[NYTr] Anti-Diversity Backlash at Univ of Delaware

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

[A strange press release claiming that the University is requiring
students to be aware of racism, sexual diversity and the environment,
and that it's all being imposed in a clumsy and doctrinaire manner. -NY
Transfer]

AmazonAws - Oct 30, 2007
http://s3.amazonaws.com/thefirecache/8555.html

Univ of Delaware Requires Students to Undergo Ideological Reeducation 

October 30, 2007

FIRE Press Release

NEWARK, Del., October 30, 2007—The University of Delaware subjects
students in its residence halls to a shocking program of ideological
reeducation that is referred to in the university’s own materials as a
“treatment” for students’ incorrect attitudes and beliefs. The
Orwellian program requires the approximately 7,000 students in
Delaware’s residence halls to adopt highly specific university-approved
views on issues ranging from politics to race, sexuality, sociology,
moral philosophy, and environmentalism. The Foundation for Individual
Rights in Education (FIRE) is calling for the total dismantling of the
program, which is a flagrant violation of students’ rights to freedom
of conscience and freedom from compelled speech. 

“The University of Delaware’s residence life education program is a
grave intrusion into students’ private beliefs,” FIRE President Greg
Lukianoff said. “The university has decided that it is not enough to
expose its students to the values it considers important; instead, it
must coerce its students into accepting those values as their own. At a
public university like Delaware, this is both unconscionable and
unconstitutional.” 

The university’s views are forced on students through a comprehensive
manipulation of the residence hall environment, from mandatory training
sessions to “sustainability” door decorations. Students living in the
university’s eight housing 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.” 

According to the program’s materials, the goal of the residence life
education program is for students in the university’s residence halls
to achieve certain “competencies” that the university has decreed its
students must develop in order to achieve the overall educational goal
of “citizenship.” 

These competencies include:

“Students will recognize that systemic oppression exists in our
society,” “Students will recognize the benefits of dismantling systems
of oppression,” and “Students will be able to utilize their knowledge
of sustainability to change their daily habits and consumer mentality.”

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.” 

In the Office of Residence Life’s
internal materials, these programs are described using the harrowing
language of ideological reeducation. In documents relating to the
assessment of student learning, for example, the residence hall lesson
plans are referred to as “treatments.” 

In a letter sent yesterday to
University of Delaware President Patrick Harker, FIRE pointed out the
stark contradiction between the residence life education program and
the values of a free society. FIRE’s letter to President Harker also
underscored the University of Delaware’s legal obligation to abide by
the First Amendment. 

FIRE reminded Harker of the Supreme Court’s
decision in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943),
a case decided during World War II that remains the law of the land.
Justice Robert H. Jackson, writing for the Court, declared, “If there
is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no
official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in
politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force
citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” “The fact that
the university views its students as patients in need of treatment for
some sort of moral sickness betrays a total lack of respect not only
for students’ basic rights, but for students themselves,” Lukianoff
said. 

“The University of Delaware has both a legal and a moral
obligation to immediately dismantle this program, and FIRE will not
rest until it has.” FIRE is a nonprofit educational foundation that
unites civil rights and civil liberties leaders, scholars, journalists,
and public intellectuals across the political and ideological spectrum
on behalf of individual rights, due process rights, freedom of
expression, and rights of conscience on our campuses. FIRE would like
to thank the Delaware Association of Scholars (DAS) for its invaluable
assistance in this case. FIRE’s efforts to preserve liberty at the
University of Delaware and elsewhere can be seen by visiting
http://www.thefire.org. 

CONTACT: Greg Lukianoff, President, FIRE:
215-717-3473; greg_lukianoff at thefire.org 

Samantha Harris, Director of Legal and Public Advocacy, FIRE:
215-717-3473; samantha at thefire.org 

Patrick Harker, President, University of Delaware: 302-831-2111;
president at udel.edu 

Kathleen G. Kerr, Director of Residence Life,
University of Delaware: 302-831-1201; kkerr at udel.edu