I read this piece and I had to doublecheck to see if it didn’t come from The Onion. I find it hard to believe that this can be happening in the United States. What will come next? Hauling students off to the gulag who refuse to be “re-educated?”
The University of Delaware subjects students in its
residence halls to a shocking program of ideological reeducation that
is referred to in the university’s own materials as a “treatment” for
students’ incorrect attitudes and beliefs. The Orwellian program
requires the approximately 7,000 students in Delaware’s residence halls
to adopt highly specific university-approved views on issues ranging
from politics to race, sexuality, sociology, moral philosophy, and
environmentalism. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
(FIRE) is calling for the total dismantling of the program, which is a
flagrant violation of students’ rights to freedom of conscience and
freedom from compelled speech…The university’s views are forced on students through a
comprehensive manipulation of the residence hall environment, from
mandatory training sessions to “sustainability” door decorations.
Students living in the university’s eight housing complexes are
required to attend training sessions, floor meetings, and one-on-one
meetings with their Resident Assistants (RAs). The RAs who facilitate
these meetings have received their own intensive training from the university, including a “diversity facilitation training” session at which RAs were taught, among other things,
that “[a] racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the
basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies
to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the
United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or
sexuality.”The university suggests
that at one-on-one sessions with students, RAs should ask intrusive
personal questions such as “When did you discover your sexual
identity?” Students who express discomfort with this type of
questioning often meet with disapproval from their RAs, who write
reports on these one-on-one sessions and deliver these reports to their
superiors. One student identified in a write-up as an RA’s “worst”
one-on-one session was a young woman who stated that she was tired of
having “diversity shoved down her throat.”
This is it. This is the liberals wet dream. A perfect world of Socialism/Communism gripping the throats of all who enter their domain. You must submit and believe what we believe.
Some students have written about their experiences:
We are told to “embrace diversity.” The way this has played out on my
floor is performing multiple childish activities, “teaching” us how to
handle situations involving racial, sexual, socioeconomic, and cultural
diversity. In each of these meetings, the underlying theme seems to be
to make us feel guilty about the privileges we have, and to convince us
our part in white supremacy. Most questions we are asked must be
answered one hundred percent in one direction or the other; there is no
room for indecision, or holding a neutral view on any issue. This adds
to the feeling of guilt imposed on us. For me specifically, it seems
that I’m being told it’s wrong to be a middle-class white male. The
whole system being used seems to be trying to change the students into
all holding the same views–the views the school, Residence Life
specifically, wants us to hold. This is in no way diversity, and it is
in no way right to attempt to brainwash the students.
University President Patrick Harker
Office of the President
University of Delaware
104 Hullihen Hall
Newark, DE 19716-0101
(302) 831-2111 FAX: (302) 831-1297
E-mail: harker@udel.edu
Other’s Blogging:
See author page
Sounds like the governor should remove the entire administration at the rat hole, or the federal government should remove the entire administration in the governor’s rat hole.
If you think the referred article is something go there and look at the pdf they use for a source document. They select important parts of it for their commentary, but viewing the entire PDF to adsorb the whole context is vital for a full understanding.
First I poked around the University website and looked at their published policies in their student handbooks. What I found there was the usual PC lawyer boiler plate any here could probably draft yourself by now and thus contrary to the out of line proposals here.
The pdf is so extreme I viewed it as a document that would be used with others in a history of racism course to compare and contrast all viewpoints from the extreme to the moderate to glean insights into the whole issue. But I would never have taken it as a stand alone policy document.
The only thing I could conceive is that it was being used as a training example of how far things could get out of hand if PC was allowed to fail or be questioned.
But that all fell pretty much apart with the coerced activities of the student body part.
So now I am in a WTF point and will be looking for more data points on this issue to determine scope and intent before jumping off without a full basis for doing so.
But it is so disturbing it does merit more explanation.
Yesterday I was going through an old college psych 101 book I had in the basement. While checking the index for the section I was interested in…I bumped into the book’s index of contributors. It read like a who’s who of today’s political indoctrination writers. To think that I was reading Noam Chomsky (among countless others), paying hundreds of dollars for the friggin course, and being indoctrinated the entire time. Ahhhhh, the late 1980’s…gotta love em. I guess I should’ve expected such a thing at Kent State
Scott,
If you think the late 80s were bad, you should be glad you were out of college in the 90s.
I had a whole long post but the program crashed, so here are the highlights.
Programs like this existed when I was in college. They were showing the signs of the “re-education camp” mentality then, but one could walk out/not attend and not have the reprocussions these mandatory events have now. This stuff makes the “Tolerance Camp” Concentration camp parody of SouthPark seem all too real. However, it is the logical progression of the unchecked, unaccountable power of the “education” system.
I heard on the news yesterday that some primary schools are trying to “grade” and “assess” parents in their duties to help kids do homework and general child raising. This from the NEA which viciously attacks anyone who dares hold government employeees (teachers and administrators) accountable to the public. Disgusting and disturbing hardly begin to describe the educators’ latest attack on parents.
Which leads me to the last point. The left loves to attack Soldiers stating we are “less intelligent” than the “enlightened” left as many enlisted do not have formal univeristy education. To this I counter with the facts: Many Soldiers have college credits and degrees, though from “non-traditional” colleges and that is a good thing (core courses with less PC general education classes). Also, college does NOT make one intelligent. Brainwashing is not equatable to intelligence.
In regards to the situation at the University of Delaware, it is unfortunate that FIRE has chosen to vilify the university with such ruthless rhetoric. In one fell swoop, FIRE has completely flipped this issue on its head, and in doing so, has been able to control the spin on the entire story.
I am currently a senior at the University of Delaware and I was a resident assistant (RA) for the maligned Office of Residence Life for one semester last year. Not only has FIRE grossly misconstrued what is actually occurring at the university but they have added unnecessarily loaded language in their presentation of the issue which has further incited the criticism being foisted upon Delaware.
To make clear before people paint me as a mouthpiece for the university: I am no longer working for the Office of Residence Life and I left voluntarily at the end of last semester. Also, I can only speak from my own experience and my observations of the system as a whole, and my statements do not necessarily reflect the opinions of other RAs.
In my time working with this department, I was often at odds with many policies put in place but never did I feel that the office’s programs were “Orwellian,†a “grave intrusion into students’ private beliefs†or coercive, as FIRE portrays them. In fact, I was skeptical of the effectiveness of many of the office’s programs but never did I think they endangered students’ right to free speech or their intellectual welfare.
To put it simply — the university wants to promote diversity and facilitate social tolerance among its students. There is no subversive indoctrination, no hidden agenda. The university feels, to paraphrase what I gathered from my time employed by the Office of Residence Life, that students should progress as individuals during their time spent at Delaware and feels it is responsible for exposing them to what it deems character-building social concepts and qualities.
The university does have in place an extensive program to promote tolerance among its students living in the residence halls. Yes, it has a list of “competencies†it hopes students achieve in their time at the university and it does hope students embrace a notion of “citizenship.†However, there is no “comprehensive manipulation†as FIRE claims.
In my time as an RA, I was required to attend a class titled, “Contemporary Issues for Resident Assistants.†The purpose of the course was to educate RAs about the range of divisive issues facing college students and to prepare RAs to deal with any problems they might encounter in working with residents. We frequently covered diversity-related topics — issues relating to religion, ethnicity, socio-economic status, sexuality, gender, etc. — and the purpose of the course was to learn how to be tolerant of and understand different people and situations.
To be fair, not all of the material in the class dealt with these issues, however. We were also taught how to deal with sexual abuse, roommate-to-roommate conflicts, alcohol abuse, and a host of other issues which were relevant to working with largely underclassmen residents.
FIRE’s main allegations for misconduct have to do with the university supposedly promoting a view that white students are to be encouraged by RAs to feel remorseful of their racist, supremacist past. This is simply not true and was never taught to me. I was never instructed to teach residents about this.
Some of the coursework and activities were bluntly direct in their message. The university very obviously strived to instill in us near-universal tolerance and acceptance — or at least the cognizant awareness of what problems we might encounter in our positions and how to deal with them — so that we would be better equipped to do our jobs working with residents.
However, there was no stipulation that we as students had to agree with the university’s position on these issues. In fact, few in the class (all fellow RAs) truly believed everything we were taught and felt much of the material was overstated, silly and patronizing. But none were actually against what was being taught. Most of us readily agreed that the university had the right intention — trying to make its students better people, which is what all universities try to do after all, right? — but misfired on the execution of those lessons.
As for the “training sessions, floor meetings, and one-on-one meetings with their Resident Assistants (RAs)†that FIRE says students are supposedly required to attend: never in my experience did I see any students forced into a meeting they had an issue with or truly did not feel comfortable attending. While students were greatly encouraged to attend these meetings and these may have been promoted as mandatory, there were no consequences for absence. In fact, my meetings were attended by fewer than 50 percent of floor residents. How did I advertise them? Email notifications followed by knocking on each resident’s door to tell them when the meeting would be held. Hardly coercive, in my view.
In general, it was a common occurrence for students to skip meetings at their leisure and there were no repercussions besides a “please try to come next time.†There were literally zero things we could do to punish residents, and moreso, no RAs that I knew felt the need for such punishment.
In the one-on-one sessions, they are intended to be relatively short meetings between a resident and an RA with the hope of building a rapport between both sides to better create a “floor community.†The RAs were given rough guidelines as to how to conduct these meetings, but they were largely left up to the RA to plan and conduct. Yes, RAs were expected to ask somewhat-personal questions to better get to know residents, but I have never heard of a situation where students were generally offended or made uncomfortable by an RA’s questions or conversation. The entire point of these meetings is to promote a positive relationship between RA and resident, not to interrogate residents or scare them away from future interactions. Again, in my experience, these were encouraged but never forced onto residents; if a resident ever had a serious issue with this kind of meeting, I cannot see a request to be excused for personal reasons being denied.
If anything, any problems relating to residence hall suppression of freedom of speech is due to problems relating to the work of individual RAs and not the system as a whole.
I could go on and on with examples from my semester as an RA. From my first-hand experience, FIRE’s allegations are largely unfounded and serve only to stir a pot that is essentially non-existent. I truly hope the FIRE’s Web site re-evaluates its statements and tones down its rhetoric as to prevent the university from taking flak it does not deserve.
This says it all:
What it deems? Thats the problem. Our liberal universities have taken to indoctrinating our kids for decades now. Any kid who is pro-capitalism, pro-Republican, and doesn’t feel the need to whip himself because they come from a middle-class background or may be white is told that they are wrong. David Horowitz’s work is superb in detailing all of this liberal bias and now your university is promoting some kind of re-education….simply disgusting.
Baloney. Tell that to the many conservative kids who have had to keep quiet or suffer failing grades.
Thanks boys
ec5f7b61f4e1d4100451542046e3c151
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