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
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