The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which fights for the speech rights of students on America’s college campuses, has released a video documenting a “thought control” policy at the University of Delaware.
WND reported on the issue when the university’s office of residential life was caught requiring students to participant in a program that taught “all whites are racist.”
School officials immediately defended the teaching, but in the face of a backlash from alumni and publicity about its work, the school decided to drop the curriculum, although some factions later suggested its revival.
The documentary by FIRE, called “Think What We Think … Or Else: Thought Control on the American Campus,” explains the “though-reform program.”
It is available on The FIRE’s website and also has been embedded here:
FIRE reports it was in the fall of 2007 when the “Orwellian program of ideological re-education aimed at coercing students to change their thoughts, habits, and values to conform to a highly specific ideological agenda” was established.
More than 7,000 undergraduates in the Delaware dorms were required to attend training sessions, floor meetings and one-on-one sessions with resident assistants who followed the rules described in internal documents as a “treatment.”
“‘Think What We Think… Or Else’ serves as a reminder to college and university administrators that programs like that established at the University of Delaware are flagrant violations of students’ right to freedom of conscience – and that colleges with programs that emulate UD’s failed effort just might end up as the subject of FIRE’s next documentary,” the organization said.
Foundation officials said they never had encountered a more systematic assault upon the individual liberty, dignity, privacy and autonomy of university students.”
Even Delaware professors Jan Blits and Linda Gottfredson described the program as a type of thuggery.
“We read ResLife’s online materials (most of which were later removed) and were appalled. ResLife was engaging students in mandatory activities designed to change students’ thoughts, values, attitudes, beliefs, and habits to conform to a specific, highly politicized set of ‘citizenship values’ that had been pre-selected as the marks of responsible citizens. Anything deemed remotely ‘oppressive’ by anyone was to be stamped out, and resident assistants were being taught 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,'” they wrote, according to the FIRE report.
The treatment of a female freshman class student was typical of the school’s indoctrination, the program said.
“A female freshman arrives for her mandatory one-on-one session in her male RA’s dorm room. It is 8:00 p.m. Classes have been in session for about a week. The resident assistant hands her a questionnaire. He tells her it is ‘a little questionnaire to help [you] and all the other residents relate to the curriculum.’ He adds that they will ‘go through every question together and discuss them,'” according to the report.
When the student is asked, “When did you discover your sexual identity?” she responds, “That is none of your d*** business.”
Because she did not respond correctly, the residence assistant “becomes so appalled by her resistance that he writes up an incident report and reports her to his superiors,”
the report said.
The mandatory “reprogramming sessions” even had the trappings of a cult, it said.
Among the teachings from the Office of Residence Life Diversity Education Training documents was:
“A RACIST: 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. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as peoples within the U.S. system, they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities, or acts of discrimination. …'”
The education program also asserted that “reverse racism” is “a term created and used by white people to deny their white privilege.” And “a non-racist” is called “a non-term,” because, the program explains, “The term was created by whites to deny responsibility for systemic racism, to maintain an aura of innocence in the face of racial oppression, and to shift the responsibility for that oppression from whites to people of color (called ‘blaming the victim’).”
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