When they go off like this, I take them seriously.

I am currently a senior at the University of Delaware and I was a resident assistant (RA) for the maligned Office of Residence Life for one semester last year. Not only has FIRE grossly misconstrued what is actually occurring at the university but they have added unnecessarily loaded language in their presentation of the issue which has further incited the criticism being foisted upon Delaware.

To make clear before people paint me as a mouthpiece for the university: I am no longer working for the Office of Residence Life and I left voluntarily at the end of last semester. Also, I can only speak from my own experience and my observations of the system as a whole, and my statements do not necessarily reflect the opinions of other RAs.

In my time working with this department, I was often at odds with many policies put in place but never did I feel that the office’s programs were “Orwellian,” a “grave intrusion into students’ private beliefs” or coercive, as FIRE portrays them. In fact, I was skeptical of the effectiveness of many of the office’s programs but never did I think they endangered students’ right to free speech or their intellectual welfare.

To put it simply — the university wants to promote diversity and facilitate social tolerance among its students. There is no subversive indoctrination, no hidden agenda. The university feels, to paraphrase what I gathered from my time employed by the Office of Residence Life, that students should progress as individuals during their time spent at Delaware and feels it is responsible for exposing them to what it deems character-building social concepts and qualities.

The university does have in place an extensive program to promote tolerance among its students living in the residence halls. Yes, it has a list of “competencies” it hopes students achieve in their time at the university and it does hope students embrace a notion of “citizenship.” However, there is no “comprehensive manipulation” as FIRE claims.

In my time as an RA, I was required to attend a class titled, “Contemporary Issues for Resident Assistants.” The purpose of the course was to educate RAs about the range of divisive issues facing college students and to prepare RAs to deal with any problems they might encounter in working with residents. We frequently covered diversity-related topics — issues relating to religion, ethnicity, socio-economic status, sexuality, gender, etc. — and the purpose of the course was to learn how to be tolerant of and understand different people and situations.

To be fair, not all of the material in the class dealt with these issues, however. We were also taught how to deal with sexual abuse, roommate-to-roommate conflicts, alcohol abuse, and a host of other issues which were relevant to working with largely underclassmen residents.

Some of the coursework and activities were bluntly direct in their message. The university very obviously strived to instill in us near-universal tolerance and acceptance — or at least the cognizant awareness of what problems we might encounter in our positions and how to deal with them — so that we would be better equipped to do our jobs working with residents.

However, there was no stipulation that we as students had to agree with the university’s position on these issues. In fact, few in the class (all fellow RAs) truly believed everything we were taught and felt much of the material was overstated, silly and patronizing. But none were actually against what was being taught. Most of us readily agreed that the university had the right intention — trying to make its students better people, which is what all universities try to do after all, right? — but misfired on the execution of those lessons.

As for the “training sessions, floor meetings, and one-on-one meetings with their Resident Assistants (RAs)” that FIRE says students are supposedly required to attend: never in my experience did I see any students forced into a meeting they had an issue with or truly did not feel comfortable attending. While students were greatly encouraged to attend these meetings and these may have been promoted as mandatory, there were no consequences for absence. In fact, my meetings were attended by fewer than 50 percent of floor residents. How did I advertise them? Email notifications followed by knocking on each resident’s door to tell them when the meeting would be held. Hardly coercive, in my view.

In general, it was a common occurrence for students to skip meetings at their leisure and there were no repercussions besides a “please try to come next time.” There were literally zero things we could do to punish residents, and moreso, no RAs that I knew felt the need for such punishment.

In the one-on-one sessions, they are intended to be relatively short meetings between a resident and an RA with the hope of building a rapport between both sides to better create a “floor community.” The RAs were given rough guidelines as to how to conduct these meetings, but they were largely left up to the RA to plan and conduct. Yes, RAs were expected to ask somewhat-personal questions to better get to know residents, but I have never heard of a situation where students were generally offended or made uncomfortable by an RA’s questions or conversation. The entire point of these meetings is to promote a positive relationship between RA and resident, not to interrogate residents or scare them away from future interactions. Again, in my experience, these were encouraged but never forced onto residents; if a resident ever had a serious issue with this kind of meeting, I cannot see a request to be excused for personal reasons being denied.

If anything, any problems relating to residence hall suppression of freedom of speech is due to problems relating to the work of individual RAs and not the system as a whole.

I could go on and on with examples from my semester as an RA. From my first-hand experience, FIRE’s allegations are largely unfounded and serve only to stir a pot that is essentially non-existent. I truly hope the FIRE’s Web site re-evaluates its statements and tones down its rhetoric as to prevent the university from taking flak it does not deserve.

Besides the disturbing degree to which the freedoms of speech and expression are discarded here, perhaps most shocking thing about this – and there are many shocking things about it – is how blatant it is. I’m sure anyone who remembers their education…

My daughter is taking a course at FAU, a state university in Florida, where she is educated in political thinking in, of all courses, an ENGLISH class! [She is being taught "cosmopolitanism" by a Cuban female who is ESL and cannot spell or employ correct English grammar. Her spelling of the word "idea" on the blackboard came out as "ide" and her only qualification for the TA job seems to be her marriage to an FAU political perfesser. ]

The Thought Police are beginning to assert their mad conformist agendas in the universities—where they can punish recalcitrants and hold-outs with bad grades.