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07.01.2008 0

University of Delaware Perpetuates Freshman Indoctrination Program

  • On: 07/20/2008 16:42:45
  • In: First Amendment
  • “U.D. President [Patrick] Harker got it right when he decreed — with false promise as it turned out — that the campus’s repressive dorm program had to ‘be stopped immediately.’ Shame on him, and all other university administrators, trustees and professors who cower before despotic campus ‘change agents’ intent on upending American society. Shame on them all for flagrantly violating the public trust.”– Dr. Candace de Russy, “College Mind Police Live to Brainwash Another Day,” April 9th, 2008.

    As education budgets swell to their largest levels in our nation’s history, it is instructive to see where Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars are actually going: into radical indoctrination programs.

    It is equally instructive to see how university officials responded when they were notified that a totalitarian-style reeducation program was being implemented under the noses of the entrenched educrats:

    “Last fall, University of Delaware President Patrick Harker appeared to pull the plug, once and for all, on a totalitarian-style dorm program for indoctrinating freshmen in the full complement of today’s radical dicta. But in fact, as the Wilmington News-Journal now reports, Harker passed the buck, as university administrators are wont to do in time of controversy, by lobbing the program to the faculty for what has proven to be a feckless ‘review.’

    “This ‘Residence Life,’ so-called ‘citizenship’ program would have remained under wraps except for whistle-blowing by indignant students and their parents, as well as groundbreaking efforts by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and the National Association of Scholars (NAS) to investigate and expose the character of what the university, in its own Orwellian materials, called ‘the treatment.’

    “The program’s stated intent was for the approximately 7,000 students in U.D.’s residence halls to espouse, in FIRE’s words, ‘highly specific university-approved views on politics, race, sexuality, sociology, moral philosophy, and environmentalism.’

    “Program materials for this ideological reeducation, which have been removed from the U.D. Website, included race/gender/class/sexual orientation ‘trainer’ Shakti Butler’s definition of a racist as ‘all white people living in the United States’ and her edict that ‘people of color cannot be racists.’ An intrusive rating instrument, ‘Discovery Wheel,’ was used to prompt students to admit to their putative racism, and they were instructed that the U.S. is as ‘an oppressive society’ whose ‘structures of oppression’ it is their ‘duty’ to eliminate.

    “’The treatment’ was also mandatory and punitive. Students were required to attend training sessions, group floor meetings, and one-on-one meetings with their Resident Advisers (RAs), who, having been coached in interrogating vulnerable freshmen, plied them with invasive questions. Thereafter students were rated on a scale of “best” to ‘worst,’ according to how they complied with the prescribed campus orthodoxy. For example, students were grilled about when they first discovered their sexual identity. One resistant student who replied, ‘That is none of your damn business,’ was written up as having one of the ‘wors[t] one-on-one’ sessions, and identified by name and room number.

    “To its shame, the U.D. Faculty Senate could not muster the gumption in its review even to name, much less denounce, these abominations.”

    This is indeed abominable. But, ALG News regrets to report that it is par for the course when it comes to higher education.

    All parents and concerned citizens ought to be paying close attention. As Dr. de Russy points out, the University of Delaware’s “citizenship program” for incoming freshmen is nothing more than an ideological, coercive indoctrination program that, even when it was brought to the attention of university officials, continued unabated. That’s just wrong.

    Students attending our nation’s higher education institutions should be treated with the freedom of inquiry, not to be force-fed the talking points of the radical Left.

    ALG CTA:
    Please encourage your audiences to give University of Delaware President Patrick Harker a call at (302)831-2111 and email him at president@udel.edu to let him know that universities were founded to promote the freedom to think, not to indoctrinate students with a particular ideology. U.D.’s program needs to “be stopped immediately”, in the words of U.D.’s President, not revamped and retooled so that the propagandists live to indoctrinate another day.

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