By Professor
Doom
During the last election, the cry of
“RACIST,” the great weapon of the Left for decades, was finally blunted after
being bashed into the head of everyone the Left considers an enemy…basically half
the country had this weapon smashed into their heads for voting for Trump, so
it’s no small wonder the weapon doesn’t work as well as it used to.
They’re casting about for a new weapon,
and one of the big candidates is the cry of “PRIVILEGE.” This is, of course, a
code word for RACIST, and can be used almost interchangeably. Much like with
racism, almost everything can be blamed on privilege, and it’s already being
used excessively:
Academic rigor is not merely making a
claim, but backing up that claim with facts and coherent arguments. For what
it’s worth, a mathematically rigorous argument generally isn’t open to
debate--pretty much by definition, if a mathematical assertion is open to
debate, it’s not rigorous. Other fields aren’t so objective, and so a part of
more qualitative arguments is debating and discussing the assertions.
I’d noticed long ago that certain fields
(Hi African Studies!) generally don’t do debate and discussion. Any challenge
to an assertion made there is either shouted down, responded to with a cry of
RACISM, or both.
I’m inclined to believe academic rigor is
a good thing, and the proper way to generate new, valid, knowledge. Lack of
rigor, lack of discussion, is only good for spreading ideology. At best.
The one making this claim about the
“privilege” of academic rigor heads an Engineering department. How could an
engineering professor argue that rigor is unimportant? Buildings and bridges
don’t remain standing because you yell at them or threaten to call them RACIST,
after all.
Defining rigor as “the aspirational quality academics apply
to disciplinary standards of quality,” Riley asserts that “rigor is used to
maintain disciplinary boundaries, with exclusionary implications for
marginalized groups and marginalized ways of knowing.”
Ok, so let’s go with this definition of
rigor. When was quality determined to be a bad thing? When was rigor used to
maintain boundaries? These seem natural questions to ask, but no argument is
provided to answer them.
“Ways of knowing”? What? Gravity is
pretty hard rule not to follow…it’s not “white” to obey and understand the
rules of gravity, and I’m unaware of alternative “ways of knowing” how to
adhere to those gravity laws. Similarly, there are many broad rules of engineering
(eg, Newton’s Laws) where there only is one way of knowing the facts of how
reality works. I assure the gentle reader that great minds have considered
getting around those laws, because doing so would be a tremendous advancement
in human knowledge.
But you have to actually know the laws
before you can try to work around them. It’s not a white thing (I’ll never
understand why the nuts making these sorts of claims just ignore China), nor is
it a male thing (the professor making these claims identifies as female, which
may or not be the same thing as actually being female anymore).
Riley also argues that academic rigor can be used to
exclude women and minorities, saying, “Rigor may be a defining tool, revealing
how structural forces of power and privilege operate to exclude men of color
and women, students with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people, first-generation and
low-income students, and non-traditionally aged students.”
Can someone get this person a mirror? She
was head of the Department of Engineering at Purdue for over a decade. And yet
she’s arguing the system kept her from rising to the top. I have to wonder a bit about what sort of engineer
she is:
Riley is the author of…Engineering and Social
Justice…Riley earned…a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in Engineering and
Public Policy.
Yes, she has an undergraduate degree in engineering, but she didn't become department head based on her undergraduate degree, it's her Administration degree which has put her in a position to run this engineering department. We need to ask questions about whether this sort of hiring is a good idea, honest.
The reality is she’s a Social Justice
Warrior with an Administration degree, and she’s head of a school of
Engineering Education…not exactly a school of Engineering.
Let that sink in: this department is not
being run by an engineer. She got a Ph.D. in Administration, not engineering.
To fight this, Riley calls for engineering programs to “do
away with” the notion of academic rigor completely, saying, “This is not about
reinventing rigor for everyone, it is about doing away with the concept altogether
so we can welcome other ways of knowing. Other ways of being….
Is anybody else a bit worried about
driving over a bridge built by engineers from this school? Would Riley really
want her children on such a bridge? I suspect her tolerance for “other ways of
knowing” would diminish markedly if her or her children’s life hung in the
balance. Gravity, schmavity, right?
I’m really hard pressed to believe she
actually believes these things she’s saying.
Campus Reform reached
out to Riley multiple times for comment, but did not receive a response in time
for publication.
Well, it is clear from the above she does
believe her own work should not be open to debate, or even comment, but luckily
the article I’m quoting from has a few comments from readers, uniformly
dismissive of this “other ways of knowing” nonsense.
At some point companies will not recruit Purdue. This happened
at Stanford. If an engineering product is defective people die…
The above comment shows I’m not alone in
thinking that engineering is one of the many things in the modern world which
should be pursued rigorously. Another comment asks the question I’ve been
dancing around:
Wow I thought that engineering was about designing and building
things , all this time it’s been another white haven, but why are there so many
Asian and Indian engineers? More importantly why does this woman have a job?
When SJWs
(Social Justice Warriors) take over a campus, they put themselves in
“leadership” positions, from which they can enforce their lunacy. I can’t help
but suspect that’s what happened here. From her position as department head,
you can bet she pressures her underlings to follow her SJW ideals…or else. You
can also bet she makes certain that all future hires are SJWs only.
Eventually, you’ll have a whole department of people with
pseudo-engineering degrees, yet allegedly teaching engineers. I’ve seen it
happen in math, so I can easily conceive it happening elsewhere.
In any
event, Purdue has just nuked the credibility of their engineering degrees.
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