From the clown quarter of academia:
According to Dr Donna Riley, academic rigour and the expectation of competence are “exclusionary” and tools of “privilege,” and are unfair to women and minorities, for whom rigour and competence are presumably impossible.
As Dr Riley complains that expectations of rigour generate both inequality and “white male heterosexual privilege,” presumably she would rather we erased distinctions more broadly, between ability and mediocrity, and between diligence and half-arsedness. Though her own so-called scholarship, and indeed her employment, suggest that these wishes may already be coming true.
Objective Reality is a Bitch.
Academia is not sufficiently exclusionary, if a moron like this is in the club.
Yikes! those comments were something a social justice warrior would say. I myself, prefer competence and so do insurance companies as they have to pay out for incompetents and then raise the insurance premiums on the idiots.
I myself have had to work with HVAC engineers from Jamaica and structural engineers from China. The results were NOT good.
The good news is that the free market appears to be fixing the problem.
https://www.collegetransitions.com/blog/losing-ground-a-decade-of-decline-in-humanities-degrees/
I wonder what those who sought to politicize scholarship thought would happen.
The ‘free market’ (which is hardly a ‘free market’, by the way — it pays to read the source material with a…thoughtful eye and to consider the real world) isn’t doing a blasted thing here. Other than creating some false sense of victory in the minds of its adherents.
Tell me, what is really gained by a decline in the humanities? What was gained by considering it not worthy of defense from the legions of Gramsci?
Utterly craptastic movie versions of Greek classics (based on an utterly ludicrous ‘scholarly’ rewritings of said classics, which is where it all went very wrong — my opinion of course), that’s for one. (I hear there are some conservatives who are trying to defend that slop — and its most egregious transgression wasn’t the black chick nor the tranny; it was worse; it was…civilizationally foundational, yes, I just made up that term; it suits.) That’s what you get.
Which leads us to all the wailing and gnashing of teeth about the ‘fall of Western civilization’ and all that from many self-described free marketeers. To which I can only respond “no s–t you idiots; what did you think was going to happen? enjoy the decline, I guess; unfortunately mine and I have to enjoy it with you; good job; here’s a cookie.”
And by the by, people are beginning to realize that STEM and the trades weren’t going to be spared — climate science and collapse of the trades, anyone?
I can just see you thinking “Killer Marmot just posted something. I’d better attack it.”
But it is actually a free market. No one can force students to enroll, much less enroll in a specific program.
Can you see what I’m thinking? It’s, “Killer Marmot just posted something. Time to fart!”
I’m kidding. Of course I fart all the time. It’s easy to make it look like you’re the reason, but don’t be fooled.
Time to phase out those damned iron rings! Let’s have rainbow turkey feathers for our engineering grads!
oh look. yet another avenue for the unprecedented chaos and danger of The End Times,
licenses to practice (TWO meanings of that word now) are available in all manner of disciplines.
like the former whites only field of engineering.
(ignoring the fact the Brooklyn Bridge went up with the utterly irreplaceable assistance of the chief engineer who was bedridden and issued orders from what he observed with atelescope, via, wait for it . . . . . . . . his wife who boned up on the skill in order to act as ‘go between’, and dont fergit the chief softeware engineer for the Apollo moon mission was, wait for it . . . . . . . . a woman). but hey, shove HISTORY aside which proves competence knows no gender or age or race, and impose the usual leftoidal ‘fix’.
Without proper experience and training, disasters will occur. I have included a link to pictures of the La Colle Falls Hydroelectric Dam (wannabee) from Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, a story in what not to do as an engineer told to me by a civil engineering professor, Brooks, in my first year of engineering at university. The city of Prince Albert decided that, in 1909, four years after Saskatchewan became a province, to boost the city’s fortunes, it would extract cheap electric power by creating an hydroelectric dam on the North Saskatchewan river that ran through the heart of the city. That much is in the link below along with the pictures.
https://www.prairiepast.com/blog/explore-3/lacolle-dam-392
What is not in the article in question is that they approached the city’s chief engineer with the project and instead of telling them “No” (because he didn’t have the experience or expertise), he agreed and started planning. Mistake # 1. The city, as per the account, borrowed $3 million dollars to build said dam. Mistake # 2.
After 6 months of actual construction, the project manager went out early one morning to survey the dam before the work day commenced, only… (wait for it), the dam had disappeared. The river current had picked up the entire worksite and moved it a mile down river. Needless to say, the project was stopped as unsafe.
Consequence # 1 – the engineer in charge was no longer employed because of Consequence # 2, the money needed to paid back and it took a substantial increased tax burden on the taxpayers of Prince Albert until the year 1966 to pay it back – almost 60 years of increased taxes because of incompetence.
In the engineering college that I graduated from, we were told to look to the left and look to the right as those fellow students would not be graduating from the program – a 66% attrition rate. The guy on my left couldn’t hack the math and left at the end of first year. The guy on my right played video games every weekend, going through $40 of quarters per weekend, and he was ousted at Christmas. He held the high score in Space Invaders, though, at the campus hub.
Competence is necessary as reality is a bitch to those that aren’t competent.
Donna just insulted the BLEEP of a lot of people. I would like to put her on a stage with Hyveth Williams…or Thomas Sowell. Be like putting her on a tennis court with those younger Williams Sisters.