very uncomfortable," Venkatesan said. "Why would he be saying racism in baseball consistently? Hes intimating that my being a fan of baseball is inappropriate, its ignorant. Dont you know that people like you would never be let into baseball because of your ethnicity? Thats what can be read into that statement."
Cormen said he was perplexed. "I taught a first-year writing course on baseball," Cormen said. "Some of the students wrote papers on racism in baseball. Thats true. What its got to do with Priya Venkatesan is beyond me."
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Information from: Valley News, http://www.vnews.com/ 