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:

Ed West on the ghosts of Christmas yet to come: 

I’ve noticed these ‘diversity bollards’ popping up everywhere, without a word spoken about it… Does anyone in a position of power believe this is going to get better and these security measures will ever be taken down? If not, perhaps they should explain to us why, how they led us down this route, and what they intend to do about it… No free society can maintain its liberal traditions with that sort of internal [terrorist] threat, so as the problem deteriorates the surveillance state will expand. We will be faced with the decision about whether to allow the government to monitor people’s internet activity, because the alternative would be asking serious questions about immigration and multiculturalism.

Heather Mac Donald and Mark Bauerlein on the fallout of absent fathers: 

One of the fallacies of leftwing ideology is to insist that differences between males and females are socially constructed, at the same times as females are demanding all sorts of privileges and quotas on the basis that, well, you’ve got to have a female there because apparently there’s something essentially different about her. But when it comes to acknowledging the unique and complementary roles of a father in raising a child, that’s all just out the window. Everything is interchangeable, and males are an afterthought. The tragic thing is the kids themselves understand this.

And Bruce Bawer on the demands and evasions of the Swedish Clown Quarter: 

Erik Ringmar, a 56-year-old political scientist at Lund University, had a problem. At Lund, he explained, it’s strongly recommended that 40% of the readings for every course be written by women. There’s a certain flexibility, but if your reading list contains no women at all, your chance of approval is near zero. Ringmar had wanted to teach a course on “the rise of right-wing ideas, and eventually fascism, at the turn of the twentieth century”… and wanted his students to read original texts by fascists themselves. The problem was that during the period in question, there were virtually no female fascist writers of consequence. Ringmar did manage to find one woman who, with a bit of a stretch, could be included on the course list, but that was it. It wasn’t enough. His department head told him so.

Accordingly, Ringmar expanded his course topic to include anarchists as well as fascists. Fortunately for his purposes, there’d been plenty of female anarchist authors back in the day. With this change, Ringmar’s course plan was approved – but just barely, and only on the condition that he also adds Judith Butler. Judith Butler, of course, was not a pre-World War I fascist or anarchist. Born in 1956, she’s a founder of Queer Studies and a propagator of the notion that gender is a social construction. By conventional standards, there was no sensible rationale for putting Butler on Ringmar’s reading list. But Ringmar agreed.

Needless to say, Dr Ringmar’s accommodation of such irrelevance proved insufficient and a campaign of slander and harassment ensued, led by leftist students, with the educator being denounced for his “insufficient focus on gender.” 

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

Heather Mac Donald on a certain newspaper of record: 

The day after the New York Times informed its readers about the “professional” world of astrology, it ran a front-page story about ICE agents’ alleged reign of terror in Atlanta, Ga., under the Trump administration. This reign of terror consists in targeted enforcement raids against individuals like an illegal Mexican who has been deported twice, served time in prison, convicted of two domestic-violence incidents, and charged with rape which he plea-bargained down to a lesser crime. The number of illegal alien law-breakers in Atlanta is so high that one is booked into a county jail every few hours, reports the Times. The Times notes with dismay that illegal aliens are being arrested for driving without insurance and without a licence. Apparently Times reporters would not mind if their car were totalled by an uninsured driver. A reporter for the Spanish-language newspaper Mundo Hispanico sends out Facebook alerts of sightings of ICE agents so that illegal aliens can evade the law. Yet we are supposed to believe that it is the Trump administration that poses a threat to the rule of law.

Apparently, readers of the New York Times are expected to concern themselves with the violation of their borders by illegal aliens only insofar as illegal alien status is to be construed as excusing other criminal activity.

Peter Wood on perverse art and its admirers: 

Take the elevator to the sixth-floor offices of the college president, however, and… you will find… a celebratory exhibit of art created by the friends and allies of the 9-11 terrorists… The paintings and the models in the show are unremarkable as art. They display no special skill or aesthetic sensibility. That has not stopped Erin Thompson and her two fellow curators from attempting to squeeze whatever portentous meaning they can from the paintings. For example, in reference to a painting of a glass vase, a bottle, and two cups, by Ahmed Rabbani (a member of Al Qaida who trained as a terrorist in Afghanistan), the curators observe in the exhibition notes, that the “empty vessels also serve as an oblique reference both to Rabbani’s absent family and to his acts of self-denial and resistance.” What you won’t find in these paintings is any trace of repentance. These artworks are by terrorists and their accomplices who seem untouched by the monstrousness of their actions. They can wax sentimental about their own families and can draft images of hearts and flowers, but pity for the victims of their jihad is beyond their imagination — at least their visual imagination.

Curiously, or perhaps not curiously at all, the reasons for detention are downplayed or entirely absent. Nor is there any mention of released detainees’ recidivism rates. And despite the claims of artistic and sociological heft, there is, as Peter Wood notes, a baser motive in play – the wearying, juvenile need to be seen as transgressing bourgeois proprieties: “What better way to rile people than to celebrate terrorist art at a college that educates students for careers in law enforcement?” In New York City, no less. 

Somewhat related, this video here, in which students share their views of the exhibit, and of course this somewhat revealing faculty profile. 

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

At Ballou High School, Washington, DC, it would appear that miracles happen:

Teachers… say they often had students on their rosters they barely knew because the students almost never attended class.

And yet, this year, every student of suitable age, including those who were absent more often than in class, has somehow graduated and been accepted by a college or university. At a school were only 3% of students were deemed proficient in reading, where the average SAT score is 782 out of 1600, and where, according to one teacher, those who do attend, in the loosest possible sense, “roam the halls with impunity.”

Of course I use the word graduated in the same entirely bogus way favoured by the school’s administrators.

Via Rafi. 

More lifting from the comments, where, following this post, we were discussing how to spot good intentions, however dire their actual consequences:

If we set aside the explicitly sadistic and murderous fantasies of Marx and Engels, and Lenin and Trotsky and all the others, I suppose we have to ask whether the claim of benevolence and altruism, or the delusion of such, signifies actual benevolence and altruism, or whether it can be used as camouflage, a fig leaf, for something else entirely.

What if someone – say, a politician and supposed intellectual – wants to confiscate even more of other people’s earnings and wants to do this regardless of whether such confiscation would have the social benefits they claimed it would have, even if it makes their stated objective impossible. Are we to trust in their self-image as a person of unassailable virtue?

And what about these guys here, the ones who want to compel us to live more simply, as they conceive it, and who claim, apparently in all seriousness, that not permitting us to own the “dispensable accoutrements of middle-class life,” including “cars, holidays, electronic equipment and multiple items of clothing,” will make us “better neighbours,” “better parents” and better people? Do you trust their stated motives – of “healing” us, and curing us of our acquisitiveness – and do you trust their self-image as benevolent and just?

And when a Guardian columnist rages against a random family in the neighbourhood, about whom she knows nothing beyond the size and amenities of their home, and then exults, proudly and in print, at the thought of that random family’s downfall and suffering, and at the thought of the “aggressive redistribution” of their belongings, and that Guardian columnist tells us how pleasing this will be and that she just “can’t wait,” are we to believe that her motives are selfless and high-minded?

Readers are invited to fathom the intentions in play behind each of the above examples.