Why you should never cross a bridge designed by a Purdue U engineer

Donna Riley (pic), the head of the engineering department at Purdue, argues that academic “rigor” is merely a blind for “white male heterosexual privilege.”

“The term,” she writes, “has a historical lineage of being about hardness, stiffness, and erectness; its sexual connotations—and links to masculinity in particular—are undeniable.”

There follows a truly surreal meditation on the existential and sexist depredations of slide rules—those hard, straight instruments that have traditionally been deployed by men—and periodic eructations like this:

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+ [love the plus sign!] people, first-generation and low-income students, and non-traditionally-aged students.

Of course, it is not just rigor that upsets Professor Riley. There is also “Scientific knowledge itself,” which, according to Professor Riley, “is gendered, raced, and colonizing.” What should we do about this outrageous behavior on the part of nature? We must abandon the whole machinery of rigorous analysis for something freer, more “creative.” Engineering programs, Professor Riley suggests, should “do away with” the ideal of academic rigor. “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.”

Her essay appears not in a science fiction journal or a publication intended for the denizens of a sanatorium but a journal concerned with science. This woman is the head of a department of engineering in an institution of higher education. The moral is that things are worse than they appear.

Lifted from: New Criterion.