Flashback: Actual Thought-Policing, with "Deprogramming" Sessions to Break People's Aversion to Social Justice Warrior Beliefs, at the University of Delaware
Corrected: Program Was Terminated Years Ago

via @comradearthur, a must read.

Why Ya Gotta Bust My Nuts All the Time? Okay, this article, rude commenters rudely inform me, is from October 31, 2008. It's still absolutely dynamite.

I take full responsibility on behalf of @comradearthur, with whom all fault plainly lies.

...

I'll skip the opening, which details some "resistant" students -- students who gave f***-all about the U of Delaware's silly-shit mandatory Social Justice Warrior indoctrination. They said things like "Yes as an opera lover I feel oppressed by the Rock Majority."

They were taking the piss (why I am using all this English slang all of a sudden?) out of mandatory forms where UD demanded to know about each student's sexual orientation, and when he "discovered" that orientation, and when he had been the victim or victimizer in Unapproved Going About One's Life activities.

These people needed to be broken, and now the University of Delaware crosses all the fascist lines.

This is cult shit, man.

She is not playing along like the other students [she's giving "bite me" answers to the mandatory questionnaire -- ace], and the RA confronts her using his "confrontation training," but it isn't working. He becomes so appalled by her resistance that he writes up an incident report and reports her to his superiors. After all, this is the University of Delaware, and the school has a zero-tolerance policy for anything remotely resembling "hate speech."

This one-on-one session was not meant to be a punishment, some kind of mandatory sensitivity training for a recalcitrant student who had committed an infraction. It was mandatory training for all 7,000-odd students in the University of Delaware dorms. The sessions were part of a thorough thought-reform curriculum, designed by the school’s Office of Residence Life, to psychologically "treat" and correct the allegedly incorrect thoughts, attitudes, values, beliefs, and habits of the students. The ResLife staff considered students too intolerant of one another, too "consumerist," and in dire need of reeducation to become responsible world citizens who could meet the planet's environmental crisis and the requirements of social and economic "justice."

The reprogramming sessions had the trappings of cultism. After an investigation showed that males demonstrated "a higher degree of resistance to educational efforts," one dorm chose to hire "strong male RAs." Each such RA "combats male residents' concepts of traditional male identity" in order to "ensure the delivery of the curriculum at the same level as in the female floors." Mandatory group sessions singled out and shamed non-minority students because of their "privilege" in American society. Staff members kept individual files on students and their beliefs--which were to be archived after graduation. RAs were trained in the zero-tolerance policy against anything "oppressive" -- an untoward word would trigger immediate notification of the campus police. RAs were required to report their "best" and "worst" one-on-one sessions to their superiors, including students' names and room numbers. Posters and door decorations provided the ResLife messages everywhere; one could not escape them. One administrator of the program, Sendy Guerrier, wrote that students "should be confronted with this information at every turn." Students with "traditional" beliefs had to become "allies" and "change agents" by their senior year.

All of this, according to the university's own materials, was part of a new educational model that had won awards from the American College Personnel Association's Commission for Social Justice Educators. The University of Delaware was proud of this "every student" model of values education in the residence halls, which had been implemented in 2004. This "curricular approach," the university sang, was superior to the old "programming model," which was merely voluntary and only focused on outmoded activities like study breaks. Finally, Residence Life officials could be teachers of a mandatory program, just like the faculty, and they could reach students where it really mattered--where they lived. The program was a comprehensive manipulation of the living environment to inculcate, unrelentingly, the ideological messages insisted upon by the ResLife staff. It was an extreme example of what Alan Charles Kors and Harvey Silverglate had predicted ten years ago in The Shadow University: a large apparatus of Residence Life officials usurping the educational prerogatives of the faculty in order to advance a deeply repressive agenda.

Obviously, this should be made subject of a law: No university engaging in the mandatory "programming" of student political, social, or cultural beliefs can receive a dime of federal money.

That should happen -- that must happen.

America no longer exists, except in the hearts and memories of those who once loved it.

If you want that memory to be real again, it's time to start smashing the instruments of repression and control.

Update: The University of Delaware's "reprogramming" sessions were halted in 2007, thanks to pressure from Fire.

Apologies. I'll put something else up.

Damn.

Corrected: Program Was Terminated Years Ago&bodytext=via @comradearthur, a must read. Why Ya Gotta Bust My Nuts All the Time? Okay, this article, rude commenters rudely inform me, is from October 31, 2008. It's still absolutely dynamite. I take full responsibility on behalf of @comradearthur, with...&topic=world_news"> posted by Ace at 01:37 PM

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