Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

So not only does my future school deny Jeremiah Wright an honorary degree, despite having Bernandine Dohrn on their faculty, they’ve also hired the infamous Priya Venkatesan, the professor at Dartmouth who thinks that students disagreeing with her is a  violation of her civil rights and  was an example of  especially pernicious ““subversiveness.”

Now, many are using this Ventkatesan incident as a way to blast the bugagboos of the humanities – critical theory, literary theory, postmodernism or anything with a French last name. Now, I’m much more sympathetic to these strands of thoughts than most, and I hardly want to be part of a backlash that is often dishonest, borderline-xenophobic and genrally uninformed. If we can instead just focus on the core of the Venktasean case, which is that we seem to have a narcissistic, control freak, authoritarian and all around ineffective professor, we’d all be better off.

Of course, this suggested switch in focus doesn’t change the fact that I’m going to be attending school that hired her. Go Wildcats!

PS – In case anyone cares, my partner and I went 4-3 at the TOC, thus failing to get into elimination rounds.  A slightly disappointing end to our national circuit debate careers, but hardly a distressing one. We debated some amazing teams, and the teams we lost too all did really well.