My freshman orientation consisted of a brief party game to meet the folks on my floor, a unanimous vote by the floor to have no rules restricting visits to the floor by women, a bunch of band concerts and instructions on how to register for classes.
I did, however, later have an experience analogous to your fantasy. Before they were fully developed and made mandatory, the academic left had warm ups for the kind of “exercise” described in the article: when I was a grad student Penn had voluntary “racism awareness workshops” similar sorts of events which seemed to have the chief purpose of giving rich liberal white girls a sense of virtue by letting them confess their covert “racism”. I, my best friend in those days (a solidly right-of-center physics grad student who ended up emigrating to Israel after finishing his Ph.D.), and a physics professor decided to make trouble by attending a “racism awareness workshop” and shining the light of reason on the pap they were peddling.
We got broken up into groups and all in all, I think was the most successful of the three of us, as our group’s “facilitators” ended up having to call in the organizer of the event, Jacqueline Wade, to moderate our group’s discussion. The “facilitators” were out of their depth because I was arguing a position they had, evidently never encountered before: that by and large racial prejudice had been extirpated from American society — yes it still existed in places and in some people, but it no longer held sway. Rather what seemed to be racial prejudice was now cultural prejudice, and that cultural prejudice is not invidious like racial prejudice because some cultures really are better than others. (I gave as an example the difference in reaction to a black man dressed in surplus fatigues — the ‘80’s analog of a hoodie and sagging pants — walking into a jewelry story speaking urban street patois — now called ‘ebonics’ — and to the same black man dressed in a suit and speaking perfect Queen’s English with a Jamaican accent.) By the end of the session, everyone was discussing culture, not race.
All in all it was a “hoot”: a good time “annoy[ing] the left and keeping it unhappy,” as Bill Buckley would have put it.
(I actually want to find out whether that event had anything to do with the transformation of American “anti-racism” into “multiculturalism”, which in the mid-’80’s was an odd Canadian notion unheard of south of Lake Erie. It seems Dr. Wade, is, someone of stature in the academic anti-racism circuit, so it is just conceivable that it did.)
“our group’s “facilitators” ended up having to call in the organizer of the event, Jacqueline Wade, to moderate our group’s discussion. The “facilitators” were out of their depth because I was arguing a position they had, evidently never encountered before”
That is hilarious. This whole multicultural movement is an anti-intellectual movement and you proved it. Take away their script and they have nothing. Good on you.
My daughter did a science project on the golden mean and facial proportions. She had 10 pictures of people she cut out of magazines and she had people order them from most attractive to least attractive and then she measured the proportions of each face to see if the ones closest to the golden mean were judged most attractive. We were at the regional finals and while I was in the bathroom this Hispanic studies professor at Adams State College chastised my 12 year old because she had only white people in the group. I wish I had been there because I would have made her cry in public. I told my daughter to point her out to me if she saw her but I think she was afraid I would make a scene.