From a reader, in reference to my posts on Brown's minority orientation (Third World Transition Program):

I was once a graduate student at Brown and had the opportunity to see the debates over TWTP up close and I wanted to commend you for hitting the nail on the head in your comments. A few years back, a professor who was publicly critical of TWTP (before tenure, even) recounted a story to me about TWTP that I think perfectly captures its pathology.

During one of the week's exercises, students were asked to clap when a sentence described them. One sentence said something about homosexuality being sinful or immoral. One young black woman clapped, as she was an observant Muslim from Savannah, Georgia. Horrified at her beliefs, the organizers forced her to slow-dance with another woman while other participants shouted anti-gay slurs at her, "sensitizing" her to her "homophobia." She briefly left school after that week and seriously considered filing a sexual harrassment suit against Brown, but decided against it.

One other note: not only are white students not allowed to participate in TWTP, but white administrators are barred as well. President Gee, who left a couple of years ago, asked to attend and was rebuffed. A white man, he decided not to push the issue. One wonders what the current president will do.

I've been collecting anecdotes about what happens at freshman orientation for a while now, but this one left me speechless with disgust--at Brown, at the holier-than-thou campus thought police who believe it is their right to impose their outlook on others, at myself for all the years I quietly and stupidly inhabited the leftist campus culture that gives rise to such abuses and then piously invokes various Marxist, postcolonial, and psychoanalytic "theories" to

Comments or additional anecdotes are welcome--I'll post the postworthy unless you specify otherwise. Meanwhile, don't miss World Magazine's current cover story on freshman orientation. I'm proud to say I helped with the research for it. This kind of stuff can't get too much exposure. And it won't survive it.