https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=10257 A Purdue University engineering professor recently lamented the emphasis on academic "rigor," calling it a “dirty deed” that upholds “white male heterosexual privilege.” Donna Riley calls for doing away with the notion of academic rigor entirely, suggesting that higher education pursue "other ways of knowing" in order to "build a community for inclusive and holistic engineering education."
I don't care what they call it, as long as bridges don't collapse. If they're going to start playing around with that, then they've lost me.
I don't mind the notion of "other ways of knowing" if that means there are other methods for approaching a problem and that conventional wisdom shouldn't necessarily dictate curricula. Our western mode of thought isn't always correct and a lot of things that we just accept as so aren't so; they're male-centric, western civilization-centric and we don't notice it because that's how we've always been taught. For example, (and this is peripherally related to a discussion I've been having with others here on the Franciscan University of Steubenville thread) I think many westerners have trouble with eastern modes of thinking so that they often miss the point of the Bible when they cite an "irreconcilable conflict" in an "incorrect" arrangement of a sequence of events in the Gospel accounts. They don't understand that in the eastern cultures, chronological order was not a compelling concern and events were often recounted amongst ancient eastern cultures with very different priorities in mind, yet they would still be every bit as true and correct. So I can certainly understand how some academics would cry out against a mode of thinking and want to play the iconoclast. But all that said, academic rigor is not the thing they should be crusading against. I teach a lot of African-American kids and, of course, a lot of women at the university, and minority groups are exactly like anyone else and no more or less afraid of rigor than any other group. The groups that sometimes have difficulty with rigor have nothing to do with male/female, black/white--the ones who throw the biggest fits at the gauntlet I make them run are immature, entitled kids, and that category knows neither color nor gender.
