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 of Delaware’s residence life education program is a grave intrusion into students’ private beliefs,” FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said. “The university has decided that it is not enough to expose its students to the values it considers important; instead, it must coerce its students into accepting those values as their own. At a public university like Delaware, this is both unconscionable and unconstitutional.”
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.”
According to the program’s materials, the goal of the residence life education program is for students in the university’s residence halls to achieve certain “competencies” that the university has decreed its students must develop in order to achieve the overall educational goal of “citizenship.” These competencies include: “Students will recognize that systemic oppression exists in our society,” “Students will recognize the benefits of dismantling systems of oppression,” and “Students will be able to utilize their knowledge of sustainability to change their daily habits and consumer mentality.”
At various points in the program, students are also pressured or even required to take actions that outwardly indicate their agreement with the university’s ideology, regardless of their personal beliefs. Such actions include displaying specific door decorations, committing to reduce their ecological footprint by at least 20%, taking action by advocating for an “oppressed” social group, and taking action by advocating for a “sustainable world.”
In the Office of Residence Life’s internal materials, these programs are described using the harrowing language of ideological reeducation. In documents relating to the assessment of student learning, for example, the residence hall lesson plans are referred to as “treatments.”
In a letter sent yesterday to University of Delaware President Patrick Harker, FIRE pointed out the stark contradiction between the residence life education program and the values of a free society. FIRE’s letter to President Harker also underscored the University of Delaware’s legal obligation to abide by the First Amendment. FIRE reminded Harker of the Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), a case decided during World War II that remains the law of the land. Justice Robert H. Jackson, writing for the Court, declared, “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”
“The fact that the university views its students as patients in need of treatment for some sort of moral sickness betrays a total lack of respect not only for students’ basic rights, but for students themselves,” Lukianoff said. “The University of Delaware has both a legal and a moral obligation to immediately dismantle this program, and FIRE will not rest until it has.”
FIRE is a nonprofit educational foundation that unites civil rights and civil liberties leaders, scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals across the political and ideological spectrum on behalf of individual rights, due process rights, freedom of expression, and rights of conscience on our campuses. FIRE would like to thank the Delaware Association of Scholars (DAS) for its invaluable assistance in this case. FIRE’s efforts to preserve liberty at the University of Delaware and elsewhere can be seen by visiting www.thefire.org.
It's just unbelievable. There are no words. Fun fact? Freshman are required to live in the dorms unless they have family nearby.
What's really fun is that Democrats like John Edwards want everyone to go to college. And why not? Then everyone will be brainwashed into being perfect little zombie-fied moonbats.
Please feel free to contact the University of Delaware and demand that they stop this. We live in a free society, and to be completely frank, this is bullshit. NO ONE should have to put up with that. NO ONE.
Patrick Harker, President, University of Delaware: 302-831-2111; president@udel.edu
Kathleen G. Kerr, Director of Residence Life, University of Delaware: 302-831-1201; kkerr@udel.edu
Also, please make sure to visit the FIRE website and show your support. It's a great organization, fighting against the indoctrination of the people who will be running our country in the future.
Hat tip: Moonbattery
4 comments:
"Students will recognize that systemic oppression exists in our society."
Hopefully they'll recognize that it's happening to them at the University of Delaware.
You've certainly tipped us off to a political correctness horror show at U. of Delaware. What's obviously needed is greater representation of conservatives in the Administration there. For instance, what would an ideal president look like?
How about a man with practical training (in engineering, say), but whose career has been mainly to devoted to business-management education, with strong views in favor of free enterprise (at a B-school like Wharton, say). You would also want a guy whose sympaathies with the private sector are manifest through his membership on the boards of investment banks and other financial institutins. Moreover, you'd want a guy who is obviously acceptable to conservative office holders, as evidenced, for instance, by an appointment as Presidential Fellow by the current President Bush. Finally, you'd want a man whose spiritual life is centered on traditional religion, for instance, a guy who serves as advisor to a local Roman Catholic diocese. Such a man would surely put a stop to the PC nonsense at Delaware!
But--oh my--I seem to have described the incumbent President of U. Del., Patrick Harper!!
So maybe it isn't a conspiracy of left-wing nutcases we've been talking about, but rather an even more subtle conspiracy of right-wing screwballs.
most of the program is horrible...but what is so wrong with 'committing to reduce their ecological footprint by at least 20%'...
"committing to reduce their ecological footprint by at least 20%"
Why do this when it could potentially harm humans? There's zero evidence that humans are causing global warming. More and more studies are coming out connecting it to the sun, and that it'll reverse in a few years, and then revers again, and again, and again... It's a natural cycle. The sooner people accept this the sooner people can sleep better at night and actually contribute to society.
And fossil is right. He's stumbled on our plan to hate on Whitey. /rolleyes
Post a Comment