This fall, tens of thousands of bright-eyed and malleable young men and women will descend on American campuses to begin their academic careers in earnest. Most of them will face what we used to call freshman orientation. More than anything, though, it's looking more and more like indoctrination. One of the main components of many of these orientations is diversity, or sensitivity training.
Attendance is usually mandatory and often tax-funded.
Students will watch films and participate in exercises designed to shake the values they acquired from their culture and families. Two of the most popular diversity-training films are Blue Eyed and Skin Deep . Hugh Vasquez's Skin Deep documents a workshop on race. One section of the accompanying study guide entitled White Privilege declares that white privilege controls all power in society and that whites must assume their guilt. Requiring attendance to sensitivity training has caused some critics to make comparisons to Soviet psychiatry and the re-education camps of some Communist countries, such as Maoist China.