Yesterday I posted a diary about the coming firestorm over the University of Delaware's Resident Life diversity program. A free speech group basically called it a political indoctrination that was mandatory. Today, there's more--lots of news happening on this front.
In brief, the accusation is this: The U of Delaware requires their freshmen to live in dooms, and there is a program to teach diversity in the dorms. The group FIRE, or Foundation for Individual Rights in Education accused the U of Delaware of, basically, attempting to brainwash their students. Key elements of this charge were that the diversity education was mandatory, that the RA's were to have one on one interviews and review each students "progress" and that the diversity training was rather outlandish. FIRE quoted from numerous documents that have quotes explicitly claiming that all whites are racist by nature and other things.
So that was yesterday. Here is FIRE's collection of materials on this matter. The U of Delaware replied. And today, FIRE, to pardon the pun, fired back, basically doubling down and standing 100 % behind their comments.
This story is getting interesting. The Chronicle of Higher Education has a story on this now, and while the story is a pretty good overview, the comments to that story are interesting as well. One claims to be an RA that has been threatened if they don't speak up for the program.
I'd link to the program pages (I did yesterday in my diary's comments), but apparently U Delaware is now deleting the evidence of what was going on. So the PDF's from FIRE are the only source. The U of Delaware did not dispute they were accurate, so I think there's no question of authenticity.
If FIRE is right, the U of Delaware's program really goes into thought control attempts. And the U of Delaware has some issues, to be sure.
Edit: fixed typos and clarified some language