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| 2004-04-08 |
| Just rename the place PCU. In order to close a budget gap, San Francisco State U. is clising the engineering program while they keep the social engineering programs. AKA the Slow, Steady Decline of Western Civilization... Social engineering 101 Debra Saunders (archive) April 8, 2004 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? Yes, that’s exactly why the Social Engineering courses will remain. 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? Yaaa! Ahhhnold must terminate Corrigan! 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. Do you get to bang hot chicks? Oh, wait, this is San Francisco, sorry... 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. I’d pick up on that theme and embarass Corrigan. What’s the difference? You have little to lose, and eventually you’re out of there either way, might as well make a stand & piss off the PC Martyr’s Brigades. 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. Or you could just say "Fuck ’em, I’m transferring to Cal Poly". "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." Nice dig! 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." Don’t forget to "study the problems of thermodynamics from a black / Asian / transgendered perspective"! 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." I shouldn’t make light of this, but even though I wasn’t an engineer at the home of Marc Herold, I had tons of respect for them. This is disturbing on a number of levels, the main one being is that the Left is slowly but surely winning the culture war on campus. The only solution I see to fix this crap - abolish tenure, and go in with the ax swinging. ©2004 Creators Syndicate, Inc. |
| Posted by:Raj |
| #6 "Revolutionary Engineering" - the integration of the School of Engineering with College ROTC. THAT will put them in their place! 8^) |
| Posted by: Old Patriot 2004-04-08 7:55:48 PM |
| #5 This does sound like a typical govt. bureaucrats' response to the money tap being slowed.Threaten to close something important/popular unless you get all the funding you want.(For example,isn't it funny how the Interior Department can't find any fat to cut when budgets are tight-it always has to close the National Parks.) Funniest example to me of bureaucratic hysteria exploding in their face occurred a few years ago in Tampa.The school district went crazy claiming it faced a shortage of 6000 teachers and it needed a ton of money immediately to fix problem-they discovered the shortage only a month before start of new school year.The shortage was blamed on low pay of teachers,that no one wanted to teach in Tampa because of low pay.Local papers were soon flooded w/accounts of applicants who were told the school district didn't need them.School officials then tried to claim applicants weren't qualified-that backfired when scores of part-time teachers said they wanted to work full-time,and experienced teachers from up North who'd moved South were all told they weren't wanted. |
| Posted by: Stephen 2004-04-08 7:17:00 PM |
| #4 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. At the University of New South Wales, it's the Faculty of the Built Environment. It's the environment, see? Environment=good. Not engineering. Hey, there's one at Berkeley, too. When the revolution comes, though, I'll be prepared. |
| Posted by: Angie Schultz 2004-04-08 6:22:36 PM |
| #3 They may be on to something - given U.S. companies outsourcing engineering jobs to other countries, there's not a whole lot of demand for U.S. engineers. Many of the CS and EE's I've worked with are moving into other fields. |
| Posted by: A Jackson 2004-04-08 6:15:04 PM |
| #2 no problem - plenty of other schools will pick up the slack. Pretty obviously the E school is low on the priority/funding/attention/pride list at |
| Posted by: Frank G 2004-04-08 5:04:59 PM |
| #1 Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio.... |
| Posted by: Shipman 2004-04-08 4:56:51 PM |