AMAIRIKUHN EDGYKAYSHUN STRIKES AGAIN: ACADEMIC RIGOR ENDANGERS ...
We're well overdue for another rant on Amairikuhn edgykayshun, and I was beginning to wonder when we'd have another one, when Mr. V.T., a regular article contributor here, found this one and passed it along.
I have to blog about this, because it hits close to home. It seems that a Purdue University engineering "profuzzilator" (sorry, I just can't call him/her/it a "professor") is saying that academic rigor is - you guessed it - racist and sexist and another example of "white male privilege." Why does this hit close to home? It's because my father was an engineering alumnus of Purdue, when it was still a respected engineering university.
But you can kiss that distinction goodbye, after you read this:
Prof: Academic rigor reinforces 'power and privilege
Sorry dad, all your hard work and sacrifice and education are now up for grabs. Academic rigor, according to Profuzzilator Riley, is really not about academic rigor, but about reinforcing white heterosexual male privilege:
“One of rigor’s purposes is, to put it bluntly, a thinly veiled assertion of white male (hetero)sexuality,” she writes, explaining that rigor “has a historical lineage of being about hardness, stiffness, and erectness; its sexual connotations—and links to masculinity in particular—are undeniable.”
Hence, Riley remarks that “My visceral reaction in many conversations where I have seen rigor asserted has been to tell parties involved (regardless of gender) to whip them out and measure them already.”
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.”
She claims that rigor can “reinforce gender, race, and class hierarchies in engineering, and maintain invisibility of queer, disabled, low-income, and other marginalized engineering students,” adding that “decades of ethnographic research document a climate of microaggressions and cultures of whiteness and masculinity in engineering.”
She evens contends that “scientific knowledge itself is gendered, raced, and colonizing,” asserting that in the field of engineering, there is an “inherent masculinist, white, and global North bias...all under a guise of neutrality.”
The last bit of foamy blither might be news to Dr. Michio Kaku, Dr. Sylvester Gates, Dr. Shirley Jackson, Dr. Elizabeth Rauscher, Chen-Ning Yang, Srinivasa Ramanujan, and a very long list of other people who apparently had no problem learning their disciplines, suffused as they were, with white male privilege. And I have to wonder just exactly what a lesbian-gay-transgendered version of Foucault analysis or Bernouilli's equation or the Euler identity might look like. One shudders to think what an LGBTQXYZGHK interpretation of E=Mc^2 might result in when the terms of the equation are defined by such kookery.
But wait, there's more. While you're trying to wrap your brain around LBGTQXYZGHK versions of any number of outdated white heterosexual male mathematical theorems dating back to Euclid, that Procrustean bed of white male privilege, ponder for a moment what profuzzilator Riley's "recommendation" is to fix this dire state of affairs:
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. It is about criticality and reflexivity.”
“We need these other ways of knowing to critique rigor, and to find a place to start to build a community for inclusive and holistic engineering education,” she concludes.
Uh huh.
Somehow, I can't see profuzzilator Riley getting a job any time soon actually engineering anything for anyone. Just for kicks, imagine such nitwittery presenting itself for a job interview with the design and engineering division of Airbus in Toulouse, or Mitsubishi in Tokyo, or for an engineering faculty position at the University of Moscow. None of them would let such nonsense through the door - much less on campus - for an interview. Imagine, too, just for real laughs, the curriculum vita of such an individual. Imagine, too, the state of mind of someone actually thinking such idiocy would be taken seriously by any self-respecting university, anywhere...
...except, of course, in Amairikuh, the exceptional nation, which is indispensable to everyone.
Bottom line: if your son or daughter has talent for engineering, don't send them to Purdue. Paying two cents for tuition there would be paying two cents more than any engineering education there would be worth.
See you on the flip side...
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This is sad & I have read other articles with this professors s spewing the same thing. Like math is about white privilege & should be done away with because it discriminates against minorities. Being from Indianapolis, Perdue has been a bright star in our state. Sorry to see this great institution is being attacked. I
She’s inadvertently making an argument for white-heterosexual-male supremacy, isn’t she?
Perdu, French word for ‘lost’.. sounds apt.
I think you mean Fourier instead of Foucault analysis, but can’t think of a more perfect description of this absurdity than that Freudian slip. This was a great read.
You are entirely correct, of course… but the question is, did I do that intentionally or not? 😉
One cannot through a day in the good ole USA w/o committing at least three felonies[Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target Innocents by Harvey Silverglate 2011].
Now, even an unbiased word must tiptoe-cautiously into an academic paper; or be literally sentenced in more ways than it cares to admit, or imagine.
These so-called profs need to toss-back a quite few boilermakers and have a hard rigorous, ribald discussion. Then perhaps they’ll rise then rise to the occasion and celebrate/Vive La Difference!
How does any of this not end badly? Is there a single scenario in which this does not all end badly? Because I’m trying to think of one and I can’t. This post-structuralist lunacy has really jumped the shark here. It’s gone past the point where satire or parody can even mock it. And that’s actually dangerous.
Has anyone tried calmly explaining to these folks that not everything is a construction of language? Tried reminding them that there is a tangible reality out there, not just a chain of ‘signs and signifiers signifying nothing? Or that planes will fall out of the sky if engineers are incompetent?
Jordan Peterson was right: we’re living in the delusional fantasy of a 13 year old girl. And guess what folks, she’s a word nerd with some pretty serious daddy issues.
I actually would not accuse Ms Riley of saying anything ‘stupid’. In my opinion, she was handed a script by the PTB and told to push it as hard as possible. The fact that her ravings were promulgated by the media and not just simply ‘spiked’ (after sad laughter and shaking of heads) says it all…
In my opinion, Ms Riley is a minor part of setting-up fake opposition. The PTB wish to exploit every possible fracture or divide in society. Where there is not a ‘natural’ one, they will make one up. Divide and conquer, combined with enough sheer busy-ness that people “don’t look behind that curtain.” Dumbing the sheeple down is just a small ‘perk’ in this overall strategy. (Engineers – being one – have a major advantage: They have to work with the Real World. ‘Political correctness’ does not work very well when trying to deal with Mother Nature. And yep, that last was intentionally and satirically ‘sexist’.)
(On a more metaphysical level, opposites are a part of life down on earth-plane. Day/night. Hot/cold. Male/female. Opposites provide both discernment and choice. Done right, opposites clarify. To try to “define opposites out of existence” through various contrived forms of ‘neutrality’ is ultimately not only vaporous but impossible…)
Well said! Opposites can provide a complimentary balance through the fine art of logical compromise.
Thanks Gshawks ,
Ironically or coincidentally I watched a 2013 interview again tonight of Charlotte Iserbyt. So fortunate to still be able to homeschool my son .
Published on Sep 18, 2013Bones John Kerry and his brethren bloodlines.
Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt is an American whistleblower and freelance writer who served as the Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education, during the first term of U.S. President Ronald Reagan, and staff employee of the U.S. Department of State (South Africa, Belgium, South Korea).[1][2][3] She was born in 1930[4] and attended Dana Hall preparatory school and Katharine Gibbs College in New York City, where she studied business.[4] Iserbyt’s father and grandfather were Yale University graduates and members of the Skull and Bones secret society.
She is known for writing the book The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America. The book reveals that changes gradually brought into the American public education system work to eliminate the influences of a child’s parents (religion, morals, national patriotism), and mold the child into a member of the proletariat in preparation for a socialist-collectivist world of the future.[3] She says that these changes originated from plans formulated primarily by the Andrew Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Education and Rockefeller General Education Board, and details the psychological methods used to implement and effect the changes.[3]
In an interview[2] concerning secret societies and the elite agenda she disclosed that in the early 1980s she had a chance to meet with Norman Dodd who had been the chief investigator for the United States House Select Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organizations commonly known as the B. Carroll Reece Committee. In the video interview she claims that Dodd discussed a ‘network’ of individuals including Carnegie who planned to bring about world peace by means of rapid changes in society. These changes would be brought about by involving the populace in various wars and military conflicts. She further claimed that Dodd had discussions with Rowan Gaither, the president of the Ford Foundation in which he revealed that directives from the President of the United States compelled foundations related to the Ford Foundation to direct their funding into bringing about the merger of the USA with the Soviet Union.[5][6][7]
Mr. Dodd, all of us here at the policy making level of the foundation have at one time or another served in the OSS (the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA) or the European Economic Administration, operating under directives from the White House. We operate under those same directives… The substance of the directives under which we operate is that we shall use our grant making power to so alter life in the United States that we can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union.
— Rowan Gaither, President Ford Foundation – 1953, Norman Dodd – friend of Iserbyt[8]
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Let’s try this again. Last one mod ate. Great post Gshawks. I am posting this interview of Charlotte Iserbyt from September 13, 2013.
It is a Coincidence that I’ve watched for second time tonight and posted it as well, in sitewide Gizar section.
SUBVERSION it’s what’s for dinner…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BFcS6rDNXJI#
The natural state is based on intuition, not instinct.
We are already half way there in junk science. If the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine and Lancet contend that (4 years ago) upwards of 50% of all articles submitted for publication are fake science, then we are well on our way to implementing Riley’s agenda. Outside of academia we only need look at the BS “studies” that Monsanto pushes to legitimize the use of Roundup. etc, etc, etc.
I presume that Mizz Riley works in a non-rigorous building, drives a non-rigorous car, commutes over non-rigorous bridges and lives with a non-rigorous partner.
I think her brain suffers from rigorous mortis.
Let’s apply some pyschobabble back at Riley – her musings remind me of a comedy sketch of a sexually repressed woman in the psy office look at Rorschach pictures and at every pic when asked what she sees she goes ‘penis’. Lol.
Hmmm.. they’ve taken the P of the LGBTQ+ Does that mean they no longer want to be associated to CHILD RAPISTS anymore??
In full.. LGBTTTQQIAA.. looks like what my head types out on the keyboard as I slam my head repeatedly into my desk when I see this kind of over self enabled self powering intellectual diaherrea.
I wonder what this woman has to say about HARD WORK. or Rising to the challenge..
I’m glad she put her name to the article.. note to self.. make sure my children go nowhere near this person.
Natural state is based on instinct. And civilization is based on truce. Truce we call Druid circle of clans. When laying down the axe of war, it must be mutual, and sanction against broken truce must be agreed upon.
Discussion of today is, as if truce were handed down by deity. But it is actually a proven science of Runes. From rule of mutual agreement, order is enforced by reason. Fairness is to compare to original truce.
Keep in mind, that female nature was not around at the first truce in natural state. How then can she speak of what she has never known? Supreme patriarchy is to light a cigar in deep space!