Higher Ed is higher on WHAT, exactly?: Prof sues disbelieving students
In "Dartmouth's 'Hostile Environment'" by Joseph Rago for the Wall Street Journal, we learn that prof Priya Venkatesan is suing her former Dartmouth students (she has since departed to shed ineffable* light at Northwestern):
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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."
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As Rago points out, profs used to like it when students questioned things.
Anyway, of course science has suspect access to truth. Science's specialty is observable fact. Observable fact sometimes gives us a window into truth, and sometimes it doesn't. I suspect that the spoiler is often facts that were not or cannot be observed. But that's no reason for dissing science, as opposed to, say, social work or serious novels.
*ineffable = You had better not express frustration in the presence of la prof, no matter how implausible you find her theories.


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