Posted on 08/04/2017 10:12:38 PM PDT by BogusTimes
Indrek Wichman, a mechanical engineer professor at Michigan State University, has eyed a troubling trend of social justice warriors making their way through the humanities and social sciences and, to his despair, they now have their sights set on leveling their destruction on engineering.
WichmanHaving spent 30 years teaching mechanical engineering, Wichman acknowledges things have changed dramatically and is concerned that “feelings” and “micro-aggressions” have taken a predominant role, much to the detriment of the hard sciences.
“The world we engineers envisioned as young students is not quite as simple and straightforward as we had wished,” he states in a paper in IntellectualTakeout.org, “because a phalanx of social justice warriors, ideologues, egalitarians, and opportunistic careerists has ensconced itself in America’s colleges and universities. The destruction they have caused in the humanities and social sciences has now reached to engineering.”
(Excerpt) Read more at bogustimes.com ...
And when they are hired by private companies, the advocates will demand that a representative percentage be promoted to management. The question becomes where an organization can hide them without doing too much damage to its essential functions. This is a significant reason for administrative bloat in government agencies and universities. There are too many people with bogus credentials in protected classes. They can't do the job. They can't be fired. But they can serve on committees or be parked in special projects or "studies" units that aren't really expected to produce anything.
--already permeating the educaton system in the early '60's----how many tines as an engineering student did I hear "If you flunk out of the sciences , go into education"--
Or much of anything else. Education is one of the easiest of majors and its members hands down have the lowest SAT scores but get the highest GPAs in college because of the lack of rigorous.
In my work I am in contact with many in the "education" field and much of their job is make-work with extensive word salads to back up what they do. Such BS.
"...revise engineering curricula to be relevant to a fuller range of student experiences and career destinations, integrating concerns related to public policy, professional ethics, and social responsibility; de-centering Western civilization; and uncovering contributions of women and other underrepresented groups…. We examine how technology influences and is influenced by globalization, capitalism, and colonialism…. Gender is a key…[theme]…[throughout] the course…. We…[examine]… racist and colonialist projects in science….’”
Western civilization truly will begin to literally collapse! Buildings, bridges, dams, aircraft falling from the sky...
That’s right; they are the “hot potatoes” passed around by employers.
Companies have been successfully sued for under-representation of minorities, but in my experience many people (of all kinds) don’t want the extra workload and time demands of a higher position. While in the past the concept of women raising children was used to explain disparities in wages/positions, today as many women don’t even have children I still see many that just don’t want the extra hours - but they demand the promotions and pay (hiring real workers - some of them female - under them to actually do the work - including the management work). I’ve really cut back my workschedule to align it with these tokens; nobody can complain about my hours when tokens in higher positions still work a lot less.
That really sums it up, doesn’t it? That was at a time when teachers were paid the part-time salary appropriate for the job; now they are paid more than many professionals working 50 hours per week (while they still put in 180 six-hour workdays).
They cling to their unions because they have almost NO value in the real world; the unions have successfully laid it out as an “us-versus-them” - and the taxpayers are “them”.
I noticed years ago in college that they had taken some “1” level (freshman) classes and dumbed them down further by creating a separate class for non-majors. For example, an “Intro to Economics” class wasn’t basic enough for stupid people, so they created “Intro to Economics for non-majors” so dummies could fill some requirement with the class while pursuing a basket-weaving degree...
This story popped up a couple of days ago, from a different source; I’ll repost what I did at that time about the idiot SJW in charge of Purdue’s program:
In the comments section of the original article one will find the following abstract to a paper by the Dean of Purdue’s School of Engineering Education:
“Thermodynamics is a subject area in engineering that is deeply relevant as it deals with energy use in society. However, students often struggle to connect their experiences with energy course content traditionally based in theoretical discoveries from 19th century Western Europe. The work of French philosopher Michel Foucault is similar to thermodynamics in that its abstract poststructuralist theory strikes fear in the hearts of students, but can be made deeply relevant when its understanding is grounded in one’s experience”; abstract to “Power/Knowledge: Using Fourcault to promote critical understandings of content and pedagogy in Engineering Thermodynamics” by Dr. Donna Riley, Dean of Purdue’s School of Engineering Education
The errors, deceptions and diversions in just those three sentences of that abstract boggle one’s mind.
Students struggle with thermo NOT because they can’t connect it with their experiences, but because thermo is hard - and anybody who has taken a course in thermodynamics would know that.
Thermodynamics was not developed as a strictly theoretical proposition, but (as in most science) through an interplay of theory and experiment - heck, one could argue that the fundamental experimentation (which involved careful observation of processes as mundane as the heat generated when boring cannons) was more critical than the development of the mathematical theory related to it.
The fact that thermo was developed largely in 19th century Europe is totally and completely irrelevant - the Carnot cycle would describe a thermodynamic phenomenon equally well whether it was proposed by a Frenchman born in 1796 or a Korean born in 1896 or an Egyptian born in 1696.
The work of Foucault has practically nothing in common with thermodynamics - one would be hard-pressed to find to realms in academia more dissimilar: thermo provides a detailed understanding of a portion of physical reality with profound practical consequences; Foucault postulates a system of philosophical approaches best-described as a load of bull-pucky, which has mostly served the purpose of providing a pay check for poseurs like Riley.
One would hope post-structuralist theory WOULD strike fear in the hearts of undergrads; sadly what it does instead is provide an academic hiding place for students who have neither the intellectual ability nor the work ethic to handle stuff like thermo.
I could go on, but I don’t want to have to hit a booster dose of my blood pressure meds.
--and of course , it was only a few short years until those flunkouts controlled the education system---
The corporation decided to make the SSA program a minority EO outreach. So rather than finding the best and brightest, they brought in candidates from lesser schools. I tried for two years and gave up. The students were not prepared to do anything, would not reliably show up for work, were not interested is providing any outcome at the end of the summer. I went to HR to understand how I was supposed to write their end of summer appraisal, when they had basically done nothing all summer. My appraisals were pieces of art, carefully scripted to have any subsequent interviewer read between the lines. Hmmm…. Was that a microaggession?
So-called “social justice warriors” are malignancies everywhere they exist. They corrode reason, undermine merit and create less of anything good .
I had to work with one of them (I don’t think she was a Lesbian, though). She had an actual electrical engineering degree from an “historically black” institution that wasn’t worth the paper the diploma was printed on.
Working with her was an ordeal, to say the least. She had no interest in the job itself, she was more concerned with “black issues” in the workplace.
The search for truth found through science has been compromised by greed.
I had the same experience. To make matters worse over time I watched the HR department being slowly taken over by minority women. Let me tell you nothing is more racist then a gaggle of minority women running a HR department. They were determined that the previous experience was going to be the new norm.
What do you mean my carbon neutral windmill powered aircraft won’t work? You racist!
I’m really looking forward to the SJW perpetual motion machine!
Well, electrical engineers do not have these days a background in mechanics that older tinkerers learned in their own garages with their own autos. Now, robotics engineers would.
You were assigned to review a new book? Assigned by whom?
It was the same at my alma matter in the same era. I had not thought about that in years. Never thought the engineering profession was very well thought of because we dont police and promote well. We sanction a lot of what turn out to be just good technicians that society need. They do the repetitive work though but shouDRld not be called engineers.
A very good true engineer can be a very good just about anything he has the inclination to do. All people are wired differently though and I am told that classical engineers see the world and people around them very differently from others.
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