Brainwashing U: Oregon State University will be requiring all its incoming freshmen this fall to undergo "social justice training."
And also training them how to snitch on each other for violations of the code of "inclusivity"–the way Cuban block captains monitor neighborhoods for dissidence.
Dr. Angela Batista, the campus's interim diversity officer, sent an email to students earlier this week asking them to review the proposed training program. This training is ideological by its very nature: students will complete on-line modules in "social justice learning," "diversity," and "inclusivity."
"This training initiative is intended to provide all students entering Oregon State University an orientation to concepts of diversity, inclusion and social justice and help empower all OSU students to contribute to an inclusive university community," according to the proposal.
The modules will brief students on the history of social justice activism at Oregon, stress the importance of diversity and inclusivity, and provide students with resources to "incorporate the pursuit of social justice within their university experiences." It will let them know about the Bias Response Team, which provides a website where students can report each other for perceived harassment.
Reason writer Robby Soave adds this:
The BRT's latest efforts make clear what kind of nonsense counts as a "bias incident." The team has been studiously investigated the appearance of chalk messages on campus. These messages targeted "Muslims and immigrant communities." It seems likely they were actually pro-Trump messages, since Batista also felt the need to reluctantly clarify that Oregon "does not oppose any particular political candidate." Nevertheless, students are encouraged to report chalk drawings that offend them to a variety of university bureaucrats, according to Batista's email.
What's strange is that to date, there haven't actually been any news reports of anti-Islamic or anti-immigrant chalk messages on the Oregon State campus in Corvallis, Oregon, that I could find in Google searches. On the campus of the University of Oregon, a different public institution located in Eugene, Oregon, students chalked the message "U of O [Loves] the Wall," an apparent reference to Donald Trump's immigration policies, Newsweek has reported.
So–is Batista, who assumed her job only in January, after serving as dean of students at Southern Indiana University, getting her Oregon institutions of higher learning mixed up?
Or was that e-mail a veiled warning that Oregon State students had better not try anything in the chalk department? She certainly has the university's Bias Response Team primed to go should they dare–and she's outlined a snitch procedure to report them.