Year: 2007

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.”

When I was in high school, BellSouth introduced a nifty new service: “fuzzy information”. You could pick up the phone and dial 311 (or was it 611?) and an operator would come on the line. You could then ask for “fuzzy” information, like “are there any Indian restaurants in the 30305 zip code?” or “I’m at 123 Maple Street – what’s the nearest dry cleaners?”. The service was free at first, but then BellSouth scaled it down to “the first 3 calls per month are free, any subsequent calls are 99¢”. Eventually, all calls were 99¢… and the service abruptly disappeared a couple of months later.

Apparently I’m not the only one that missed that service. Both Microsoft and Google have introduced similar services recently, and unlike BellSouth’s offerings, both work nationally and both are free!

Ars Technica has this comparison of both services. In a nutshell, Microsoft’s offerings are supreme for now, although Google’s are nothing to sneeze at, either. If you’d rather skip the article and just try them out yourself, here are the numbers:

GOOG411: 1-800-GOOG-411
LiveSearch411: 1-800-CALL-411