"A RACIST: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. ‘The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture, or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists.’ " [emphasis added]

Such stuff has long been a staple of the totalitarian "diversity" obsessives who pollute — and often dominate — political discourse at almost all of our universities, from coast to coast. The University of Delaware recently got a step ahead of its peers by including the all-whites-are-racists dogma in training those who administered a systematic thought-reform program for incoming (and other) students.

The quoted language appears in an August 2007 "diversity facilitation training" program for resident assistants. The RAs were, in turn, assigned to use far-left propaganda such as this in what university documents called the mandatory "treatment" of freshmen and the rest of the 7,000 students in university residence halls.

University President Patrick Harker suspended this particular program two days after an October 30 expose spurred media reports and horrified parents and other citizens. But history suggests that it may well be back in some less obvious form before long. And it provides the latest glimpse into the political correctness rot that infects our universities and a great many secondary schools.

This and dozens of other cases suggest to me that the cancerous spread of ideologically eccentric, intellectually shoddy, phony-diversity-obsessed fanaticism among university faculties and administrators is far, far worse and more inexorable than most alumni, parents, and trustees suspect.

Another hyperbolic, conservative rant about liberals in academia? Perhaps I should confess my biases. I do dislike extremism of the Left and of the Right. But I have never been conservative enough to vote for a Republican presidential nominee. And the academics whose growing power and abuses of power concern me are far to the left of almost all congressional Democrats.

They are also ruthless in blocking appointment of professors whose views they don’t like; are eager to censor such views; and in many cases are determined to push their own political views on students, who have few reality checks in their course material and are often too innocent of the world to understand when they are being fed fatuous tripe.

Delaware students have been not only inculcated with the lunatic view that all white Americans are racists (and that "REVERSE RACISM" is a "term … created and used by white people to deny their white privilege") but also:

• Told to confess their "privilege" or lament their "oppression";

• Informed that "white culture is a melting pot of greed, guys, guns, and god";

• Required to "recognize that systemic oppression exists in our society" and "recognize the benefits of dismantling systems of oppression" (whatever that means);

• Instructed to purge male residents’ "resistance to educational efforts" and "concepts of traditional male identity";

• Challenged to "change their daily habits and consumer mentality" for the sake of "sustainability";

• Pushed to display on their dorm doors politically approved decorations proclaiming support for (e.g.) "social equity" (whatever that means);

• Subjected to other "treatments" designed to alter their beliefs and behaviors and inculcate university-approved views on politics, sexuality, moral philosophy, and more;

• Ordered to attend residence-hall training sessions and submit to one-on-one sessions with RAs, who filed reports to their superiors about individual students’ "level of change or acceptance" of the thought-reform program.

One such report, for example, classified a young woman as one of the "worst" students in the residence life education program for saying that she was tired of having "diversity shoved down her throat" and responding "none of your damn business" when asked "when did you discover your sexual identity?"

"It seemed like they were trying to convince us we were racist and sexist and were horrible people," Kelsey Lanan, a 19-year-old sophomore, told The Philadelphia Inquirer.

The expose of the Delaware program came not from the media, most of which have (unlike The Inquirer) displayed little interest in the ugly details of campus PC, but from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a Philadelphia-based group that protects the liberties of students from their own universities. FIRE said in an October 29 letter to Harker that the university’s approach "represents a distorted idea of ‘education’ that one would more easily associate with a Soviet prison camp." But although especially egregious, the Delaware program is hardly an isolated example.

"In a nation whose future depends upon an education in freedom, colleges and universities are teaching the values of censorship, self-censorship, and self-righteous abuse of power," FIRE founders Alan Charles Kors and Harvey A. Silverglate asserted, with copious documentation, in their 1998 book, The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses.

They went on: "Our students are being educated in … double standards to redress partisan definitions of historical wrongs…. [The norm is] intolerance of dissent from regnant political orthodoxy [and] the belief that universities not only may but should suspend the rights of some in order to transform students, the culture, and the nation according to their ideological vision and desire."

Despite a succession of court decisions striking down university speech codes, they re-emerged thinly disguised as rules to prevent and punish "harassment," defined to include any speech deemed offensive by minorities, women, gays, or other preferred groups.

The PC sickness goes far beyond intolerance of dissent. It also has a pervasive effect on course offerings. History departments, for example, offer fewer and fewer traditional courses such as political and diplomatic history, to make room for courses portraying history as a tale of unrelieved oppression of minorities, women, the poor, gays, and everyone else by privileged white males.

Academia’s "diversity" obsession is founded on hostility to diversity of opinion. To most academics, "diversity" is a code word for systematic preference of minorities and women over white males in all walks of life. The preferred groups include many faculty members who are manifestly unqualified for their positions and whose websites read like a Saturday Night Live parody of wacky professors.

"At least in the humanities and social sciences," Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein wrote in a 2004 essay, "academics shun conservative values and traditions, so their curricula and hiring practices discourage non-leftists from pursuing academic careers…. The quasi-Marxist outlook of cultural studies rules out those who espouse capitalism. If you disapprove of affirmative action, forget pursuing a degree in African-American studies. If you think that the nuclear family proves the best unit of social well-being, stay away from women’s studies."

Over the decades, academic extremists have taken over more and more departments, like cancers metastasizing from organ to organ. For example, the 88 Duke professors who signed a disgraceful April 2006 ad in the school paper spearheading the mob rush to judgment against falsely accused lacrosse players included 80 percent of the African-American studies faculty; 72 percent of the women’s studies professors; 60 percent of the cultural anthropology department; and lots of professors in romance studies, literature, English, art, and history.

An organizer and representative member of the Duke 88, Wahneema Lubiano, has labeled herself a "post-structuralist teacher-critic-leftist." Her meager scholarly output includes railing against "Western rationality’s hegemony" while making the inconsistent (and racist) claim that "many whites might not ever be persuaded by appeals to reason."

Another 88er, literature professor Grant Farred, has produced such "scholarship" as a monograph styling Houston Rockets center Yao Ming, a native of China, as "the most profound threat to American empire." In the fall of 2006, Farred accused hundreds of Duke students of "secret racism" against "black female bodies" because they had registered to vote! The students were trying to defeat rogue Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong, who was courting the black vote by pressing rape charges against three white lacrosse players in the face of overwhelming public evidence of innocence.

At no point during or since the rape hoax has Duke President Richard Brodhead or board Chairman Robert Steel even hinted at rebuking Lubiano, Farred, or the other unrepentant faculty persecutors of lacrosse players.

Only in American academia could still another elite university — Cornell — proudly hire away and tenure a character such as Farred after he had proved himself a malicious buffoon. "We are very enthusiastic about Professor Farred, whose work everyone in this department has long admired," remarked Cornell English Department Chairwoman Molly Hite.

In academia today, a professor who falsely smears his university’s students as racists is a hot commodity. And hate means never having to say you’re sorry.