And we mustn’t forget the tale, via New York magazine, of the Brooklynite comedian and podcaster named Billy, his girlfriend Megan, and his girlfriend Megan’s other boyfriend Kyle. An exhaustingly self-consciousness three-way entanglement resulting in a series of grimly farcical situations that were framed, rather coyly, as “relationship difficulties.”

The above, I should add, was one of several attempts by New York magazine to portray unfaithfulness and cuckoldry, and the consequent anxieties, as the very zenith of a progressive lifestyle.

As when a betrayed husband, Michael Sonmore, boasted, unconvincingly, that he “finally became a feminist” thanks to his wife’s nocturnal sexual adventures with a chap named Paulo. A wife who was “embracing herself” and becoming empowered, we were told, while her children, aged six and three, wondered where their Mommy was.

Given the Guardian’s intense gravitational pull on certain kinds of stupid, it was perhaps inevitable that Dr Pitcher would find a welcome there. Now it turns out that squirrels are yet another proxy for “our” unspoken racial sentiment.

Our esteemed intellectual, who divines hidden racism by means of his third eye, is hurt by the avalanche of mockery aimed at his earlier pronouncements, claiming his words have been misconstrued, while also claiming that same derision proves him right, and while repeating the very claims that resulted in laughter.

He does, however, concede that “the uprooting of… Japanese knotweed is… not necessarily motivated by racist intent.”

Once some mental association has been discovered or contrived, everyone must act as if the innocuous object or action were in reality malicious and/or wounding, whatever the actual intention and regardless of how absurd and/or dishonest the claim of grievance is. Because whatever bizarre association of things is in the accuser’s head is assumed to be in everyone else’s head too.

Dr Golz and her peers are in effect saying to students, “You should want to be the guy who bitches about the rather unobvious racist subtext of party snacks. And if you do choose to behave that way, we’ll reward you and flatter you and make you feel important, while making other people jump through clown hoops to appease the feelings you pretend to have.”

And the more implausible and contrived the claim of victimhood is, the more status points accrue, on account of the complainant’s heightened sensitivity and supposed mental prowess. One has fathomed an injustice mere mortals cannot see. And bewildered onlookers are expected to pretend that this is a high and noble function of an academic institution.

Presumably, because there’s no social status to be had in acknowledging the realities of the matter, only in being seen to mouth support for a fashionable cause. Even when the particulars of that cause, its actual implications, remain utterly mysterious and of no discernible interest.

Dr Riley goes on to denounce engineering’s “cultures of whiteness and masculinity,” and informs us that, “scientific knowledge itself is gendered, raced, and colonising.”

Says she, “This is about doing away with the concept [of rigour] altogether so we can welcome other ways of knowing. Other ways of being. It is about criticality and reflexivity.”

Yes, the design and construction of fighter jets, oil rigs and 1000-tonne tunnelling machines will one day be informed not by careful calculation, a knowledge of materials and thoroughly tested principles, but by criticality, reflexivity and “other ways of being.”

Dr Riley is the author of the little-read tome Engineering and Social Justice, which she describes as “an attempt to explain the lack of emphasis on social justice in engineering.”

The term “social justice” is, we’re told, “difficult to define” and “resists a concise and permanent definition,” a problem illustrated by the author’s own struggle to arrive at a convincing definition, despite deploying the term on every other page.

But apparently, engineers need to spend less time doing load-bearing calculations and more time pondering “radical protest” and “Marxist traditions.”

Needless to say, Dr Riley opens the book by congratulating herself for having devised “alternative ways of thinking” that are “challenging,” and which, for those less enlightened, may be “difficult to understand.”

As Dr Riley complains that expectations of rigour generate both inequality and “white male heterosexual privilege,” presumably she would rather we erased distinctions more broadly, between ability and mediocrity, and between diligence and half-arsedness. Though her own so-called scholarship, and indeed her employment, suggest that these wishes may already be coming true.

Readers are invited to ponder the psychology in play at this terribly progressive school. The triumphal righteousness of compelling thirteen-year-old schoolgirls to undress in front of a mentally ill male or opportunist pervert. A mentally ill male or opportunist pervert that the schoolgirls do not trust. Resulting in the girls feeling frightened and upset.

Imagine that tingle of power. All wrapped in a drag of modish piety.

And – as so often – note just how readily the school administrators, these uniformly progressive women, will sell out their supposed sisters. The daughters of their neighbours. In order to look fashionable and therefore high-status…

In light of which, it’s difficult to see any plausible common ground. When activist attendees would rather jeer and preen, and call concerned parents bigots and racists, rather than address their actual concerns, it’s not obvious what room for compromise, or debate, there could be. Ultimately, either mentally ill boys and opportunist creeps can pretend to be girls and invade schoolgirls’ changing rooms, or they can’t.

Answers on a postcard, please.

In the all-too-brief video below, filmed at Boston’s Proof Gallery in September 2011, Mr Fryer performs a thrilling and ambitious piece titled Wall Melody, in which he “explores” the theme of commitment by holding down one note on a child’s musical toy, while accompanied by an unspecified power tool, operated elsewhere by persons unknown, for reasons unclear.

And note that the plumber’s reticence on political matters – i.e., his professionalism and good manners – is viewed by Resnikoff as suspect.

Not one of us.

This, lest we forget, is the kind of effete meltdown that Mr Resnikoff felt important to share publicly with his peers, in order to establish his ‘progressive’ credentials.

If I may paraphrase the dynamic: “I feared that, despite his civility and professionalism, this broad-shouldered prole might at any moment sense my disdain for his kind, rise up in a rage, and then strangle me with his big, unmoisturised hands.”

Yes, I exaggerate, though not by much.