Rigor and Evidence = "White Male Heterosexual Privilege"
In engineering, no less.
I think it's ok for scholarly types to explore stupid ideas. But there can be too much of a good thing. Also, it's bad to confuse a stupid idea you're exploring for purely intellectual reasons with...something else. If you're seriously panicked that you might be a brain in a vat, you're doing it wrong. Ditto if you're seriously suggesting abandoning intellectual rigor for gender correctness. Sadly, such activist pseudo-scholars seem to be perfectly sincere about what they're saying.
Then, of course, there's this problem: the tidal wave of craziness is always always always pushing exactly the same ideas in exactly the same direction. It's like they've found an exploit in the university: academic freedom allows me to push my crackpot politics and call it scholarship.
Well, it does. But you shouldn't. It's like using your academic position to pimp your personal business, or your favored religion. In fact, it's worse.
But all that aside: it's just goddamn dumb.
And: ask yourself: do you want to drive over a bridge built by an "engineer" educated in a program that abandoned the ideas of rigor and evidence in favor of political correctness? Not that you didn't ask yourself that already.
I think it's ok for scholarly types to explore stupid ideas. But there can be too much of a good thing. Also, it's bad to confuse a stupid idea you're exploring for purely intellectual reasons with...something else. If you're seriously panicked that you might be a brain in a vat, you're doing it wrong. Ditto if you're seriously suggesting abandoning intellectual rigor for gender correctness. Sadly, such activist pseudo-scholars seem to be perfectly sincere about what they're saying.
Then, of course, there's this problem: the tidal wave of craziness is always always always pushing exactly the same ideas in exactly the same direction. It's like they've found an exploit in the university: academic freedom allows me to push my crackpot politics and call it scholarship.
Well, it does. But you shouldn't. It's like using your academic position to pimp your personal business, or your favored religion. In fact, it's worse.
But all that aside: it's just goddamn dumb.
And: ask yourself: do you want to drive over a bridge built by an "engineer" educated in a program that abandoned the ideas of rigor and evidence in favor of political correctness? Not that you didn't ask yourself that already.
posted by Winston Smith at
7:52 AM
3 Comments:
Articles like this will (should) drive businesses looking for competent engineers away from recruiting at Purdue.
Which is a shame because Purdue is one of the better state engineering schools (viz one of the better engineering schools most Americans can afford without praying for the largesse of the universities financial aid program).
They are in the top 10 overall schools for engineering, but depending on how this goes, how do you trust a civil engineer from there? Bridges need to stay up. Airplanes' wings can't be ripped off.
Where does this disregard for rigor end, as well? I'm sure if she needed surgery of some sort, she would want that surgeon to have come from as rigorous of a program as possible. What the hell is wrong with people.
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