The Clown Quarter Now Has An Engineering Division
Toni Airaksinen notes an interesting expansion of the Clown Quarter ethos:
The leader of Purdue University’s School of Engineering Education recently declared that academic “rigour” reinforces “white male heterosexual privilege.” “One of rigour’s purposes is, to put it bluntly, a thinly veiled assertion of white male (hetero)sexuality,” she writes, explaining that rigour “has a historical lineage of being about hardness, stiffness, and erectness; its sexual connotations — and links to masculinity in particular — are undeniable.”
Hardness and stiffness. And we can’t have any of that beastliness in the minds of people who may one day be working on projects involving cranes and scaffolding. According to Dr Donna Riley, academic rigour and the expectation of competence are “exclusionary” and tools of “privilege,” and are unfair to women and minorities, for whom rigour and competence are presumably impossible.
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.”
To fight this, Riley calls for engineering programmes to “do away with” the notion of academic rigour completely, saying, “This is not about reinventing rigour for everyone, it is about doing away with the concept 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.”
Update, via the comments:
Although Dr Riley’s prose is often lumpen and unclear – clarity might prompt mockery, I suppose – there’s much that’s implied. For instance,
Rigour accomplishes dirty deeds, however, serving three primary ends across engineering, engineering education, and engineering education research: disciplining, demarcating boundaries, and demonstrating white male heterosexual privilege.
That last one still feels comically jarring, as if shoehorned in, dutifully.
Understanding how rigour reproduces inequality, we cannot reinvent it but rather must relinquish it, looking to alternative conceptualisations for evaluating knowledge, welcoming diverse ways of knowing, doing, and being, and moving from compliance to engagement, from rigour to vigour.
Cynic that I am, I can’t help wondering whether those undefined “alternative conceptualisations” would entail patronising students based on whichever Designated Victim Group they can be said to belong to, provided you tilt your head and squint, and regardless of whether the individual student wishes it or not, and regardless of any consequent alienation and resentment.
So if a student is suitably brown or female or discernibly gay, then their supposedly “diverse ways of knowing” – i.e., lack of rigour – would be indulged to an extent that those dreadful white male heterosexuals could only dream of.
As Dr Riley complains that rigour – i.e., a standard of competence – generates 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, suggests that these wishes may already be coming true.
Somewhat related: “Social justice theorist” Dr Riyad A Shahjahan tells us that punctuality and competence are racist and oppressive.
Also related: These clowns here, at the University of Washington, Tacoma. The ones who tell students that grammar is “racist” and “an unjust language structure,” and where supposedly professional educators spent over a year writing a single 500-word press release.
Well, now we know why those clown cars fall apart halfway through the show.
“scientific knowledge itself is gendered, raced, and colonising.”
Yeah, don’t do that thing that’s shown to work. You might catch whiteness.
You might catch whiteness.
Quite.
“The leader of Purdue University’s School of Engineering Education”
All together now…
Those who can’t, teach!
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.”
It’s a mystery.
This morning, Typepad has been up and down like a tart’s nether-garments. If you’re having trouble posting comments… well, er, actually, there’s bugger all I can do.
If anyone ever wondered how the Dark Ages began, then this would be a good illustration.
The cult-like undertone of “social justice” posturing is, I think, getting harder to miss. As seen above and repeatedly in the archives, it’s not just narcissistic, pretentious, paranoid and irrational; it’s actively anti-rational. Which is to say, it’s mentally, morally and socially corrosive.
Dr Riley goes on to denounce engineering’s “cultures of whiteness and masculinity,”
Is she counting all the Asian engineering students as white now?
“The leader of Purdue University’s School of Engineering Education“
A visit to their web site is instructive, it was a plain old boring school of engineering until 2004 when it appears to have gone off the rails and become the School of Engineering Education, in 2006 they ground out their first PhD in “Engineering Education” followed by lots of grant money and a “Headship” because it is a nice gender neutral term for Chairman.
The “Engineering Education Academics” are where it gets silly after the first year which is pretty standard – “Pre-Chiropractic Engineering” (all you need to get into a chiropractic school is two years of junior college and a check that doesn’t bounce); “Pre-Law Engineering Studies” (I suppose this will be useful in having a background to sue when the planes crash and bridges collapse); “Visual Design Engineering Studies” (“Their work may include designing restaurant layouts to convey visual ambience as well as improve efficiency of service, building stylish but functional devices (e.g. phones, tablets, laptops), furniture design, and automotive exterior design that considers both aesthetics and aerodynamics.”), right…Harley Earl could not be reached for comment.
It gets better, my favorite is “Humanitarian Engineering”:
That is some fine SJW gibberish.
In short “Engineering Education” is:
a) How to bloat up a department so that sinecures can be maintained;
b) Why I don’t and won’t own a car made after 2000.
Is she counting all the Asian engineering students as white now?
Heh. Students of East Asian descent, male and female, do tend to be the second largest demographic on engineering courses in the US and UK, except, that is, where they come first, by quite a margin. But something tells me Dr Riley isn’t overly concerned by such details, or by reality in general. There are predetermined conclusions to jump to.
We’ve been here before, of course. As when the Marxist philosophy lecturer Nina Power insisted, based on nothing, that, being unequally distributed, knowledge and competence are outmoded and unfair, and that “everyone is equally intelligent.” As I said at the time, if Dr Power were involved in a serious traffic accident, I’m guessing she’d want paramedics and surgeons who possessed the kind of “hierarchical” expertise that she airily dismisses. I doubt she’d be happy to go under a knife wielded by someone who’d been taught in the haphazard manner she advocates for others.
And ditto Dr Riley.
Not to worry. We’ll just put Purdue’s politically/socially reliable graduates in charge of designing and building all those “stack-a-prole” apartment blocks so beloved among Leftists everywhere. You know, they kind where the cornices would start falling off before any tenants had been stuffed in. See also, this.
“One of rigour’s purposes is, to put it bluntly, a thinly veiled assertion of white male (hetero)sexuality,” she writes,
So if my (brown female) doctor does her job properly she’s asserting her white male (hetero)sexuality?
#confused
So if my (brown female) doctor does her job properly she’s asserting her white male (hetero)sexuality?
Heh. Yes. It’s thinly veiled.
I wonder whether Dr. Riley has thought this through. Does she really thank that her students’ potential employers are going to jump on board with eliminating rigour in Purdue’s programs and competence among its graduates?
At one point we used to say it doesn’t matter if you don’t believe in science, gravity and the other laws of nature will still continue to work. Why do I feel that some people saw that as a challenge.
The School of Engineering Education has almost nothing to do with Engineering, other than running the Freshman Engineering experience. It exists to give non-Asian minorities and women employment opportunities, and as a beachhead for SJW entryism. At one time, their Interdisciplinary program was a good way to get a combined engineering and science degree, but most people who went that route now go through the School of Biomedical Engineering.
And don’t forget these clowns here. The ones who tell students that grammar is “racist” and “an unjust language structure,” and who spent over a year writing a single 500-word press release.
Ayn Rand is not my guru; I don’t follow her ideas blindly or slavishly as some do. However, that doesn’t mean that she wasn’t correct about some things. David’s story reads like something lifted out of “Atlas Shrugged”, when the Wet Nurse talks to Hank Rearden.
To repeat, she’s not my guru, but I can’t help noting that her predictive power exceeds that of the climate change gang by a considerable margin.
a beachhead for SJW entryism.
It’s quite bizarre to struggle through Dr Riley’s writing, which is rambling, dutifully mannered and removed from reality, with its endless begged questions and idle assumptions about various Designated Victim Groups. It’s the sense that, while a great deal of effort has gone into conforming to the fashions and expectations of her “social justice” peer-group, there’s seemingly little concern for whether what’s being written has veered beyond the merely dubious and into the absurd. I got through a couple of chapters and kept thinking, “Do you not hear yourself?”
From Dr Rileys bio.:
In 2005, she received a NSF CAREER award on implementing and assessing pedagogies of liberation in engineering classrooms.
Whut?
At least she does have a degree in Chemical Engineering but doesn’t seemed to have ever worked as an Engineer.
Yes, the design and construction of … oil rigs … will one day be informed not by careful calculation, a knowledge of materials and thoroughly tested principles, but …
… by arrogantly declaring the management is always right and browbeating every employee into sheep-like compliance, with the resulting catastrophe blamed on subcontracted parties?
A little more seriously, what this cretin doesn’t realise is that one of the few ways ethnic minorities who hail from shitholes can rise above the swamp that continually pulls everyone down is by studying a discipline which demonstrates hard work and commitment, is based on principles universally recognised internationally, provides steady employment, and pays reasonably well. One such discipline is engineering, and I’ve met a very great many decent engineers who have been non-white, female, and often both. I bet the idiot who wrote the piece hasn’t met one in her life.
Remind me to never drive over a bridge designed by any of “Dr” Riley’s students…
If my experiences in engineering undergraduate education and two separate engineering firms are any indication, engineering as a discipline has enough problems with ethics and competence without loading it up with this mess.
studying a discipline which demonstrates hard work and commitment*
*May not apply to those who scraped a 2:1 by the thickness of a Rizla thanks to a 4th year industrial placement which succeeded because said scholar used to go with the company management to Maine Road on Saturdays. Ahem.
engineering as a discipline has enough problems with ethics and competence without loading it up with this mess.
Heh! Seconded.
@champ, I had similar worries, but judging by Farnsworth’s comment above, there is precious little chance of any graduates from this department engineering anything other than a Big Mac.
one of the few ways ethnic minorities who hail from shitholes can rise above the swamp… is by studying a discipline which demonstrates hard work and commitment, is based on principles universally recognised internationally, provides steady employment, and pays reasonably well.
Well, yes. Rigour and conscientiousness tend to have value. And yet Dr Riley seems much more animated by the fact that some careers and disciplines are regarded as more intellectually rigorous, and more statusful, than others. Often disciplines that require a high IQ, rare skills and aptitudes, and most likely some hardcore number-crunching. Apparently, this is somehow unfair.
If you poke through the preview chapters of her book Engineering and Social Justice, you’ll find some boosting of so-called “critical race theory,” a paragraph on Larry Summers’ comments on women in STEM that’s laughably glib and misleading, and of course Marx gets a rhetorical tongue-bath. But the thing is basically a disorderly pile of assertion, with rambling tangents and irrelevant name-dropping, and very little argument in any formal sense. And no explanation of why engineering students should be wasting their time on the “social justice” claptrap that Dr Riley wants to peddle.
In 2005, she received a NSF CAREER award on implementing and assessing pedagogies of liberation in engineering classrooms.
The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency.
So, once again leftists in government are using our tax dollars to defraud us, indoctrinate our children, and destroy our culture.
I have been told numerous times that few in government are radical leftists, but rather are reasonable and moderate reality-based liberals. And yet none of them call our attention to this garbage.
“…a thinly veiled assertion of white male (hetero)sexuality,” she writes, explaining that rigour “has a historical lineage of being about hardness, stiffness, and erectness …”
Anyone else notice the homophobia? I get hard, stiff, and erect too, Dr. Riley.
I get hard, stiff, and erect too, Dr. Riley.
[ Slides plastic sheeting underneath Dom. ]
I’m concerned for my upholstery.
Anyone else notice the homophobia?
Do you mean androphobia / misandry?
“Do you mean Andropov is …”
She associates hardness, etc, with heteros, as though gay men are limp and flaccid. That’s homophobia in my book.
Andropov is = androphobia. Spell corrector.
Andropov is stiff, too. Has been for quite a while.
as though gay men are limp and flaccid
Only their wrists? (ducks)
As I recall. Post-modern fraudster Jacques Derrida was also fond of claiming that anything in the STEM fields that had to do with “hardness, stiffness, and erectness” was an inarguable sign of male sexism.
Please, someone tell me that this is a joke…
It’s only the lack of a budget which delays the apotheosis of Dr. Riley’s career; the world’s first suspension bridge with a monthly cycle.
My car’s a 2013 but it was engineered and designed in Japan, and built by deplorables on an Ohio assembly line, so I figure it’s pretty safe.
Speaking of engineering, let’s have a round of applause for the henchlesbians, who fixed Typepad right up after David issued them screwdrivers. (The metal kind.)
Politicaly incorrect slogan from an ’80s fad: Engineers do it by the book.
What were once vices are now habits.
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.”
Or, Why All The Proper, Non-Bullshit Subjects Need A Social Justice Add-On To Keep Me Employed.
…explaining that rigour “has a historical lineage of being about hardness, stiffness, and erectness; its sexual connotations — and links to masculinity in particular — are undeniable.”
In a sane world, this is when the Purdue board would quietly urge this woman to seek help, arrange a face-saving sabbatical to be followed by a quiet demotion, and reassure students that there is indeed nothing at all priapic about hard work and intellectual rigor.
Hardness and stiffness
Nobody tell her about the Rigid Tool Company!
the Rigid Tool Company
I’ll just drop this here and pretend I haven’t noticed.
Speaking of deranged feminists, I’ve downloaded the first of what I think will be a series of podcasts of Laurie Penny and her sister discussing things. I’m going to try to get through it, just to see how bad a podcast can really get.
I’ve downloaded the first of what I think will be a series of podcasts of Laurie Penny and her sister discussing things.
Do report back.
I can see that rigor is hard (as in hard evidence) but why is it stiff and erect? Why don’t we just call it “big-breasted” and, uh, moist? Problem solved.
And fishy. Evidence is fishy.
And fishy. Evidence is fishy.
You can’t use that word.
Didn’t you get the memo?