UNC freshman mocks school for its ‘ironic cluelessness’ in diversity orientation

Alec Dent just went through freshman orientation at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and boy, was it a doozy.

He recounts the experience at the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, particularly the “interactive theater experience focused on diversity and inclusiveness”:

The actors performed four skits, each addressing a cardinal sin of the liberal perspective—racism, sexism, heterosexism, and class politics. For each skit, the overarching theme was avoiding offense. But they also displayed an ironic cluelessness: the skits were themselves narrow-mindedly offensive for their clumsy portrayal of people conducting these supposedly daily interactions.

The victims in the skits were an Indian, a woman, a poor person and a gay man, and “the theater group created its own caricatures: the ‘villains’ in each of the skits were either white, male, heterosexual, middle class, or some combination of the four,” Dent says.

In post-skit discussions:

The event leaders brought back the characters from the sexism skit, a big, strong looking man, probably over six feet, and a petite woman. The actors were told to go back to a scene where the man had his arm on the woman, clearly checking her out, while the woman looked uncomfortable. Then they switched roles. This caused some laughter, which disturbed the event leaders so much they reprimanded the crowd. They failed to see the humor in this unlikely situation, a large, strong man in an atypically submissive situation.

The leaders proceeded to say that what society tells us about gender is wrong—that gender is fluid and so are the characteristics typically associated with genders. They went so far as to refer to audience members as “those who identify as male” and “those who identify as women.”

You won’t be surprised how the crowd reacted to a white guy who asked the leaders why affirmative action wasn’t discriminatory.

The orientation lesson for Dent? “In order to be accepted, we must make our views uniform.”

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