Last week, Harry Painter reviewed the books assigned to incoming freshmen at North Carolina’s public and private colleges. He concluded that, instead of helping students transition to demanding academic environments, many of the selections promote left-wing social activism (see “response to”). In today’s Pope Center feature, Alec Dent, an incoming freshman at UNC-Chapel Hill, shares his experience with freshman orientation, which also promotes a progressive agenda.

Dent and his fellow classmates were recently treated to a mind-numbing “interactive theater experience” in which actors performed skits touching on common social justice tropes, such as racism, sexism, and classism. He says the insufferable skits were marked by cheap caricatures of whites, males, heterosexuals, and the middle class and “clumsy portrayals” of student interactions.

“This exercise could have looked at our different backgrounds in an effort to cultivate true community, built on respect and politeness. Instead, we were ‘asked’ to accept a perversion of true open-mindedness. Instead of encouraging us to each bring ourselves to the table and explore our differences cordially, we were told that some differences, namely non-’progressive’ beliefs, were unacceptable,” writes Dent.

Read the full article here.