Indoctrination At College

This is something I'm very sensitive about:

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 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)...

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.”

I'm not surprised by this. There's little doubt that universities are largely staffed by way-left-of-center faculty and that political correctness has a stranglehold on dialogue in many fields. Just ask Larry Summers.

Why am I super-sensitive to this? Because as a young boy I myself went through a one-year course in ideological reorientation. I attended an elite elementary Catholic school in Havana. Castro took over, the Catholic school was shut down, and I got transferred to a revolutionary school where the entire day was spent teaching Marxist-Leninist ideology. Luckily, this lasted only a year and I continued my education in Miami (where the entire school day was instead spent talking about the upcoming football game). I am certain that the blind zealotry that I saw in the young teacher's eyes that year turned me off from that particular way of viewing the world for the rest of my life. One can only hope that many of the students forced to attend the re-education programs at Delaware and other universities react in the same way.

There's a related documentary called Indoctrinate U that probably won't make it into mainstream Hollywood distribution channels. But I've seen a few clips of it on the web and it looks like something that I should rent when the DVD comes out.

Comments

[Brian]

Disgusting. Hopefully students will recognize the oppression of the program itself and work to dismantle IT. Thanks for the pointer.

[Benjamin.L]

Sad but true. It's primarily the attentive reading of economics blogs that has helped me begin to recover from my own fringe left-wing ideological indoctrination (i.e., multiple humanities departments at Harvard and Yale). Keep up the great work!

[Coyote99]

“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 . . . living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality.”

Oh great. This makes things so much easier. Now we don't have to consider a person's actual beliefs, attitudes, or actions to determine if they are racist; instead, all we have to do is look at their skin color. We can judge people based not on the content of their character, but solely on the color of their skin. We've come a long way, baby. The only problem is, it seems we've been walking in a big circle and now we're right back where we started.

[corvid]

I'm pretty left-wing--on economic issues, at least--but I utterly despise these overbroad definitions of racism and this thoroughly disgusting rejection of cognitive diversity. But it's even worse than we think.

For instance, I, for one, think that global warming is an enormous problem that needs to be addressed right away. But the public at large appears to feel little urgency and, in fact, is suspicious of efforts to do anything to address climate change on an effective scale. And I don't blame them.

The reason is, these very same PC-Nazis that infect our campuses are also among the loudest proponents of environmental causes. Much of the public seems to think that if they vote for candidates who advocate addressing the climate crisis, they'll also get more PC-Nazism. At some level, they suspect a unified cause at work beneath the surface here.

In fact, they may be right. So, as our first order of business, we should begin calling out these folks and putting them back in line--and not for their views but for their rotten intolerance.

[Ben]

Thanks for the information on topics.I was excited by this article.
Thank you again

College online for good ideas.

[Online College Consulting - Applywise]

Shaping the students view on the world and how they should make themselves productive and useful when they are ready to face the world is something that colleges and universities have the right to do. But intervening with what students should believe in is something that is way beyond their scope. Well, that's just my opinion.