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To: ProtectOurFreedom

What you posted here is a nationwide trend to dumb down higher education, even in the STEM fields where competition and quality were once the hallmark of these programs. We in the STEM fields were fully aware of the useless degrees that were being generated in many areas of liberal arts decades ago. We all talked about some of these courses a simpleton could easily ace. At least a third of the students in higher education have absolutely no business being there. Many of them barely got out of high school.


459 posted on 03/15/2018 3:29:03 PM PDT by Neoliberalnot (MSM is our greatest threat. Disney, Comcast, Google Hollywood, NYTimes, WaPo, CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC ...)
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To: Neoliberalnot
Find out if anyone involved was affected by the crazy SJW movement to free engineering and construction from "rigor" (academic and scientific rigor ..... just white male masculinist nonsense, you know).

From Purdue's Dean of Engineering Education:

“One of rigor’s purposes is, to put it bluntly, a thinly veiled assertion of white male (hetero)sexuality,” she writes, explaining that rigor “has a historical lineage of being about hardness, stiffness, and erectness; its sexual connotations—and links to masculinity in particular—are undeniable.” Hence, Riley remarks that “My visceral reaction in many conversations where I have seen rigor asserted has been to tell parties involved (regardless of gender) to whip them out and measure them already.”

Riley also argues that academic rigor can be used to exclude women and minorities, saying, “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+ people, first-generation and low-income students, and non-traditionally aged students.”

She claims that rigor can “reinforce gender, race, and class hierarchies in engineering, and maintain invisibility of queer, disabled, low-income, and other marginalized engineering students,” adding that “decades of ethnographic research document a climate of microaggressions and cultures of whiteness and masculinity in engineering.”

She evens contends that “scientific knowledge itself is gendered, raced, and colonizing,” asserting that in the field of engineering, there is an “inherent masculinist, white, and global North bias...all under a guise of neutrality.”

471 posted on 03/15/2018 3:45:15 PM PDT by Enchante (FusionGPS "dirty dossier" scandal links Hillary, FBI, CIA, Dept of Justice... "Deep State" is real)
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To: Neoliberalnot

STEM education has surely gotten dumbed down over the years, but I have seen no evidence that this has extended to the licensing exams for professional engineers. That’s usually where the wheat is separated from the chaff.


475 posted on 03/15/2018 3:52:54 PM PDT by Alberta's Child ("Go ahead, bite the Big Apple ... don't mind the maggots.")
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