Is Evergreen State College the canary in the coal mine, foretelling the death of higher education?

[Velocity]

Someone once captured a good example of this:

@ITR_champion

I agree. It’s mundane and pointless.

But not unique or limited to totally irrelevant people. In the world of postmodernist philosophy, Luce-Irigaray is an important figure. She has a famous theory concerning fluid mechanics summarized thusly:

The privileging of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed the inability of science to deal with turbulent flow at all, she attributes to the association of fluidity with femininity. Whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids. Although men, too, flow on occasion – when semen is emitted, for example – this aspect of their sexuality is not emphasized. It is the rigidity of the male organ that counts, not its complicity in fluid flow. These idealizations are reinscribed in mathematics, which conceives of fluids as laminated planes and other modified solid forms. In the same way that women are erased within masculinist theories and language, existing only as not-men, so fluids have been erased from science, existing only as not-solids. From this perspective it is no wonder that science has not been able to arrive at a successful model for turbulence. The problem of turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conceptions of fluids (and of women) have been formulated so as necessarily to leave unarticulated remainders.

It is, of course, true that not all feminist intellectual work consists of this sort of thing, but there’s enough to be amused by it.