Washington, May 8: An Indian-American professor at an Ivy League institution is suing her students on the ground that they were “anti-intellectual” in her class, causing her trauma and distress.

Priya Venkatesan, 39, has achieved notoriety in America on account of her unprecedented threat of a lawsuit, communicated in an unorthodox manner through emails to as many as 14 of her former students a few days ago.

Venkatesan, an alumnus of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, returned to her alma mater in 2005 and was asked to teach a course she herself designed, called Science, Technology and Society.

Her competence to teach this course was deemed by senior academics at Dartmouth College to be her uncommon qualifications: a master’s degree in genetics and a PhD in English literature.

Venkatesan says she expected that students would enjoy an inter-disciplinary class of understanding science through literature.

But her expectations were belied when students began questioning her academic assumptions and plotting what appears to have been an insidious revolt in class.

Venkatesan is giving no more interviews, but has spoken at length to campus publications at Dartmouth.

According to those accounts, on one occasion, a male student took issue with Venkatesan’s arguments about the effect of scientific revolution on women at the time of witch trials of the Renaissance period.

When the student who challenged the teacher was applauded by others, Venkatesan told them that the boy’s behaviour amounted to “fascist demagoguery”.

“It was extremely humiliating that my students would clap against me,” Venkatesan told The Dartmouth Review, a campus publication.

She earlier told Concord Monitor, a New Hampshire newspaper, that she was so distraught that she was advised by a doctor to take a break.

Promptly, Venkatesan cancelled classes for a week and her students, for their part, complained to Thomas Cormen, chairman of Dartmouth’s writing programme.

Narrating several incidents of this kind, Venkatesan told the campus press: “The students manipulated the situation so that they totally undermined the academic system.… It never became about the students meeting my expectations, it became about me meeting their expectations. They abrogated that right. They abrogated, they turned the tables around. Bullying, aggressive and disrespectful.”

Venkatesan said her students showed “intolerance of (her) freedom of expression”.

In March, she quit Dartmouth and took up a job at Northwestern University in Illinois.

Then, a few days ago, unexpectedly, her former students received an email that read, in part: “I regret to inform you that I am pursuing a lawsuit in which I am accusing some of you (who shall go unmentioned in this email) of violating Title VII of anti-federal discrimination laws.… I am also writing a book detailing my experiences as your instructor, which will name names so to speak. I have all of your evaluations and these will be reproduced in the book.”

Venkatesan said: “The behaviour, like I said in which the tables were turned around, was partially motivated by race,” although she conceded that she may not be able to prove that in court.

If she goes ahead with her lawsuit, Venkatesan will also make Dartmouth and her superiors party to the case on the grounds that they did not support a colleague against harassment.

In an op-ed article this week in The Wall Street Journal, an alumnus of Dartmouth, now a staffer for the paper, wrote: “The remarkable thing about the Venkatesan affair, to me, is that her students cared enough to argue. Normally, they would express their boredom with the material by answering emails on their laptops or falling asleep.… Maybe, despite the professor’s best efforts, there is life in American colleges yet.”