Professor Defarge

This hilarious story appeared on the Journal Online a couple of days ago, but a friend just brought it to my attention. As often happens when American professors open their mouths or put pen to paper, Professor of "French Narrative Theory," Priya Venkatesan, made herself a laughingstock when she threatened to sue her former students because their anti-intellectualism allegedly violated her civil rights. A sample, a soupcon, if you will, of her comedy routine:

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."

I work in academia. Yes, these people really exist and no, we conservatives don't have to make them up. I recently received a draft program for a scholarly conference I will soon attend. With genuine anticipation I opened the program scanning for workshops in my subject area. To my chagrin, I found them. The description of one workshop began by denying that gender is biological and declaiming that social science has now proven "that gender is not fixed; rather, it is variable and negotiable." It went on to complain, "The hegemonic masculinity is the culturally dominant masculinity."

Um, yeah. As a friend is fond of pointing out, truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense.