I've written a lot lately about the phenomenon of separate freshman orientations for minority students, and I devoted special attention to Brown's remarkable Third World Transition Program (see especially this and this). Today, a Brown undergraduate who opposes the orientation as a type of "apartheid" weighs in at Front Page Magazine. He has apparently caused quite a flap at Brown--for the crime of publishing an article critical of TWTP in the student paper, he has been called, on the paper's public message board no less, "a prick trying to start controversy...the Horowitz-in-residence for Brown. There's one for every season and they usually find themselves living out a reflection of their own hatred."

Or, they find themselves living in the reflection of the hatred spread by separatist campus programs such as Brown's TWTP. This year, an Asian American student reports, "During TWTP, we participated in an exercise that had us 'split up' into our respective ethnicities, list some common misconceptions about our cultures and what we wanted other people to know about them. Although we all laid claim to different ethnic backgrounds, our experiences as minorities in the United States were all remarkably similar, each characterized by a trend of white oppression (whether overt or subtle). These experiences ranged from never completely feeling we belonged in this country to facing unfair racial stereotypes and bias." Bonding as victims of "white oppression" is a feelgood, nominally "therapeutic" means of making racism the basis for community formation (and I mean here not the racism that these students attribute to "white oppression" but the racism that characterizes their own actions at the workshop).

TWTP and programs like it want to look warm and fuzzy. But they are the furthest thing from it--as students who don't fully swallow its cultish tribalism quickly find out. Consider this anecdote about the goings on at TWTP several years ago, sent to me by a former Brown student:

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.

This was not an aberration. It was an exemplification of the emotional blackmail that lies at the heart of so much of the activity campuses devote to teaching "tolerance." "Celebrating diversity" is really a code word for enforcing conformity. If you clap when no one else is clapping, the only thing you get to celebrate is your own humiliation.