University re-education camps

When the government funds education, it’s always wise to be alert for the potential for a “two-tiered” curriculum.

The public curriculum is easy to ascertain. Ask those in charge of any university for an official list of the subject matter being taught. A handsome catalog is often available, bragging that students have wide opportunities to take courses in engineering and the sciences, in English and foreign literature, in history and psychology and any number of other disciplines.

But if your son was attending the University of Delaware in recent years, where in the catalog would you have learned that he would not be advancing until he had acknowledged that “systematic oppression exists in our society” and that those “systems of oppression must be dismantled”?

Where in the course catalog were parents or prospective students advised that they would be expected to demonstrate they had “changed their daily habits and consumer mentality” to reflect current politically correct notions of the “sustainability” of various forms of energy generation and resource extraction?

In fact, the Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights in Education learned that the University of Delaware has been carrying on just such an ideological re-education program, referred to by the university itself as “treatment” for the incorrect attitudes and beliefs which students have been bringing to the university from their home environments.

“The program’s stated goal was for the approximately 7,000 students in Delaware’s residence halls to adopt highly specific university-approved views on politics, race, sexuality, sociology, moral philosophy and environmentalism,” the human rights group announced in a Nov. 2 release.

And mind you, these were not open debates on these topics, where dissenting views were granted a fair hearing and respectful treatment. Oh no. Under the program, students were required to attend training sessions, floor meetings and “one-on-one” meetings with their resident assistants (RAs), who apparently filled the same role here as the political commissars in the old Soviet Army.

The university even instructed their RAs to ask intrusive questions during these one-on-one sessions, including, “When did you discover your sexual identity?”

A student who responded “That is none of your damn business” was “according to the university’s own materials, written up — along with the student’s name and room number — as having one of the ‘worst one-on-one’ sessions.”

With the aid of the Delaware Association of Scholars, FIRE went public, exposing the mandatory indoctrination program. Although the university at first defended the brainwashing, university President Patrick Harker announced Nov. 1 that he was terminating the program, effective immediately.

“Universities often cannot defend in public what they try to do in private,” said FIRE president Greg Lukianoff last week, “and the situation at Delaware was no exception. While we are pleased that the program is over, it is stunning that it ever existed at a public university in the United States.”

With due respect, perhaps Mr. Lukianoff needs to get out more.

“Under the First Amendment, state institutions have no right to impose mandatory ideological training on their students,” the head of the individual rights group continued. “We are thrilled that this unconscionable and invasive program is gone, but … FIRE will continue to monitor the situation at Delaware and to fight against other ideological re-education programs at schools across the nation.”

Unfortunately, given the current popularity of unison chantings from the gospel of PC — and the corollary tendency to denounce any dissent on campus as “oppressive hate-speech” — the folks at FIRE may not have to look very hard.