The Academy – its dirty laundry keeps spilling out

University of Delaware – degrees in indoctrination? 

While this story came out last week and may be one of the most egregious of the bunch, it really bears watching. This is not an isolated instance by any stretch of the imagination – at a lot of campuses, political correctness seems to overrun sanity.  And in this case, common sense…

While the professors themselves may disagree, the Academy (our institutes of higher learning) lean left.  It has been shown in multiple studies that the professors are more often Democrats than Republicans in large (sometimes overwhelming) percentages – just like a lot of MSM newsrooms.  Often, entire departments will contribute to liberal causes (and politicians) to the almost total exclusion of conservative issues (and politicians).

And while I’d rather see a more equitable split, that’s their problem, not mine.  But after reading this, perhaps it is a problem for all of us: Left and Right.

And it has turned into a problem.  It is has been seen that the radical, liberal groupthink that has overtaken our colleges and universities is threatening the free exchange of ideas and views – the whole raison d’etre for its existence.  In other words, while there is much talk of freedom in the theoretical, in reality, political correctness rules the day.  Unless one talks the talk decreed by that groupthink, you are in deep sneakers.

Examples: 

Have a great GPA but disagree that corporal punishment is not necessarily wrong?  Get thrown out of school:

SYRACUSE, N.Y., January 19, 2006—A New York appeals court has determined that Le Moyne College wrongly removed graduate student Scott McConnell from its education program for endorsing corporal punishment in class.  The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) first brought McConnell’s case to public attention last year.

“This is a great day for all those who believe colleges should keep their promises to students,” said FIRE Interim President Greg Lukianoff, hailing the ruling. “Le Moyne College has learned that it cannot promise freedom and fairness but deliver repression and injustice.”

McConnell’s ordeal began with a November 2004 assignment in which he advocated, as part of an ideal classroom, an environment “based upon strong discipline and hard work” and that could include “corporal punishment.”  McConnell earned an “A-” for the paper.  But in January 2005, Education Department Chair Cathy Leogrande summarily dismissed McConnell, citing a “mismatch between [his] personal beliefs regarding teaching and learning and the Le Moyne College program goals.” At the time he was dismissed, McConnell had achieved a grade-point average of 3.78 and had received an “excellent” evaluation for his work in an actual classroom.

Read the whole thing!  And read the counter argument here.  Want to become a social worker or a teacher?  Prepare to acknowledge and embrace the notion of "dispositions" – only those that think and believe as we do are able to be what we are. 

Have other ideas or beliefs?  Be gone with you! 

Three organizations sent letters today asking the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to stop requiring the social workers it hires to have completed their education at social-work programs accredited by the Council on Social Work Education, unless the council modifies its accreditation criteria.

The three groups — the National Association of Scholars, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education — emphasized slightly different points in their letters. But in general they said that the council’s accreditation standards include ideologically skewed requirements, such as a mandate that social-work programs pursue “strategies of advocacy and social change that advance social justice.”

Such a standard forces a “progressive” ideology upon students, and it’s inappropriate — and a violation of the First Amendment — for the department to implicitly endorse the standard in its hiring criteria, the critics said. The letters said “political conservatives” and “Christians of traditional moral views” would be unable to graduate from social-work programs under those standards, unless they kept their views to themselves, and thus would be unable to get a job in the department’s Public Health Service Commissioned Corps.

So much for tolerance of other views, other beliefs.  This is rigid Leftism – you must be in lockstep with us or we will cast you out of your chosen profession.  Actually, that’s wrong – this is actually academic racism based on a strictly defined belief system.

A new religion anyone?  After all, it certainly dogmatic… 

Don’t think that prospective teachers are not excluded from this nonsense either:

Behind the Elimination of NCATE’s "Dispositions"
K.C. Johnson, Brooklyn College—CUNY

In what amounted to a stunning reversal (Chronicle subscription required), The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education decided this last June to nullify its post-2002 requirement that dozens of Education departments around the country had to list "social justice" as a goal to "include some measure of a candidate’s commitment to social justice" when evaluating the "dispositions" of their students. The organization acted only under the threat that its dispositions policy might prompt the Department of Education to revoke its ability to accredit Ed programs — and thereby put it out of business. Here’s some background on what led to the campaign of a coalition of groups, including FIRE, NAS, and ACTA, that formed to testify publicly against NCATE at its reauthorization hearings.

I first encountered the dispositions concept on 29 November 2004, when the head of the Social Studies Ed program at Brooklyn e-mailed me. The e-mail asked me to supply negative information about one of my students, Evan Goldwyn, since:

    We have some serious concerns about his disruptive and bullying behavior in the SOE classroom as well as aggressive and bullying behavior towards his professor outside the class . . . The School of Ed is trying to be more systematic in looking at what educators call "dispositions," that is behaviors necessary for being a successful teacher in the public schools. Being able to do excellent academic work, does not always translate into being a thoughtful, self reflective and effective teacher for youngsters.

Evan was a wonderful student—very smart, very hard-working, about whom my only real problem was that he occasionally didn’t speak up enough in class. I e-mailed back to say this, after which point my feedback was no longer desired. (Politically, Evan struck me as centrist or perhaps center-right, but hardly a strong conservative.) I also asked a colleague, fellow NAS member Margaret King, to do some background investigation into the concept of "dispositions," since I had an article deadline at the time.

Margaret worked her way through Ed literature to note the link between the idea of "dispositions" and using Ed programs to promote "social justice." At that point, I had still never heard of NCATE, and assumed that "dispositions" was another tool brought in by Brooklyn College provost Roberta Matthews, who since her installation in 2001 has zealously redefined college personnel and curricular policies to implement her written mantra that "teaching is a political act."

And the examples could go on and on. 

But the most egregious example that has made the rounds of  blogosphere has been the University of Delaware.  It decided, in its infinite wisdom, that it would not limit itself to one particular academic area – it decided to indoctrinate ALL of its dorm students. From F.I.R.E:

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 f
reedom 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.”

I used to be an RA at Boston University (aka BU) – the big dorm (at the time) at 700 Commonwealth Ave officially called Warren Towers (aka "The Zoo"; as RAs, we had an intramural team and called ourselves the ZooKeepers! ) 

NO WAY would I have ever agreed to ask questions like these: 

The Delaware Horror (Cont.)   [John Derbyshire]

Here is the latest skinny on the University of Delaware indoctrination consciousness-raising program for resident students, from Philly.com.

Readers might like to try the sample questions at the end, taken from one of the diversity training questionnaires.

1. When were you first made aware of your race?
2. When did you discover your sexual identity?
3. Who taught you a lesson in regard to some sort of diversity awareness? What was that lesson?
4. When was a time when you confronted someone regarding an issue of diversity? What was the confrontation about? If haven’t, why not?
5. When was a time you felt oppressed? Who was oppressing you? How did you feel?
6. Can you think of a time when someone was offended by what you said? How did that make you feel? How do you think it made them feel? How did his/her behavior change toward you?

Having been now a few days since the story broke, the U of Del has had, shall we say, a massive public relations fiasco.  Like all things politically correct, the exercise may have started out with good intentions (er, maybe not), but it went waaay over the edge, found the cliff, and jumped off with exclaimations of joy! 

Well, in addition to the bloggers at GraniteGrok (Doug and I, with contributions from Judy, Pat, and Ed), we also have the "’Grok Stunt Man" (see the video here).  Now, we may have the "’Grok College Student" that may report on the politically correct goings on at a large New England urban university.  Hopefully sometime soon, we’ll start getting some reports "on the ground" from a smart, savvy student with a biting wit.

Yup, the 60′s gave rise to the rebellious Boomers – who make up the vast majority of academe.  Just as they challenged their elders during their heyday (which being the narcissistic generation we are, they never grew out of), I wonder how they feel as their orthodoxy is now challenged in turn by these "rebellious" students – ooh, dreaded conservatives!

I look forward to these reports!