Academic Rigor Reinforces Privilege
 

So, academic rigor for those who design and build bridges, aircraft, weapons systems, ships, dams, nuclear reactors, medical equipment, etc., merely reinforces privilege.

I, for one, am heartened that those who design and build such important systems are subject to rigorous academic standards.

Normally, this wouldn't even be worth reading except that the calls for eliminating rigorous standards in many areas expands and continues.

"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right." ― George Orwell, 1984


Purdue Prof: Academic Rigor Reinforces Privilege
Caroline Stout December 12, 2017 College News

A prominent engineering professor at Purdue University’s School of Engineering Education recently made the judgments that academic “rigor” reinforces “white male heterosexual privilege.”

Donna Riley published an article entitled “Rigor/Us: Building Boundaries and Disciplining Diversity with Standards of Merit” that argues that academic rigor is a “dirty deed” that upholds norms of “white male heterosexual privilege.” The article was published in the most recent issue of the journal Engineering Education.

Riley defines rigor as “the aspirational quality academics apply to disciplinary standards of quality.” She contends that it “is used to maintain disciplinary boundaries, with exclusionary implications for marginalized groups and marginalized ways of knowing.”

"One of rigor’s purposes is, to put it bluntly, a thinly veiled assertion of white male (hetero)sexuality,” she states. Riley also adds that it “has a historical lineage of being about hardness, stiffness, and erectness; its sexual connotations—and links to masculinity in particular—are undeniable.”

Among the other impacts of merit-based motivation, as put forth by Riley include the claim that academic rigor may “operate to exclude men of color and women, students with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people, first-generation and low-income students, and non-traditionally aged students.

Riley also claims that it can “reinforce gender, race, and class hierarchies in engineering, and maintain invisibility of queer, disabled, low-income, and other marginalized engineering students.”

Further, Riley even argues that “scientific knowledge itself is gendered, raced, and colonizing” with “inherent masculinist, white, and global North bias…all under a guise of neutrality.”

In order to eradicate the negative impacts of academic rigor, Riley calls for engineering programs to “do away with” the notion of academic rigor altogether. She states, “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,” Riley demands in the article.

https://www.turningpoint.news/purdue...gor-privilege/

Hmmmm, perhaps the author is merely calling for more flaccid academic standards...;)

The Tacoma Narrows Bridge suffered that failure from uniform gusts of 30MPH or oscillation... Same force as to why soldiers break their step when marching across a bridge. In reality buildings and bridges are not stiffly erect, they sway, expand, and move or they fail....
Sorry about your thesis Caroline, probably helps to know what your talking about.

Edit: That pesky context of the Code of Hammurabi sure flies in the face of SJW's probably finds the Diorite Stela threatening as well.

Professor Donna Riley
 

Yeah, about what I thought...

The learned professor at a White House conference (during the Obama administration).

By her standards, I suppose that rigorous standards are not as important as
insuring that the design and engineering is done by an appropriate SJW placeholder.

So the real question, when a walkway collapses and 114 people are killed, is not
whether or not the engineer improperly
designed and built the box beam support so as to double the load on the bolt heads,
and failed to take live loads into account, but whether or not the engineer was a card carrying LGBTQ person.

http://www.nytimes.com/1985/11/16/us...-disaster.html

"I, for one, am heartened that those who design and build such important systems are subject to rigorous academic standards. " Agreed Tonyz.

She is out of her freaking mind and more than a little bit of a rascist. She pretty much dismisses people of color as having the ability to meet rigorous acedemic standards. Participation ribbons to all.

It was the first thing I thought of when I read those words... :D

Great example with some crazy images for prosterity!

:munchin

The world is full of blithering idiots.:rolleyes:

So by default anyone who is not white, male or straight is too stupid to handle academic rigor. These people are so accidentally sexist/homophonic/racist it’s laughable, but it’s ok because she’s liberal and it’s impossible for her to be any of the aforementioned.

I love the idea that a college professor basically wants people to stay ignorant!

In fact, I enjoy the fact that she probably indebted herself to get to where she is and yet wants others to remain ignorant so as not to offend the willingly ignorant by their lack of desire to improve themselves.

Ah...academia at its finest!

the words: privilege , allahu akbar, racist, blm, nothing but left-wing hate speech
 

I've learned, privilege , allahu akbar, racist, blm, mean absolutely nothing especially mouthed by "professors".

Anything that has the word privilege, I immediately stop reading. :munchin

Your post makes my head hurt. :D