Put up your hand if you want a heart surgeon working on your triple bypass who went to a university where they weren't rigorous with testing his abilities?
That's the real trick here. Mr. Vainaloid here gets you thinking that's what his opponent is saying, thereby constructing an extremely attractive strawman. Don't fall for it.
Well, she writes:
Rigor accomplishes dirty deeds, however, serving three primary ends across engineering, engineering education, and engineering education research: disciplining, demarcating boundaries, and demonstrating white male heterosexual privilege. Understanding how rigor reproduces inequality, we cannot reinvent it but rather must relinquish it, looking to alternative conceptualizations for evaluating knowledge, welcoming diverse ways of knowing, doing, and being, and moving from compliance to engagement, from rigor to vigor.
In contrast to perhaps a doe-eyed numpty smitten with her perceived agenda, who, due to his or her or its own intellectual limitations, chooses to read and interpret such words figuratively as a way of allegedly comprehending the truth or actual noble cause of this woman's thesis, what, exactly, is anyone who is actually capable of basic logical deduction supposed to make of those bold statements if read and interpreted literally? Huh?
She doesn't simply assert that traditional methods of pursuing and ensuring rigor (an absolutely essential quality) in engineering and scientific research, for whatever imagined reason, need to be rethought and revamped, but explicitly states that rigor itself is irredeemable and must be relinquished!
What, pray tell, are the alternatives to rigor supposed to be? How does one actually achieve the reliable and necessary outcomes of a rigorous approach without actually being rigorous? Further into her confused, ideologically-driven mess, she conflates rigor with "complex math" and the upper strata of engineering. She declares that this boogeyman "rigor" thus works to exclude from all levels of engineering those lacking the ability to contribute at the highest and these less able potential engineers are taken for granted to be ethnic minorities and women! Isn't this the bigotry of low expectations?
Gay, straight, black, white, yellow or blue, male female or other, one can work competently and productively at any level in engineering, but not without basic method and rigor!
This woman's mission and logically ridiculous argument against "rigor" and attacks on STEM studies as a whole isn't one that can be dismissed as simply an argument over "semantics". She is ardently persisting with this illogical nonsense and has dug herself in far too deep for this to be the case. I'm incredulous that she could be stupid enough not to see the logical flaws in her arguments herself, and that degree of intellectual dishonesty and denial can only be ideologically driven.
Her agenda here as far as I can see it (regardless of whatever threat she may or may not pose to engineering education) is to infuse her ideological claptrap into areas of academia where it simply does not belong. She is no different in that regard from a religious zealot pushing to teach alternatives to evolution in the science class and her stance against "rigor" in engineering and her obtuse writings and presentations to that effect pretty much occupies the same logical plane. If that isn't a potential recipe for the dumbing down of academic standards in engineering, should by some miracle a monumental conspiracy of stupidity give sway to her thesis, suddenly making her ideas mainstream, then I'm not sure what possibly could be.
There are few good causes that aren't championed by idiots and this woman in practice is probably the antithesis of a feminist. I seriously doubt that there are too many women with successful careers in science and engineering who passionately feel that this particular academic happens to speak for them. From the websites of the institutions that publish her work, academic citations of her contributions are reportedly practically nil.