Any experiences in the workplace with the new academic/postmodern left? 19

[beej67]

A lot of talk on this topic in the podcast circles, vis a vis the Weinsteins, Jordan Peterson, etc. I ran across this gem today:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19378629.2017.1408631?journalCode=test20&

Rigor/Us: Building Boundaries and Disciplining Diversity with Standards of Merit

ABSTRACT

Rigor is the aspirational quality academics apply to disciplinary standards of quality. Rigor's particular role in engineering created conditions for its transfer and adaptation in the recently emergent discipline of engineering education research. ‘Rigorous engineering education research’ and the related ‘evidence-based’ research and practice movement in STEM education have resulted in a proliferation of boundary drawing exercises that mimic those in engineering disciplines, shaping the development of new knowledge and ‘improved’ practice in engineering education. Rigor accomplishes dirty deeds, however, serving three primary ends across engineering, engineering education, and engineering education research: disciplining, demarcating boundaries, and demonstrating white male heterosexual privilege. Understanding how rigor reproduces inequality, we cannot reinvent it but rather must relinquish it, looking to alternative conceptualizations for evaluating knowledge, welcoming diverse ways of knowing, doing, and being, and moving from compliance to engagement, from rigor to vigor.

KEYWORDS: Feminist theory, liberal education, engineering education

Has anyone here seen this sort of nonsense leak into the workplace yet, or is it still basically confined to the education sector?

Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East -

http://www.campbellcivil.com

 

[beej67]

Thanks. Google worked.

For the record, since this discussion is public and all... I am professionally dedicated to ensure that all my drainage analyses remain staunchly gender neutral. I may need to update my website in that regard lest some recreational outrage protester decides to burn my house down.



Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East -

http://www.campbellcivil.com

 

[TehMightyEngineer]

beej: You've already bowed to the pressure. My precast concrete culverts have a male end and a female end and we like it that way!

Ian Riley, PE, SE
Professional Engineer (ME, NH, MA) Structural Engineer (IL)
American Concrete Industries

https://www.facebook.com/AmericanConcrete/

 

[JAE]

TME - at least the culverts generally keep that kind of activity underground!

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[drawoh]

beej67,

I have one more thought, given that pumpkins are white, and I have sort of very quickly skimmed through the article. What about coffee and chocolate? I love coffee and chocolate. Does this mean I properly and politically correctly empathize with things that are black, or does this mean I am ruthlessly consuming them?

--
JHG

 

[IRstuff]

Gilley's article is an example of the "rigor" that Riley is claiming reinforces white privilege. But, Riley is wrong, because Gilley's article is not rigorous, it's a "fake rigor," because it couches itself as an economic analysis that completely negates the negatives of pre-modern colonialism:

> the slave trade -- seriously, who's claiming now that this was a "benefit?" Actually, Gilley claims that it was colonialism that abolished slavery!!??? WTF?
> treatment of indigenous peoples as second class or lower humans -- this is a benefit? Gilley, of course, does not mention this at all
> the sheer fact that whites considered it their manifest and God-given right to subjugate the population, pillage, and plunder their resources Gilley claims that colonialism was a money loser, but that's crock as well. Spain did extremely well in plundering the New World; they only lost money because they spent beyond their means afterwards
> the utter destruction of indigenous cultures

The bottom line is that Gilley is a fraud and an apologist who is attempting to re-write history to point out the superiority of white privilege and white rule.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

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[ornerynorsk]

drawoh - Perhaps that would be cultural appropriation. No judgement here, I love tea, and have to use a few phrases of Mandarin now and then with our suppliers, so I am to be equally as disdained as you!

It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.

 

[beej67]

The bottom line is that Gilley is a fraud and an apologist who is attempting to re-write history to point out the superiority of white privilege and white rule.

I don't know enough about Gilley's article to comment, although I think a very good case could be made that there were both positive and negative effects from colonization. Take India - what the Brits did in India was morally abhorrent, but India is now a major world wide player economically due to many of the things the English forced on them. So what's the balance? I don't know, but the idea that we're not even allowed to talk about that balance without receiving death threats is pretty terrifying to me.

Or take the Aztecs. The Spaniards basically wrecked their civilization in a very cruel way, and that was very not-nice, and they stole all their gold and silver. Total meanies. But the Aztecs sacrificed virgin girls to make the sun come up. They were an objectively awful society. So put that on the steelyard and where does it bend? Again, I don't know the answer, but it's something we should at least be able to talk about without being academically blackballed or killed in our sleep.

You've already bowed to the pressure. My precast concrete culverts have a male end and a female end and we like it that way!

Think of the growth model if you can develop gender self-identifying culverts.



Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East -

http://www.campbellcivil.com

 

[IRstuff]

It's pretty clear to me that Gilley's article is not a "discussion", and more of a white-washing (irony). Instead, there were no major wrongs of colonization, and in fact, we should recolonize those "failed" states, which completely flies in the face of the history of the last 40 years.

We essentially attempted recolonization of Iraq and Afghanistan, and after 40 years of spilled blood, the two countries are hardly better off than they were 40 years ago. India, which is a supposedly success story is rife with corruption, and rampant gang rapes.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

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[SkipVought]

Pity, the precast concrete culverts have had gender assignment at the beginning of zir existence, polarizing zir extremity connection points.

This is yet another example of white male heterosexual privilege for zem!

Skip,
[sub]
Just traded in my OLD subtlety...
for a NUance![/sub]

 

[SkipVought]

We often criticize previous generations of our society, in my case Americans, looking down our noses from our twenty-first century position of sensibilities and knowledge; from this lofty and morally superior perch.

String me up! We transported our infants and children in substandard automobiles in the 50s and 60s, without government approved childseats. And we actually recited The Pledge of Allegiance and read a portion of The Bible in public school every morning.

Shoot my parents! They allowed me, in moments of inattention to 1) shock my finger in an empty lamp socket, 2) pick lead-based paint from the window sill, 3) fall down a stairway, 4) climb an iron fence with arrow-head finials, 5) play on iron jumgle-jim bars, 6) play in the street.

Not to mention the fact that many Americans have radically changed their outlook on some significant social issues over the just past decade. Obama is reported to have evolved over the past couple of decades. Our society pillories people for similar outlooks from decades past.

http://time.com/3816952/obama-gay-lesbian-transgender-lgbt-rights/

So there is good reason to evaluate former generations and cultures with some reasonable charity and historical/cultural perspective, realizing that future generations, perhaps our very children and grandchildren, may very well look at what we have “accomplished” with a jaundiced eye.

Skip,
[sub]
Just traded in my OLD subtlety...
for a NUance![/sub]

 

[moltenmetal]

It seems to be human nature, as old as recorded language for the older generation to criticize the newer ones as decadent, lazy, stupid, and impractical, with their heads in the clouds.

It seems to be equally common to use the lens of the present to evaluate the past, invariably finding our ancestors to be "backward" (as if it were possible for them to be otherwise!), with a morality which was perverse in some way or another.

 

[IRstuff]

"It seems to be equally common to use the lens of the present to evaluate the past, invariably finding our ancestors to be "backward" (as if it were possible for them to be otherwise!), with a morality which was perverse in some way or another."

If one doesn't understand the mistakes of the past, then one is even more likely to repeat them in the future. Otherwise, one is likely to think that bashing a woman on the head and dragging her to one's cave is an acceptable means of courtship.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

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[CWB1]

As this discussion is rapidly leaving the rails of engineering...

Let's take it seriously. We have the discipline of engineering. We have the discipline of engineering education. We have the discipline of engineering education research. Author Donna Riley has "received a NSF CAREER award on implementing and assessing pedagogies of liberation in engineering classrooms." I see no evidence she has practiced engineering.

I would disagree. Academia today has in many cases isolated and protected themselves/their jobs from competition with the working engineers that I believe you are encompassing with "we." I know many personally who dont identify as engineers but professors having very little or no experience in engineering. From that perspective, the author IMHO is no less qualified to prattle on about engineering education than a big chunk of academia. Not to suggest it isnt pure drivel, but we have serious issues today in engineering education as mentioned above due to this disconnect.

That's hardly necessary; most schools are not even remotely lacking for students clamoring to get in. Almost every one of our state's universities are chock full of applicants every fall; even the lowest ranked schools have barely 10% acceptance rate, simply because there's not enough room for them.

Which state is that? Nationally the acceptance rate is ~65% in the US and out of eight(?) schools I've attended I believe the lowest acceptance rate for an engineering program was ~40%.
Nevertheless I concur with beej's assessment in his second post - many students that have no business in engineering are being passed through to bolster professor, dept, and school "success rates."

As for extreme politics and social justice in the workplace, I've seen some rather questionable ethics shrugged off by management on several occasions to avoid potentially larger issues. The local HR head of a previous employer (Fortune 50 company, 3k+ worker plant) often mentioned her goal of increasing gender and orientation diversity while implying (corny wink and nudge included) that she did so through selective screening of resumes. My manager called her out on it when we went three months without receiving a single resume for an open req, we magically had six resumes of qualified candidates the following week.

 

[drawoh]

CWB1,

Let's look at engineering education research. We can assign intelligent definitions to terms like this, whether or not anybody actually means it.

I am single and I do not have kids. I volunteered to help do an engineering presentation at a public school last year. The children were around ten years old. I was impressed at how the teacher handled them. Clearly, she had extensive training at this.

To teach small children in public school, you don't need to know very much. I see no reason why this cannot be done by high school graduates, although schools these days are obsessed with degrees. You do need to be very good at teaching. You need to gain and hold the attention of small children. You need an understanding of how children understand and learn stuff.

In college, I found that the quality of teaching was all over the place. Some people should not be taught how to teach, either because they should not be teaching, or because they are too good at it to benefit from training. Bad teaching is a problem in college and university, because the teachers must have deep knowledge of their subjects. At this stage, the students ought to be good at learning.

Is anybody really doing engineering education research?

--
JHG

 

[JohnRBaker]

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.", George Santayana.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[beej67]

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.", George Santayana.

What about those that claim that all perspectives of the past are culturally subjective and there is no objective past at all? That's where a lot of academia is at this point, with the cultural postmodernism thing.

In my view, the liberal arts can sorta do whatever they want to without harming the engineering profession, as long as there's a firewall between that sort of bubbly incoherent nonsense and the fields of hard science/engineering. I feel like engineering professionals have a deep and important responsibility to make sure that stuff doesn't leak into our field in any strange ways. The idea that a "right answer" is patriarchal or whatever is all fun and games until the bridge falls down.

Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East -

http://www.campbellcivil.com

 

[drawoh]

JohnRBaker,

--
JHG

 

[JohnRBaker]

Perhaps, but at least we can take some solace from when we say "I told you so." ;-)

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[bridgebuster]

@SkipVought - in moments of inattention mine let me do those things and play with fireworks. BTW - years back I let my daughter fall down a flight of stairs too.

Moving back to the topic, everyday in the daily propaganda from my employer, there's always something about how we're in the forefront of diversity, breaking down barriers, being allies, destroying stereotypes, creating a better world, etc. Last week at the office townhall meeting, some bean counter who runs the regional operation said "...over 60% of our hires this year were hired for diversity. Diversity brings new perspectives to problem solving." I suppose force, stress, moments, etc are different in diversity world. Of course if I were a "diversity hire" I might start wondering why they really hired me. Here's the real paradox: The company wants to portray a "progressive image" but if you're not 100% billable you're diversity or lack thereof won't matter, as what happened recently to one of our "diversity" CAD operators. Hey, the Almighty $$$ rules; gotta keep our stock price up.

 

[Sparweb]

Beej,
I wonder if we're being duped by an algorithm here.
Some other titles published by the Taylor & Francis so-called journal:
[ul][li]Multi-objective ant colony optimization for the twin-screw configuration problem[/li]
[li]Adaptive multi-objective archive-based hybrid scatter search for segmentation in lung computed tomography imaging[/li]
[li]Multi-objective metaheuristics for preprocessing EEG data in brain–computer interfaces[/li]
[li]A bi-objective model for the retail spatial design problem[/li]
[li]A multi-objective approach for the segmentation issue[/li][/ul]
I don't know what these papers are about yet, but I see a pattern: These titles could have been written by a program with elementary phrase search and replacement.
Could it be something like this? Popular Science: An Essay-Writing Machine Made To Fool Other Machines

STF