The War On Objective Competence

Campus Reform brings to us a masterpiece of feminist criticism of engineering and the hard sciences. And by "masterpiece", I mean a perfect example:

The professors are especially concerned with how engineering courses tend to be “depoliticized” compared to classes in other fields, which they contend is due in part to engineering culture’s emphasis on meritocracy and individualism.

“Socialization into the ideologies of meritocracy and individualism, coupled with a valorization of ‘technical’ prowess at the expense of ‘socially focused’ work processes, depoliticizes the gendered structure of the profession,” they write.

The professors add that this can be problematic because “students learn that raising concerns about marginalization—of themselves or others—is tangential or even distracting to what counts as the ‘real’ practical and objective work of engineering.”

The authors' credentials are all impeccable: none of them teach engineering classes, and only one drifted away from that discipline:

• Carroll Seron has a post at the Criminology, Law and Society department of UC Irvine's School of Social Ecology.
• Susan S. Silbey works at MIT's Sloan School of Management as a Professor of Behavioral and Policy Sciences.
• Erin A. Cech is an assistant professor in the sociology department at U. Michigan after obtaining an engineering degree at Montana State.
• Brian Rubineau teaches at McGill University as an Associate Professor of Organizational Behaviour.

As usual, none of these people have anything directly to do with their institutions' engineering or science schools. But it does qualify as yet another salvo in the ongoing war by idiot mandarins who do nothing upon objective measures of competence in fields where its exercise is of obvious import to society.