By: Adam Kissel
Published: October 31, 2008
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.” He later reports that she “looked a little uncomfortable.”
“When did you discover your sexual identity?” the questionnaire asks.
“That is none of your damn business,” she writes.
“When was a time you felt oppressed?”
“I am oppressed every day [because of my] feelings for the opera. Regularly [people] throw stones at me and jeer me with cruel names…. Unbearable adversity. But I will overcome, hear me, you rock loving majority.”[1]
She is not playing along like the other students, 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.
Recognizing what they called the “betrayal of liberty on America’s campuses,” Kors and Silverglate established the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) in 1999. FIRE’s mission (see www.thefire.org) is to defend and sustain individual rights at America’s colleges and universities. These rights include freedom of speech, legal equality, due process, religious liberty, and—notably lacking at the University of Delaware—the right of private conscience.
Fortunately, indoctrination cannot bear the light of public scrutiny. Just days after FIRE exposed the program to the public in October 2007—and put all 500-odd pages of the “curriculum” documents online—the university’s president, Patrick Harker, suspended it. But the many full-time Residence Life staff worked nonstop to bring it back. Rather than repudiate the racist teachings and invasive methods of the program, some University of Delaware faculty even worked with the Office of Residence Life to reinstate the agenda.
Hello, Mom? I’m a Racist!
The media focused heavily on one part of the RA training called “Diversity Facilitation Training.” RAs were trained using definitions like these:
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…
REVERSE RACISM: A term created and used by white people to deny their white privilege. Those in denial use the term reverse racism to refer to hostile behavior by people of color toward whites, and to affirmative action policies, which allegedly give ‘preferential treatment’ to people of color over whites. In the U.S., there is no such thing as “reverse racism.”[2]
The training was heavy-handed as it passed from RAs to students. Guerrier described it as leaving “a mental footprint on [students’] consciousness.” The staff actually called the program a treatment: “through the … curriculum experience (a treatment) specific attitudinal or behavioral changes (learning) will occur.” The fact that ResLife viewed students as patients in need of “treatment” for their problems revealed their utter lack of respect for the students and their freedom of conscience.
A freshman at Delaware couldn’t escape the ideological, highly politicized messages about consumerism, social justice, affirmative action, world redistribution of wealth, and so on. The messages were woven into the fabric of the very place where students slept or talked late into the night. The door decorations were not the usual “Hello, My Name Is,” but rather featured the “three interlocking circles” of “sustainability”: “social justice,” “healthy environments,” and “strong economies.”
The messages were reinforced by “roommate contracts,” “suite constitutions,” and the one-on-one sessions for which RAs—students themselves—had been trained with “delivery strategies.” And they were reinforced at the mandatory floor meetings, where RAs led activities that forced students to reveal their personal views and to suffer public shame for taking conservative rather than progressive positions on social issues. In one such activity, students were to stand on one side of the room if they agreed with, for example, gay marriage, the other side if not. Staying in the middle was not tolerated because, the students were told, the real world is polarized like this.
The pressure to conform to particular standards included mandatory “social justice” activities. For instance, at the Dickinson Complex,[3] “Each student would be asked to make a commitment to reduce their [ecological] footprint by at least 20% before the next one on one meeting.” In the Christiana Towers, all juniors were to “act on the internal belief that societal problems are everyone’s responsibility.” Each student was expected to experience a “cultural plunge,” namely, “an experience that forces the student to leave his/her comfort zone and surround him/herself with people of which [sic] s/he has never interacted on a personal level before.” And at various points throughout the year, Russell Complex students were required to advocate for a “sustainable world” and for an “oppressed” social group.
Freshmen had no way to opt out. One RA announced that the group sessions gave her “a chance to know how everyone’s doing and where everyone stands on certain issues or topics. Not to scare anyone or anything, but these are MANDATORY!!”
The New “Sustainability” Agenda
ResLife’s ideological messages are part of a worldwide “sustainability education” movement. The United Nations declared 2005-2014 the “Decade of Education for Sustainable Development.” UNESCO is the lead agency for the program. Its goal is “to integrate the principles, values, and practices of sustainable development into all aspects of education and learning.” But the agenda goes far beyond environmentalism, just as at Delaware. The worldwide project is to “encourage changes in behavior that will create a more sustainable future in terms of environmental integrity, economic viability, and a just society for present and future generations.” University of Delaware ResLife and many other “sustainability” educators in the United States have taken that program to mean education into a very specific progressive agenda.[4]
For instance, the American College Personnel Association’s (ACPA’s) Sustainability Taskforce, on which ResLife Director Kathleen Kerr serves as a member, identified several “educational outcomes” around the sustainability agenda. At Delaware, ResLife planned an entire four-year sustainability curriculum, making only a few alterations to the ACPA learning outcomes. Here are some of Delaware’s expected “competencies” for all students:
Each student will recognize that systemic oppression exists in our society. (sophomore year)
Each student will recognize the benefits of dismantling systems of oppression. (sophomore year)
Each student will be able to utilize their knowledge of sustainability to change their daily habits and consumer mentality. (junior year)
Learn the skills necessary to be a change agent. (junior year)
Demonstrate civic engagement toward the development of a sustainable society. (senior year)
Maybe you like these goals; maybe you don’t. At a public university, shouldn’t that be each student’s choice? Such declarations are possible endpoints of democratic debate and a college education, but they are hardly suitable as university dogma, a basis for a curriculum that serves all kinds of students in a pluralistic democracy.
ResLife had carefully repackaged the UN program to proclaim that it was merely helping young Americans learn good “citizenship.” After all, citizenship education was an explicit part of the university’s mission. And ResLife set itself as the arbiter of the proper responsibilities of citizenship. For director Kathleen Kerr, these responsibilities entailed progressive advocacy on these issues:
• Gender Equity • Water Rights • Human Rights • Child Labor Issues • Affirmative Action • Multicultural Competence • Pollution & Farming Practices • Worker’s Rights • Sweatshop Labor • Slavery
All of that was on a PowerPoint slide that President Harker never saw, at a conference that Harker did not attend.[5] Yet Kerr considered this the ideal subject matter for students in the dormitories, never mind that such topics are already covered in regular, optional university courses. It is normally the faculty’s prerogative to investigate and debate these issues with students. But ResLife was setting the educational agenda—as well as the opinions that students were expected to internalize. The same people who probably would have objected strenuously (and rightfully) to an “American patriotism” curriculum saw nothing wrong with imposing their own very specific agenda on students.
The Brainwashing Curriculum in Action
The first student outcry concerned the coercive, mandatory group sessions in the dorms. FIRE first learned about the program from a student’s father, whose son (who later left UD altogether) had alerted him. The concerned parent described the activities his son reported as
ugly, hateful, and extremely divisive. It forced the students to act out the worst possible racial stereotypes and was replete with … ideological commentary and gratuitous slurs …
Shortly after hearing from him, FIRE received word from two UD professors, Jan Blits and Linda Gottfredson, that their students had bitterly complained about the program. From that point forward, they put in countless hours to protect the rights of UD students. Not a single other faculty member has been brave enough to come forward with public criticism.[6]
The group sessions were designed to help students learn which of their opinions were “congruent” with ResLife’s idea of good citizenship. In the name of tolerance, students were being taught how different they were from one another—in ways that polarized the students and required them to reveal their most personal beliefs to people they had only recently met. Consider whether the following set of mandatory activities, given here with their original titles, reads more like brainwashing or like a critical, academic analysis of racism, sexism, or other dynamics in American society:
Surrounded by Stereotypes. Students find 13 pieces of paper posted around the room. Each piece of paper has a “social identity” written on it: Latino/Latina/Hispanic, Obese, Poor, Jewish, Male, Asian, Lesbian/Gay, and so on. All students must record on every sheet the stereotypes they have heard associated with these identities (or a zero if they can’t think of any), and then the RA leads a discussion of the answers. RAs are told to follow these guidelines:
Students are asked to focus on stereotypes in the media to encourage them to share “real” stereotypes that actually exist without the fear that they will be judged by their peers. … This activity needs to be done rapidly. Pressure is to be put on the participants as the goal is to have them write down the first thing that comes to their mind.
How can a subconscious word-association exercise simultaneously rely on memories of stereotypes found in the media? Clearly, the exercise is intended to be characterized by pressure rather than mature reflection.
In a focus group at one dorm, the recommended follow-up questions included, “How do you define your comfortableness with homosexuality?” “Do you think that religion and sexual identity could ever coexist?” “Do you feel that your beliefs and actions (behaviors) contribute to the social injustice in American society?”
Day In, Day Out Deluge. Students break up into role-playing groups or “families,” each of which exemplifies one of the social identities by means of a narrative about the family. The narrative includes scenarios that express denigrating stereotypes about each identity. Then, the families are given the list of stereotypes from the first activity and are “reminded that from this moment on they have inherited all the stereotypes.” Thus, the students role-play by demonstrating the worst stereotypes they can imagine!
Fishbowl Discussion. The third exercise is an interrogation. A student from each “family” sits in the center of the room, surrounded by the others, and is asked to reveal his feelings. Each student is told to stay “in character,” yet the RA is told to “pay attention to body language and cues from the rest of the family to ensure that they are all fully engaged.” The point is to make everyone as uncomfortable as possible so that each student “learns” through adversity.
Commitment to Diversity Statement. These three exercises are designed to shame and pressure all students into signing a vow of commitment to diversity. The students identify which of thirty commitments they will make in college, based on their “level of activism.” Keep in mind: this is the beginning of the freshman year. Their choices include:
1. Create an anti-prejudice slogan for your floor, such as “I Don’t Put Up With Put-Downs.” … 17. Investigate the cultural diversity of various performers [brought] to campus. … 30. Examine your textbooks and course work to determine whether it is equitable, representative and multicultural.
Each student now receives a Commitment to Diversity card on which he or she is to record three things learned, two questions, and one commitment each student will make as a result of the earlier activities. Later, “their RA will be asking them questions related to their responses during their first one on one meeting.”
Finally, each student “can choose to sign” the Commitment to Diversity Statement. By this point in the day, it would take an awful lot of chutzpah for a freshman to refuse to sign the statement in the presence of the RA and his or her peers—even if his or her objection were simply that RAs should not be treating adult students like morally deficient children in need of reform.
Again, this was just the beginning. Four years’ worth of activities awaited.
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Reminder: this occurred in 2007 - fifteen years ago. And prior to DiAngelo inventing “white fragility” specifically to silence heretics.
You’d assume that in the light of discovery and the scandal that ensued, the masterminds behind this Maoist totalitarianism would be borderline unemployable.
They’re not. They’re celebrating, and being celebrated.
Date: October 31, 2007
The University of Delaware’s senior residence life staff are so proud of their totalitarian approach to student “education” that they are hoping to export their model to educators from around the country. In the November–December 2006 issue of About Campus—a magazine for college and university educators—UD Director of Residence Life Kathleen Kerr and Associate Director of Residence Life James Tweedy published an article entitled “Beyond Seat Time and Student Satisfaction: A Curricular Approach to Residential Education.” In that article, Kerr and Tweedy discuss their belief that residence halls “represent an important setting for delivering a curriculum focused on citizenship development.” They discuss their desired “learning goals,” which include requiring each student to, among other things, “explore societal privilege and the experiences of those disadvantaged in our democracy,” “explore social identity privilege,” and “explore class privilege.” They also discuss potential improvements to the program, such as—creepily—“the possibility of identifying behavioral factors that can be observed and recorded by hall staff members.” Then, in January 2007, Delaware hosted the first Residential Curriculum Institute. According to a university press release, the Institute focused “on UD’s efforts to use a curricular approach to residential education as a replacement for the traditional programming model.” (Those following this case may remember that the quaint and outmoded “programming model” differs from the curricular approach in that it “relies on voluntary attendance.”) Representatives from more than 35 schools across North America registered to attend the Institute.
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Since then, they’ve proceeded to move up the food chain,
Date: April 21, 2021
One would think after the program was disastrously exposed and condemned by faculty, the authors of the program would’ve been fired. But look at the career trajectory of a co-author of the University of Delaware program, Kathleen Kerr. In 2007-08, the time of the controversy, she was the Director of Residence Life. In 2013, she was promoted to Executive Director, Residence Life & Housing. In 2017, she was promoted to Associate Vice President for Student Life, a role she holds today.
Indeed, Kerr and Tweedy came out with the book just last year titled “The Curricular Approach to Student Affairs: A Revolutionary Shift for Learning Beyond the Classroom,” advocating, again, for administrators to take an “educational” role in the dormitory and beyond.
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All this just to live in a dorm on campus.
Instead of simply saying “here’s some basic, common-sense rules, learn to sort out how to live with each other and your differences.”
In 2007-2008, this was shocking. This language was bizarre and made no sense, and these tactics seemed extremist and insane.
Thirteen years later, and it’s the water we swim in. It’s everywhere, from Sandia Nuclear to Coca-Cola to Verizon to the U.S. Department of Defence, and in every school at every level from kindergarten to the highest levesl of law, science, technology and mathematics education and research.