Simple Deconstruction

Having taken a class on Literary Theory & Criticism @ UNLV, nearly three weeks of which was spent on the Decontructionists, I find the below post on a WSJ story by Mark Hemingway over on The Corner pretty funny. (It was heady stuff, to be sure, and we did have a number of students who were either so (a) lost or (b) hostile to the subject (and to the poor teaching assistant), that I believe they were politely invited to drop the class. A few of them did…)

Deconstruct This [Mark Hemingway]

I imagine our esteemed Dartmouth alum Peter Robinson will have some thoughts on this later, but this story from today's WSJ is most amusing:

Often it seems as though American higher education exists only to provide gag material for the outside world. The latest spectacle is an Ivy League professor threatening to sue her students because, she claims, their "anti-intellectualism" violated her civil rights. Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of "French narrative theory" that it amounted to a hostile working environment. She is also readying lawsuits against her superiors, who she says papered over the harassment, as well as a confessional exposé, which she promises will "name names."

Kids can be so cruel. I mean you work hard to explain something simple like how in Baudrillardist simulation, one is faced with a choice: either reject subdialectic patriarchialist theory or conclude that society, somewhat paradoxically, has objective value, but only if language is equal to culture; if that is not the case, Sartre’s model of Baudrillardist simulation is one of "neodialectic narrative", and therefore a legal fiction — and they just refuse to respect you as a teacher.