Apparently, “wokeness” is infiltrating college-level mathematics instruction.
There Is No Such Thing as “White” Math
In my position as a professor of mathematics at Princeton, I have witnessed the decline of universities and cultural institutions as they have embraced political ideology at the expense of rigorous scholarship. Until recently — this past summer, really — I had naively thought that the STEM disciplines would be spared from this ideological takeover.
I was wrong. Attempts to “deconstruct” mathematics, deny its objectivity, accuse it of racial bias, and infuse it with political ideology have become more and more common — perhaps, even, at your child’s elementary school.
Since I would have insisted that the Pythagorean Theorem, and the thousands of pages of calculations I made while working as an engineer, had nothing to do with race, I suppose I also thought STEM was immune to woke lunacy. After all, the race of the client, or facility users, never enters the calculation of the settlement of a spread foundation or the load-carrying capacity of a pile.
Whoops! It turns out that the mere use of mathematics is a symptom of … something, and it’s pretty awful.
The woke ideology, on the other hand, treats both science and mathematics as social constructs and condemns the way they are practiced, in research and teaching, as manifestations of white supremacy, euro-centrism, and post-colonialism.
Uh-huh. Woke theorists should be obliged to live downstream of an earth-fill dam designed without the use of math — post-colonial, or euro-centric, or otherwise — I’m thinking.