Want a Resident Assistant’s Job? At Marquette You Must Submit to Thought Reform

From MUScoop (which is mostly a sports discussion board, but which sometimes ventures into other campus issues):

An account of how the Office of Residence Life engages in indoctrination of students, and especially people who are Resident Assistants.

One person posted a link to an ORL event called Remove the Blindfold. This is described as:

. . . an annual event sponsored by RHA that promotes awareness about many social justice issues facing the world today. The experience of attending Remove the Blindfold should stimulate thoughts, feelings, and emotions around the issues and images presented. The hope is that through this experience, students will become more aware of social injustices and move toward positive change by taking action.

Such events, of course, are profoundly anti-intellectual. It’s assumed that there are no contentious issues about which there is a legitimate debate. Rather, there is only “injustice.” And it’s always obvious to those who have “removed the blindfold” what constitutes an injustice. For example, it’s assumes that a lack of affirmative action is an injustice. If you believe that having affirmative action is an injustice, you must be a racist.

And note the elitist assumption that people who don’t see the world the way ORL staff do are blinded. In fact, ORL staff live in the narrow and parochial world of student affairs bureaucrats, and lack both the competence and the open-mindedness to deal with serious public issues.

One might think that silly events like this aren’t of much import, but another poster explained something much more intolerant and insidious:

As an RA for 2 years, I was required to participate in this program, as well as numerous other “diversity” oriented programs. I can say with no amount of exaggeration that they were very anti-male, anti-white, etc. We were bussed to the LGBT Center on MLK Drive as part of our “sensitivity training,” and it was intimated that anyone whose personal beliefs contradicted their agenda was backward and bigoted.

This stuff is all over in MU’s administration. As an openly Evangelical Christian, there were numerous times when I was made to feel that my beliefs were not acceptable within ORL. The ironic thing about the PC movement is that everyone’s beliefs are acceptable unless you disagree with them...

This stuff is indeed “all over all over in MU’s administration.” Freshman orientation, for example, contains a heavy dose of politically correct indoctrination. And not only are freshman students indoctrinated, but students who work in orientation are subjected to what we described as Stalinist thought reform.

And at Marquette, as elsewhere in academia, these things are defended in terms of “tolerance” and “diversity.”