If you\u2019re a parent who is giving consideration to refinancing your home for the sake of sending your child off to a university, you may want to reconsider.<\/p>\n
Most parents, doubtless, regard college as nothing more or less than a means to the end of a lucrative profession for their children. Still, even some of these may be of one mind with those parents who expect that, while pursuing their degrees, their children will and should receive a decent education.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, however, the view of Donna Riley<\/a>, a professor of engineering education at Purdue University, is representative of a growing number of academics from around the country. \u00a0In \u201cRigor\/Us: Building Boundaries and Disciplining Diversity with Standards of Merit,\u201d an article<\/a> featured in the most recent edition of the journal Engineering Studies, <\/em>Riley writes that rigor\u2014\u201cthe aspirational quality academics apply to disciplinary standards of quality\u201d\u2014actually \u201caccomplishes dirty deeds\u201d in the fields of \u201cengineering, engineering education, and engineering education research [.]\u201d<\/p>\n To repeat: Academic rigor serves dirty deeds<\/em>. \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n These \u201cdirty deeds\u201d are \u201cdisciplining, demarcating boundaries, and demonstrating white male heterosexual privilege.\u201d<\/p>\n Riley trades in the Newspeak that we\u2019ve come to expect from contemporary leftist academics.\u00a0 This lends to her prose an aura of Gnosticism, the semblance of esotericism.\u00a0 Ultimately, though, Riley\u2019s thesis is hardly original.\u00a0 In fact, it is but another expression of the dogmatic, Politically Correct status quo of her peers.\u00a0 It goes something like this:<\/p>\n Traditional academic standards, being the legacy of straight white men, are not unlike any other legacy of straight white men insofar as they \u201cprivilege\u201d straight white men.<\/p>\n In other words, academic standards like that of rigor are \u201cracist,\u201d \u201csexist,\u201d \u201chomophobic,\u201d \u201cclassist,\u201d and so forth and so on.<\/p>\n Looking carefully at Riley\u2019s \u201cdirty deeds\u201d we see that the act of disciplining <\/em><\/strong>and the activity of demarcating boundaries <\/em><\/strong>between academic disciplines or areas of specialization are inseparable from one another. The point seems to be that in carving up the intellectual landscape into distinct domains\u2014in building \u201cwalls\u201d or \u201cborders,\u201d we might say, between kinds of knowledge\u2014those who are \u201cdemarcating\u201d these \u201cboundaries\u201d perpetuate patterns of exclusion<\/em>.<\/p>\n And since it is and has always and only ever been heterosexual white men\u2014or white males, <\/em>as leftists like Riley denigratingly refer to the members of the one group at whose feet they lay the sole blame for all of the things that they think have ever gone wrong in the universe\u2014that have engaged in these activities, \u201cdisciplining\u201d and \u201cdemarcating boundaries\u201d benefit them <\/em>to the exclusion of all others.<\/p>\n Rigor \u201cis used [by heterosexual white men] to maintain disciplinary boundaries,\u201d Riley contends, \u201cwith exclusionary implications for marginalized groups and marginalized ways of knowing.\u201d<\/p>\n Continuing, she writes that one purpose served by rigor is to function as \u201ca thinly veiled assertion of white male (hetero) sexuality,\u201d for the notion of rigor \u201chas a historical lineage of being about hardness, stiffness, and erectness [.]\u201d\u00a0 The \u201csexual connotations\u201d of rigor, Riley insists, \u201cand [its] links to masculinity in particular\u2026are undeniable.\u201d<\/p>\n But Riley goes further. \u201cRigor 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Rigor can be used to \u201creinforce gender, race, and class hierarchies in engineering, and maintain invisibility of queer, disabled, low-income, and other marginalized engineering students.\u201d Ample research, Riley says, substantiates the existence of \u201ca climate of microaggressions and cultures of whiteness and masculinity in engineering.\u201d<\/p>\n Riley is blunt, maintaining that \u201cscientific knowledge itself is gendered, raced, and colonizing,\u201d and in the field of engineering specifically there is an \u201cinherent masculinist, white, and global North bias\u201d disguised under a mask of \u201cneutrality.\u201d<\/p>\n Academic rigor \u201creproduces inequality,\u201d Riley claims.\u00a0 In a nutshell, Riley\u2019s argument is powered by the leftist\u2019s singular obsession with realizing his or her<\/em> vision of Equality.<\/p>\n However, since this conception of an egalitarian paradise is so wildly at odds with anything that has ever appeared in the real word, leftists like Riley tend to perceive virtually anything and everything as impediments to its realization in the here-and-now.\u00a0 In Riley\u2019s case, it leads her to see something as seemingly innocuous, as apparently universal a benefit as academic rigor as an obstacle to she and her fellow ideologues take to be the greatest of moral goods: Equality.<\/p>\n Alternatively stated, and this is important to grasp, because inequality is grossly unjust for the Rileys of the current academic world, such traditional canons of educational excellence as rigor must be viewed as a grave injustice<\/em>.<\/p>\n Rigor, Riley submits, must be \u201crelinquished\u201d entirely, relegated to the dustbin of history (or is it her<\/em>story?).\u00a0 \u201cThis is not about reinventing rigor,\u201d but, rather, \u201cdoing away with the concept altogether so we can welcome other ways of knowing\u201d and \u201cways of being.\u201d<\/p>\n These \u201cother ways\u201d are necessary to help us \u201ccritique rigor, and to find a place to start to build a community for inclusive<\/em> and holistic<\/em> engineering education\u201d (emphasis added).<\/p>\n The Racism-Industrial-Complex (RIC) is a sprawling industry with tentacles reaching into practically every area of our culture.\u00a0 There is no place that it has impacted to quite the degree that it has impacted academia.\u00a0 In fact, the emergence and growth of RIC has corresponded to and fueled the emergence and growth of the Academic-Industrial-Complex<\/em>. \u00a0The two intersect and blend with one another.<\/p>\n Parents with college-bound children, particularly (but certainly not only) white <\/em>parents, should bear this in mind.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you\u2019re a parent who is giving consideration to refinancing your home for the sake of sending your child off to a university, you may want to reconsider. Most parents, doubtless, regard college as nothing more or less than a means to the end of a lucrative profession for their children. Still, even some of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n