Social engineering 101

http://www.therightreport.com/
Social engineering 101
Debra Saunders

It doesn't reflect well on San Francisco State University that President
Robert Corrigan has announced that he is considering axing the entire School
of Engineering to close a budget gap. The university has no shortage of
courses that appear short on academics and long on liberal brainwashing --
you know, courses in majors that prepare students for careers as low-paid
malcontent activists. Yet Corrigan wants to kill a program that actually
enables poor and minority Bay Area students to learn in-demand, high-level
skills with which they can make good money.

What gives? Does Corrigan think that if he puts the screws to students who
actually spend their days and nights studying, he won't have to endure
protests that would surely follow if he proposed cutting courses in majors
in which the students already know everything and hence have the leisure
time to engage in political protest?
Or, as others in academe have suggested, is this proposal Corrigan's
ham-handed way of suggesting the dumbest cut imaginable in order to scare
some funding out of Sacramento?
If so, Corrigan is only hurting his own institution. Word is that Gov.
Schwarzenegger's team sent out the message to California college
administrators that institutions willing to cut waste in these tight times
would be rewarded. Corrigan's gambit sends the opposite message -- that some
schools are willing to cut academic meat, while sparing junk-food
scholarship.
Corrigan's idea for saving $2.5 million -- in the face of a $14 million
gap -- and shortchanging 700 engineering students led me to the S.F. State
Web site to take a look at some of the university's other classes -- the
ones Corrigan apparently doesn't want to eliminate.
Hmmmm. Raza Studies. Recreational and Leisure Studies. Women Studies.
My fave: The Institute on Sexuality, Social Inequality and Health.
It makes you wonder if the guys in Engineering should rename their
discipline. You know, make it the School of Engineering, Structural
Inequality and Disparity Dynamics. Even better: the School of Social
Engineering. Then maybe engineering wouldn't be expendable.
Bill Nott, a vice president with the American Society for Mechanical
Engineers, was disappointed to read in the San Francisco Chronicle that S.F.
State's School of Engineering might have a date with planned obsolescence.
It's a tough break for students who are working long and hard to get ahead,
said Nott.
"Engineering is tough," he said. "It's a lot of math, a lot of science, and
the problems are difficult. It's not one of those things where you can miss
a course and get through it, and just expound back to the teachers what they
want to hear."
Not expound back to teachers what they want to hear? No wonder Engineering
may be doomed.
If they want to save their hallowed hall, the pocket protector set at the
School of E should start writing course descriptions with more B.S. (and I
don't mean bachelor's of science) -- and less promise of "a practical
education that emphasizes applications" or a "solid foundation in
mathematics and sciences."
So the engineering profs need to dump words like: design, chemistry,
physics, mechanics and projects (unless they're "group projects"). Replace
those words with the scholars' siren songs -- "strategies," "addressing
issues," interfacing with "stakeholders," "promoting change" and classes
that put an "emphasis on personal experience." In academia, exercises are
supposed to prompt students to "reflect" -- not, as happens in the School of
Engineering, to "solve."
Let professors with pens in their shirt pockets take a cue from the Urban
Studies department. Henceforth, engineering course descriptions should
promise to help students "identify crucial issues," to make the "electrical
environment sustainable," to facilitate public transit and other "green"
causes. Or ready graduate students to become effective citizens who can
promote a balance between positive and negative forces in conflict in the
global community.
Then, let the Department of Social Engineering end every course description
with the magic words: "Special attention is given to social class, gender
and ethnic diversity in the socially charged engineering environment."

--
Atheism teaches that there is no God, hence no God-given rights. That
ideology coupled with a system that believed in the superiority of the state
at the expense of the individual was murderously synergistic.