The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) reports that even after a national outcry against its Orwellian program of thought policing shut down the Residence Life office’s efforts at the University of Delaware, the ResLife office is still trying to reenact the program. So far, the Faculty Senate appears to have had enough and is rejecting the program, but the lack of awareness among the ResLife officials indicates that the problem will be recurring.

The nature of this problem goes to the heart of a dysfunction in much of American academia. Quite simply, despite having been born in a “free speech movement” that was both libertarian and libertine, the post-modern leftist ideology that holds the high ground in academia is deeply authoritarian in its preferences. Thoughts and feelings that they disagrees with must be forced out of students, using whatever means of coercion are at hand. They perceive their political project as literally that important and that all-encompassing.

The trouble is that they are often able to pull it off from behind the shield of anonymity and Orwellian double-speak where innocuous terms are substituted for what is really going on. The Delaware ResLife program only got “outed” because it took the unusual step of mandating one-on-one thought-policing sessions with on-site enforcers who wrote reports on dissenters. Programs that are nearly as coercive but merely use slightly more subtle means of reprogramming and punishment often go undetected.

What is really necessary is a renewed commitment to professionalism and real (i.e. including ideological) diversity in academia. The commitment to a search for knowledge should not come with a script written by self-righteous bureaucrats and activists.