University of Delaware Re-Education

"Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults" w/Dr. Lyell Asher

University of Delaware Re-Education (Part 4). In the late eighties, the writer Rita Kramer spent a year visiting teacher training schools around the country. She wanted to find out why students in our public schools weren't learning much. So, she began with the institutions called “ed schools” that taught and licensed teachers and administrators.

Her 1991 book, “Ed School Follies: The Miseducation of America's Teachers,” is a portrait of those institutions. She found that as a group, teacher training schools are not focused on educating students, but on radically transforming society.

A passage about Teachers College in New York explains one reason why that's a problem. These student teachers are being encouraged to transform a world they know almost nothing about. They know next to nothing of past disasters or triumphs or present mistakes. Sure of themselves, as only those ignorant of history can be, they feel no need for tolerance of their own imperfect but relatively free society. All they know is that it isn't everything it should be. To them, that seems enough evidence for indictment.

In 1991, when this was written, the damage graduates from teacher training schools could do was limited to the K-through-12 public school system, which was bad enough. But what might these graduates do if they were appointed to administrative positions in universities with control over hundreds of thousands of college students? Here are just a few things two residence life administrators, both with ed school doctorates in leadership actually did do at the University of Delaware in 2007.

For more than 7000 students housed in dormitories, they developed a mandatory curriculum that was little more than regimented thought-control. Students were questioned about their positions on controversial topics and rated best or worst according to how politically correct their views were. They were questioned about their sexual identities and whether they would date people from different racial groups.

A female student who told her male residence life administrator that her sexual identity was, as she put it, "None of your damn business," was written up and reported to higher-ups.

In some sessions, students were publicly shamed for the privilege of having white skin. In other sessions, students had to write down the stereotypes associated with Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and Jews in full view of the people targeted by those stereotypes.

Administrators referred in writing to lessons like these as “treatment” and to any incorrect thinking on the part of students as “resistance.” And when this program was exposed in the press, student employees in the dorms were pressured to voice public support for it, regardless of how they actually felt. At least one student employee claims to have had his job threatened if he didn't comply.

Once the taxpaying public got wind of this authoritarian madness, the university's president had no choice but to shut the program down. But the head of the program, Kathleen Kerr, not only kept her job at the University of Delaware in the years since, she's been awarded leadership positions in the National Organization for College Administrators, serving as a trustee, Vice President, and President of the American College Personnel Association. Still more shocking, the political indoctrination plan that brought such disgrace to the University of Delaware is something she and her fellow administrators have continued to promote and yearly instituted since 2007.

In her recent book from 2020, “The Curricular Approach to Student Affairs,” she proudly notes that thousands of college administrators have participated in these institutes where presumably they've learned how to pressure students into believing that the often simple-minded, uninformed political opinions of ed school trained administrators are just the self-evident values of all right-thinking people. Keep in mind, college administrators are likely to succeed with that pressure because unlike faculty, they seem to be speaking on behalf of the college as a whole. Most students just assume that what they're hearing about race, gender, and politics from administrators is no more to be questioned than what they're hearing from them about transfer credits or tuition payments. In this way, administrators reproduce the same kind of uncritical, group-think activism in college students that, as Rita Kramer documented, has made ed schools the basket cases of American education.

In the next video, I'll look at how one particular product of ed school thinking worked its way through higher education only to emerge, in all of its logic-defying glory, in an Oakland mayoral press conference.

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Video shot and edited by Travis Brown | The Signal Productions (Locals, Twitter, YouTube); Motion graphics by Gav Patel (Twitter, Instagram)