The latest university indoctrination scandal comes to us from the University of Delaware:

FIRE - University of Delaware Requires Students to Undergo Ideological Reeducation

FIRE Press Release
NEWARK, Del., October 30, 2007—The University of Delaware subjects students in its residence halls to a shocking program of ideological reeducation that is referred to in the university’s own materials as a “treatment” for students’ incorrect attitudes and beliefs. The Orwellian program requires the approximately 7,000 students in Delaware’s residence halls to adopt highly specific university-approved views on issues ranging from politics to race, sexuality, sociology, moral philosophy, and environmentalism. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is calling for the total dismantling of the program, which is a flagrant violation of students’ rights to freedom of conscience and freedom from compelled speech.

We’ve covered this a lot ourselves on VDARE.com–see Brainwashing In Academe: The Resident Assistant’s Tale, by Athena Kerry and Brainwashing Backfires In Academe by Kevin Carter.

Some of this goes back to the 1950s. This is from a novel by Randall Jarrell, set at “Benton College” and based on his experiences at Sarah Lawrence:

Their education was, for a good many of the girls, what they themselves would have called a traumatic experience. Two of the psychologists of the school talked of education not simply as therapy but as shock therapy: “The first thing I do with a freshman,” one of them said to Dr. Rosenbaum, “ to shake her out of her ignorant complacency.” Dr. Ros enbaum knew one of her freshmen, a cheerful scatterbrained girl who was neither cheerful nor scatterbrained about her; this girl said viciously, “All she does is pry. She thinks I’m a bourgeois prejudice and she wants me to get rid of myself.”

Pictures From An Institution,. By Randall Jarrell, 1954

Those are the people who resist indoctrination–for the girls who succumbed, it was not good either. Jarrell wrote:

“If Benton had had an administration building with pillars it could have carved over the pillars: Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you feel guilty. Just as ordinary animal awareness has been replaced in man by consciousness, so consciousness had been replaced, in most of the teachers of Benton, by social consciousness. They were successful in teaching most of their students to say in contrition, It was I, Lord, it was I; but they were not so successful in teaching them to consider this consciousness of guilt a summum bonum, one’s final claim upon existence. Many a Benton girl went back to her nice home, married her rich husband, and carried a fox in her bosom for the rest of her life–and short of becoming a social worker, founding a Neo-Socialist party, and then killing herself and leaving her insurance to the United Nations, I do not know how she could have got rid of it.

Which is amusing, but of course, it’s not funny for those going through it:

Orwell did not know that as he wrote, Mao’s China was subjecting university students to “thought reform,” known also as “re-education,” that was not complete until children had denounced the lives and political morals of their parents and emerged as “progressive” in a manner satisfactory to their trainers. In the diversity education film Skin Deep, a favorite in academic “sensitivity training,” a white student in his third day of a “facilitated” retreat on race, with his name on the screen and his college and hometown identified, confesses his family’s inertial Southern racism and, catching his breath, says to the group (and to the thousands of students who will see this film on their own campuses), “It’s a tough choice, choosing what’s right and choosing your family.”Reason Magazine - Thought Reform 101

The comparison with Communist efforts at reeducation is apt–George Borjas went through the same thing in Castro’s Cuba before he escaped:

Why am I super-sensitive to this? Because as a young boy I myself went through a one-year course in ideological reorientation. I attended an elite elementary Catholic school in Havana. Castro took over, the Catholic school was shut down, and I got transferred to a revolutionary school where the entire day was spent teaching Marxist-Leninist ideology. Luckily, this lasted only a year and I continued my education in Miami (where the entire school day was instead spent talking about the upcoming football game). I am certain that the blind zealotry that I saw in the young teacher’s eyes that year turned me off from that particular way of viewing the world for the rest of my life. One can only hope that many of the students forced to attend the re-education programs at Delaware and other universities react in the same way.The Borjas Blog: Indoctrination At College

One can only hope, indeed. But some of the kids in the Cuban reeducation class may have gone on to be part of the Cuban secret police, and some of today’s reeducated teens will go on to be enforcers in the federal bureaucracy.

The topic of the illegal alien destruction of our healthcare system has been around for years. Jose comes to America “to work,” gets injured in some way and ends up in the hospital on the taxpayer’s tab.

(In fact, some Mexicans admit they come for the free medical care mandated by Washington as well as to deliver their meal-ticket jackpot babies.)

During the recent devastating wildfires, numerous Mexicans lurking in the San Diego hills did not heed the warnings of their consulate to flee. On the Mexican side coyotes recommended the fire emergency as a good time to cross because of all the confusion.

The upshot is that a lot of taxpayer money will pay for the long-term medical care of illegal alien Mexicans in the burn unit.

The fact that 11 of the 18 wildfire victims lying in UCSD Medical Center’s burn unit are illegal immigrants with no apparent health coverage highlights the daunting financial challenge hospitals face in providing long-term, intensive care for all those who need it.

“These are the most expensive kinds of cases, but we don’t look at these patients and say, oh, because they aren’t legal residents, we’ll stop providing care or stop changing their bandages,” said Dr. Thomas McAfee, UCSD’s physician-in-chief. “It’s part of our ethic to continue to provide this care no matter what.”
[11 of 18 in burn unit undocumented: UCSD cases put focus on who pays for care, San Diego Union Tribune 10/31/07]

What a ridiculous thing to say, particularlly since Dr. McAfee gets money to provide care for illegal foreigners. He directly benefits from the current system that has cost taxpayers billions of dollars every year.

Burn care requires ventilators, multiple surgeries, round-the-clock intensive care and grafts from human cadaveric skin. McAfee said grafts can be grown from patients’ own skin to minimize tissue rejection at $500,000 per patient.

Last year, the average cost of treating a burn patient at UCSD was $45,000 for an average 15-day stay.

While on the subject of large sums of money, consider also that southerly remittances from the county are huge: S.D. County remittances to Mexico hit $1.1 billion [San Diego Union Tribune 10/19/07].

The amount of money that workers in San Diego County send to Mexico has ballooned - reaching $1.1 billion last year from $800 million in 2004, according to a new estimate by the World Bank.

If Mexicans have that much spare cash rattling around, they are obviously not being taxed enough. As I wrote in a 2002 Washington Times op-ed, taxing remittances at the point of transfer could raise money to ease the burden on the American healthcare system.

Remember that a taxation strategy worked well against another criminal, Al Capone.

What the Daily Telegraph is reporting here is the same kind of thing that we report regularly in VDAWDI– the VDARE.com American Worker Dispacement Index–but which I never see in mainstream American papers.

Foreigners fill half of all new jobs - Telegraph

By Christopher Hope, Home Affairs Correspondent
Last Updated: 10:26am GMT 31/10/2007

The revelation was the second embarrassment over immigration figures for ministers in the space of 24 hours.

First, on Monday night, the government was forced to admit that the number of migrant workers who had taken jobs since Labour came to power was 1.1million, rather than the previous figure given of 800,000.

However, in interviews yesterday morning, Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, insisted that the majority of jobs created since 1997 had gone to British workers with immigrants taking just 40.7 per cent. But last night it emerged that the 1.1million migrant workers constituted 52 per cent of the 2.1 million new jobs created under Labour.

Chris Grayling, the shadow work and pensions secretary, said: “The Home Secretary is either being deliberately misleading or does not know what is going on.”

There was further speculation last night that the figure was higher still, after the Government admitted that it did not include immigrants in temporary accommodation.

Frank Field, a former cabinet minister, claimed the figure should be 1.6 million as the new estimate was based on figures from 2003, before the European Union was enlarged.

A reader writes:

Have you noticed that no one on the right is willing to say anything about race and gender preferences during this election cycle? All the candidates had positions on preferences in 2000. Today, the pundits don’t even chide them for keeping mum.

That’s particularly strange because in November 2006, on a night that Republicans were getting drubbed across the country, Ward Connerly won a smashing victory in Michigan on his initiative outlawing racial and ethnic preferences.