Social Engineering Gets Literal

Those who would like to soften the hard sciences may think that they are building metaphorical bridges but you might not want to drive over the physical bridges they construct.

“Alas, the world we engineers envisioned as young students is not quite as simple and straightforward as we had wished because a phalanx of social justice warriors, ideologues, egalitarians, and opportunistic careerists has ensconced itself in America’s college and universities,” Indrek Wichman, an engineering professor at Michigan State writes in a column distributed by The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. “The destruction they have caused in the humanities and social sciences has now reached to engineering.”

“One of the features of their growing power is the phenomenon of ‘engineering education’ programs and schools. They have sought out the soft underbelly of engineering, where phrases such as ‘diversity’ and ‘different perspectives’ and ‘racial gaps’ and ‘unfairness’ and ‘unequal outcomes’ make up the daily vocabulary. Instead of calculating engine horsepower or microchip power/size ratios or aerodynamic lift and drag, the engineering educationists focus on group representation, hurt feelings, and ‘microaggressions’ in the profession.”

“An excellent example is the establishment at Purdue University (once informally called the ‘MIT of the Midwest’) of a whole School of Engineering Education. What is this school’s purpose? Its website tells us that it ‘envisions a more socially connected and scholarly engineering education. This implies that we radically rethink the boundaries of engineering and the purpose of engineering education.’”

To give you an idea of how radical a change this is, take a look at Ayn Rand’s first novel, We The Living. Published in 1936, it is the Gone with the Wind of the Soviet Union. Ironically, GWTW was published that same year.

The heroine of We The Living, Kira Argounova, studies to be an engineer because it is a field not subject to interpretation. So, those who would transform engineering are going beyond even the imaginations of the commissars of Stalinist Russia.