Thanks boys
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This says it all:

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.

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.

However, there was no stipulation that we as students had to agree with the university’s position on these issues.

Baloney. Tell that to the many conservative kids who have had to keep quiet or suffer failing grades.

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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.

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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.

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Welcome To Metropolis

This is pretty shocking. The University of Delaware is actually indoctrinating students who live in campus housing. It is nothing less than that, in fact, the  university’s own "teaching" materials refers to it as a &ldqu…

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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

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University of Delaware indoctrinates dorm residents in mandatory anti white dogma

As I noted earlier, Seattle went this route earlier this year. As I noted in this blog, the issue was raised locally by sending a bunch of High School kids to a White Privilege Seminar. You should be even more alarmed to learn that the curriculum is …

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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.

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University of Delaware: No Free Thoughts Allowed

FIRE, the college civil rights advocacy group, dropped a bombshell last night. The University of Delaware has been running a radical leftist reeducation program under the guise of a “life education program”. I’ve got plenty more to sa…

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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.

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