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Late Columnist Gets Own Ivy League Building
Here's a good argument for marrying rich: buildings named after you! If you are rich you can get big libraries and stuff, but the spouses of billionaires have to settle for century-old class buildings on Ivy League campuses. Ronald Perelman, recently in the news for his bitter divorce from Ellen Barkin, was once married to Page Six editor Claudia Cohen. Cohen, who more or less invented the mercurial and biting Page Six house style, was married to Perelman from 1985 until 1993. Perelman bought the naming rights to the University Pennsylvania's Logan Hall in 1995. Cohen died last year of ovarian cancer, and now Perelman has exercised those rights. You can probably imagine how academics feel about this! More »
priya venkatesan
Student-Suing Prof Wrote a Lame Senior Thesis
Former Dartmouth lecturer Priya Venkatesan famously tried to sue all her students for being mean to her. Now, as a researcher at Northwestern, she's probably less likely to have her academic feathers ruffled by entitled little Ivy frosh retching at talk of power structures. But she does still have to deal with their student newspapers digging up embarrassing things about her. Embarrassing things like... her senior thesis. It's called Montaigne and Macbeth: Rebellion, Gender and Patriarchy in the Renaissance. Of course. More »
priya venkatesan
Welcome to Northwestern, Student-Suing Prof!
Former Dartmouth lecturer Priya Venkatesan, the woman who threatened to sue her students for being mean to her and not caring about post-modernism, is now a research associate at Northwestern. She'll definitely end up with plenty of material for her forthcoming book at NU, especially because the blog College On the Record has already published her email address and invited students to harass her. Venkatesan declined to speak with the Wall Street Journal when they wrote that terrible op-ed about the situation, saying she'd said all she needed to say to The Dartmouth Review (and boy, did she). And today, the Harvard Crimson weighed in! More »
pompous tools
Student-Suing Professor Roundly Disliked
Now it's official: everyone involved in any capacity with the Priya Venkatesan affiar annoys the hell out of us. To recap, Ms. Venkatesan was a Dartmouth lecturer who decided to sue her students for harassment or something because they heckled her. She is clearly a pompous tool. Her students are also probably pompous tools. Now a pompous tool who writes for the Wall Steet Journal editorial page weighs in with an indictment against academia. Joseph Rago attended Dartmouth, you see, though he totally didn't like it very much and didn't even try very hard in his classes. Because of post-modernism. Writing papers for lit classes is just like "filling in Mad Libs," he explains. Writing indictments of academia for the Wall Street Journal editorial page, on the other hand, is more like Pictionary. After the jump: amusing student reviews of Venkatesan's class from an internal Dartmouth page. The kids didn't really like her! More »
lawsuits
Ivy League Prof Sues Students For Being Mean to Her
A Dartmouth lecturer is suing her class for discrimination, as she revealed in a series of regrettable and bizarre emails that promptly ended up all over Dartmouth blogs. Priya Venkatesan (Dartmouth '90, MS in Genetics, PhD in literature) emailed members of her Winter '08 Writing 5 class Saturday night to announce her intention to seek damages from them for their being mean to her. The email, and so, so much more, below: More »
academia
James Franco To Sexify Morningside Heights
Good news, New York-based fans of Freaks and Geeks and ridiculously good looking men. James Franco (also of Spiderman) has reportedly decided to get smaht and enrolled himself in the MFA writing program at smallish commuter school Columbia University. A tipster, who sort of bumped into him at the Whitney and then eavesdropped, tells BWOG that the actor will be starting this fall and will also be taking classes at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, where he'll presumably write beautiful plays about a young actor realizing he has secret impulses buried inside himself. He may just be doing this to get back some of the "serious actor" cred he let slip away recently (see: Annapolis, Tristan and Isolde and, erm, Fly Boys), but who the hell cares. See you on the 1 train! The full, amusing tip lies after the jump. Plus a bonus.More »
journalismism
J-School Dean Beginning To Hate Journalists
The Dean of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, one of America's most [self] important J-schools, is starting to regret drilling that punctilious attention to "ethics" into students. The Dean, John Lavine, sent out a letter with quotes from anonymous students talking about how great all these new Medill programs are. But another cheeky young bastard-in-training there remembered that the school teaches students not to use anonymous quotes, and started trying to track down who those quotes came from. When he couldn't find them, he wrote a story questioning the almighty Dean. Now it's been picked up by the Chicago Tribune, and Lavine comes off like kind of a dick, especially with quotes like "I am not about to defend my veracity." The lesson: Never work at a J-school for any reason, because you'll suffer all the karmic payback for the time you spent as an annoying journalist yourself. Full version of Lavine's controversial letter after the jump. More »
books
How to Market an Academic Book
We're all for academics sexin' up their work to sell, but this is a bit much. Lot's Daughters: Sex, Redemption, and Women's Quest for Authority, by Stanford's Robert Polhemus, "uses the 'disreputable Bible story of father-daughter incest' as a lens to understand family and gender relations through the centuries," quoth Publishers Weekly. "He casts a wide net over literature... to argue that the power dynamic between younger women and older men—in which daughters fall in love with their father's lives and older men are tempted by the intoxicating power and promise of youth'—is integral to our society." Oh, is it? Way to justify your Lolita complex, man. Middle-aged men can get away with anything. More »
academia
