Here’s a scary (and true!) story for your Halloween: it seems that the University of Delaware is now forcing students to undergo “ideological reeducation”! The university is so brazen about it that it even refers to it as a “treatment for students’ incorrect attitudes and beliefs” in their own materials! It’s so bad that the Foundation for Individual Rights In Education (FIRE) has taken action on it. You can read their press release here, but I’ve excerpted heavily from it below:
Students living in the university’s 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.”
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.”
Wow! I can’t say that this surprises me, really. I could see this coming back when I was in college 12 years ago. The sheer brazenness of it is pretty shocking, though. Oh well – as Orwell himself said:
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”