Thought Reform 101
At Wake Forest University last fall, one of the few events designated as"mandatory" for freshman orientation was attendance at Blue Eyed, a
filmed racism awareness workshop in which whites are abused, ridiculed, made to
fail, and taught helpless passivity so that they can identify with "a person of
color for a day." In Swarthmore College's dormitories, in the fall of 1998,
first-year students were asked to line up by skin color, from lightest to
darkest, and to step forward and talk about how they felt concerning their
place in that line. Indeed, at almost all of our campuses, some form of moral
and political re-education has been built into freshman orientation and
residential programming. These exercises have become so commonplace that most
students do not even think of the issues of privacy, rights, and dignity
involved.
A central goal of these programs is to uproot "internalized oppression," a
crucial concept in the diversity education planning documents of most
universities. Like the Leninists' notion of "false consciousness," from which
it ultimately is derived, it identifies as a major barrier to progressive
change the fact that the victims of oppression have internalized the very
values and ways of thinking by which society oppresses them. What could workers
possibly know, compared to intellectuals, about what workers truly should want?
What could students possibly know, compared to those creating programs for
offices of student life and residence, about what students truly should feel?
Any desire for assimilation or for individualism reflects the imprint of white
America's strategy for racial hegemony.
In 1991 and 1992 both The New York Times and The Wall Street
Journal published surveys of freshman orientations. The Times
observed that "orientation has evolved into an intense ...initiation" that
involves "delicate subjects like...date rape [and] race relations, and how
freshmen, some from small towns and tiny high schools, are supposed to deal
with them." In recent years, public ridicule of "political correctness" has
made academic administrators more circumspect about speaking their true minds,
so one should listen carefully to the claims made for these programs before
colleges began to spin their politically correct agendas.
Tony Tillman, in charge of a mandatory "Social Issues" orientation at
Dartmouth, explained in the Journal that students needed to
address "the various forms of `isms': sexism, racism, classism," all of which
were interrelated. Oberlin "educated" its freshmen about "differences in race,
ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and culture," with separate orientations for
blacks, Hispanics, gays and lesbians, and Americans of Asian descent. Columbia
University sought to give its incoming students the chance "to reevaluate [and]
learn things," so that they could rid themselves of "their own social and
personal beliefs that foster inequality." Katherine Balmer, assistant dean for
freshmen at Columbia, explained to the Times that "you can't bring all
these people together...without some sort of training."
Greg Ricks, multicultural educator at Stanford (after similar stints at
Dartmouth and Harvard), was frank about his agenda: "White students need help
to understand what it means to be white in a multicultural community....For the
white heterosexual male who feels disconnected and marginalized by
multiculturalism, we've got to do a lot of work here." Planning for New Student
Week at Northwestern University, a member of the Cultural Diversity Project
Committee explained to the Weekly Northwestern Review in 1989 that the
committee's goal was "changing the world, or at least the way [undergraduates]
perceive it." In 1993, Ana Maria Garcia, assistant dean of Haverford College,
proudly told the Philadelphia Inquirer of official freshman dormitory
programs there, which divided students into two groups: happy, unselfish Alphas
and grim, acquisitive Betas. For Garcia, the exercise was wonderfully
successful: "Students in both groups said the game made them feel excluded,
confused, awkward, and foolish," which, for Garcia, accomplished the purpose of
Haverford's program: "to raise student awareness of racial and ethnic
diversity."
In the early 1990s, Bryn Mawr College shared its mandatory "Building Pluralism"
program with any school that requested it. Bryn Mawr probed the most private
experiences of every first-year student: difference and discomfort; racial,
ethnic, and class experiences; sexual orientation; religious beliefs. By the
end of this "orientation," students were devising "individual and collective
action plans" for "breaking free" of "the cycle of oppression" and for
achieving "new meaning" as "change agents." Although the public relations
savvy of universities has changed since the early 1990s, these programs
proliferate apace.
The darkest nightmare of the literature on power is George Orwell's1984, where there is not even an interior space of privacy and self.
Winston Smith faces the ultimate and consistent logic of the argument that
everything is political, and he can only dream of "a time when there were still
privacy, love, and friendship, and when members of a family stood by one
another without needing to know the reason."
Orwell did not know that as he wrote, Mao's China was subjecting university
students to "thought reform," known also as "re-education," that was not
complete until children had denounced the lives and political morals of their
parents and emerged as "progressive" in a manner satisfactory to their
trainers. In the diversity education film Skin Deep, a favorite in
academic "sensitivity training," a white student in his third day of a"facilitated" retreat on race, with his name on the screen and his college and
hometown identified, confesses his family's inertial Southern racism and,
catching his breath, says to the group (and to the thousands of students who
will see this film on their own campuses), "It's a tough choice, choosing
what's right and choosing your family."
Political correctness is not the end of human liberty, because political
correctness does not have power commensurate with its aspirations. It is
essential, however, to understand those totalizing ambitions for what they are.
O'Brien's re-education of Winston in 1984 went to the heart of such
invasiveness. "We are not content with negative obedience.... When finally you
surrender to us, it must be of your own free will." The Party wanted not to
destroy the heretic but to "capture his inner mind." Where others were content
to command "Thou shalt not" or "Thou shalt," O'Brien explains, "Our command is
'Thou art.'" To reach that end requires "learning... understanding [and]
acceptance," and the realization that one has no control even over one's inner
soul. In Blue Eyed, the facilitator, Jane Elliott, says of those under
her authority for the day, "A new reality is going to be created for these
people." She informs everyone of the rules of the event: "You have no power,
absolutely no power." By the end, broken and in tears, they see their own
racist evil, and they love Big Sister.
The people devoted to remolding the inner lives of undergraduates are mostly
kind and often charming individuals. At the Fourth Annual National Conference
on People of Color in Predominantly White Institutions, held at and sponsored
by the University of Nebraska last October, faculty and middle-level
administrators of student life from around the country complained and joked
about their low budgets, inadequate influence, and herculean tasks.
Their papers and interviews reveal an ideologically and humanly diverse crowd,
but they share certain assumptions and beliefs, most of which are reasonable
subjects for debate, but none of which should provide campuses with freshman
agendas: America is an unjust society. Drop-out rates for
students of color reflect a hostile environment and a lack of institutional
understanding of identity and culture. What happens in the classroom is
inadequate preparation for thinking correctly about justice and oppression.
They also share views that place us directly on the path of thought reform:
White students desperately need formal "training" in racial and cultural
awareness. The moral goal of such training should override white notions of
privacy and individualism. The university must become a therapeutic and
political agent of progressive change.
Handouts at the Nebraska conclave illustrated this agenda. Irma
Amirall-Padamsee, the associate dean of student relations and the director of
multicultural affairs at Syracuse University, distributed the Office of
Multicultural Affairs' brochure. Its "philosophy" presupposes that students
live "in a world impacted by various oppression issues," including "racism.""OMA's role," it announced, "is to provide the...leadership needed to encourage
our students...to grow into individuals willing to take a proactive stance
against oppression in all its shapes."
Molly Tovar, who has done this sort of work both at the University of Oklahoma
and at Oklahoma State University, passed out a 22-page guide she co-authored,"How to Build and Implement a Comprehensive Diversity Plan." The guide explains
the three "kinds of attitudes" that
