"Conformity is the enemy of conscience" - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
This week, the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma, the university near and dear to my family, received an appropriate "hand slap" from The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs.The Higher Learning Commission may choose harsher treatment for Oklahoma University in the future.
OU is accused of forcing conformity of staff and students to certain moral, political, and cultural positions that the individual staff member or student could not support. Further, the administration of OU is accused of attempting to cover up the forcible attempts to program the thinking of students and faculty by refusing to share its "diversity training materials" with the press.
German national officials went before international tribunals at Nuremberg from 1945-1949 for their attempts to program the German populace "to think a certain way" during the 1930s. These German government officials were convicted for their efforts to punish individual Germans who refused to affirm and acquiesce to German nationalist "group think."
The atmosphere at the University of Oklahoma - as well as other colleges and universities around the United States - is beginning to look a great deal like Germany did in the 1930s.
According to an editorial written by Jonathan Small, President of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, the University of Oklahoma crossed the line of "mandatory diversity training" by enforcing students or staff to endorse specific viewpoints during the university's mandatory diversity training program.
For example, in one part of the training ('re-education?'), a student is shown a video of a fellow student saying that he is "tired of all this transgender stuff." The student watching the video is then given various choices to express his or her feelings including, "I agree. Political correctness can be so tiring."
If the student chooses, "I agree. Political correctness can be so tiring," then that student is not allowed to proceed in the course. A personal message is sent instead: "You seem upset. What's the matter?" After answering a few more questions, the university will then take the student back to the beginning of the diversity training course and REPEAT the video that the student has already watched. The course cannot be completed until the student gives those answers deemed "appropriate" by the university.
In other words, the University of Oklahoma is telling students how they should feel about transgender advocacy, as well as other current cultural issues.
The question that every Oklahoman should be asking is simple:
"Why is OU telling students and faculty the 'correct' or 'right' way to feel about moral issues?"
As Jonathan Small writes:
"It's one thing for college to be a place where students are exposed to opinions different than those held by their families, and something else altogether to force students to embrace beliefs they do not hold."
Attempts to suppress free thought, free speech, and free choice at America's public universities are real.
A secularist will tell a Chrisitan: "Go to a private university and pay tuition if you want to be taught Christian values." Very well and good. But this Christian will tell a secularist: "I will not stand by as my tax dollars are used at my state public university to demand that everyone believe a certain way." There is more than one religion, and demands that my kids conform to yours is unacceptable.
Our state's public university's attempt for all its faculty and students to affirm an amoral, atheistic philosophy must be - and is being - challenged legally. For when diversity training turns into a conformity test, the university has become the enemy of conscience and culture.