The N.A.S.’s Tom Wood has produced yet another masterful segment, “The Marriage of Affirmative Action and Transformative Education,” in his series about indoctrination in residence life, “How Many Delawares?” Wood’s research indicates that the U.D. “ResLife” scandal (which I update at Pajamas Media) exemplifies a much wider and insidious phenomenon. The totalitarian-style indoctrination and coercion of students at that campus is part of a national, progressivist, socially destructive “movement” intended, via behavior-modification techniques, to make “politically and culturally radical positions seem normal to campus life and uncontroversial.”

As summarized in the “Editor’s Introduction” to Wood’s latest essay:

The ideological force-feeding of undergraduate students that characterized the University of Delaware’s residential life program had numerous components: radical environmentalism, an attempt to stigmatize traditional moral sentiments, foregrounding questions of sexual orientation, efforts to promote deep distrust of American society, promotion of identity politics, and an aggressive focus on racial grievance. As we looked at other colleges and universities, we found this combination of themes to be widespread, but organized in a variety of ways. Residence halls aren’t the only venue. Many campuses have a contingent of administrators whose job seems to be to turn late adolescent social anxieties into radical alienation from American society … .