Reality on college campuses is reading like parody these days. Every outrage seems at first like a report from The Onion, but then comes the depressing realization that it’s real. Take the University of Delaware’s positively Hitleresque and Stalinesque new policy for students in dorms:
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.
Fortunately, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has decided to sue:
“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.â€
Twenty years from now education professionals of today are going to look back on this era with embarrassment and try deperately to hide their involvement in its outrages.
UPDATE: More on this outrage from John Leo.