A former Dartmouth College lecturer is threatening to sue as many as 14 of her former students for harassment. Priya Venkatesan, who left the college in March, said students in her freshman writing class disrespected her, complained about her to her boss and attacked the material she tried to teach.

Venkatesan, who is Indian, said she believes she was harassed because of her race and gender.

"It's not that there were any overt racial comments or sexist comments made," Venkatesan said yesterday. "There was general disrespect and behavior that I would interpret as harassment."

Venkatesan sent e-mails to her former students last week notifying them that they would be named in a "potential class action suit" brought by her against Dartmouth, which she called a "bigoted place." She told the students the lawsuit would accuse them of violating federal anti-discrimination laws.

She also told them that she's writing a book "detailing my experiences as your instructor" and said she plans to "name names, so to speak" in the book. Yesterday, Venkatesan said she's contacted one literary agent about her book but hasn't heard back. She hasn't had much luck hiring a lawyer, either.

Dartmouth lawyer Robert Donin doesn't seem worried. "It has come to our attention that a former faculty member has e-mailed some undergraduates and faculty members mentioning the possibility of legal action," he said in a statement. "We have determined there is no basis for such action."

Venkatesan, 39, is a Dartmouth graduate who returned to the Hanover college as a research associate and lecturer in 2005. In the fall of 2007 and the winter of 2008, she taught a freshman writing course she designed called Science, Technology and Society. Venkatesan, who has a master's degree in genetics and a Ph.D. in literature, said she thought students would enjoy an interdisciplinary class.

Instead, she said, some students attacked the material "as if they were achieved scholars." The students were hostile, rude and abrasive, she said, and ignored her authority as their professor.

"They were attacking thinkers that, even with my degrees, I would think twice about attacking," Venkatesan said. "I'm wondering why I was subjected to that behavior. . . . It was just a little disturbing that you'd get a student who'd come up to you after getting a reading assignment and say, 'So I underlined this. This is X, Y and Z why this statement is false.' . . . It consistently kept happening."

One example of the students' egregious behavior, Venkatesan said, was the time the students applauded in class when someone disagreed with her. She said she was lecturing on The Death of Nature, a book by philosopher Carolyn Merchant, and described Merchant's view that the emergence of science contributed to the marginalizing of women. That idea "offended the sensibilities of the students," she said, and one student harshly challenged it. At the end, the other students clapped.

"When an idea offends someone's sensibilities and they find it's something that needs to be argued with, that's fine," she said. "But there are appropriate ways of doing that in an academic setting."

The way the students did it was not appropriate, Venkatesan said. Afterward, she said, she was so upset she went to a doctor, who suggested she take a break. So she canceled classes for a week.

The students complained about her to her boss, Thomas Cormen, chairman of the college's Writing Program. An anonymous review posted to a Dartmouth blog details some complaints: "If you decide to take this class, prepare to NOT be allowed to express your own opinions," the reviewer said. "We were forced to write an in-class essay on 'respect' (and how we lacked it) because we expressed our views on controversial topics and some did not agree with the views of 'established scholars.' "

Venkatesan said she's considering taking legal action against Cormen and other faculty. Cormen did not back her up when students complained about her, she said. "He did the academically questionable thing of not supporting a colleague," she said. "That's not academic de rigueur."

Cormen declined to comment yesterday. So did Christopher Lowrey, an associate professor at Dartmouth Medical School, where Venkatesan was a research associate. She has accused Lowrey of making a sexist comment to a colleague and then berating her when she confronted him about it.

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