They want you to disclose private information about family, friends and personal beliefs
By Stanley K. Ridgley, PhD
If I could give just one warning to students attending college for the first time — a nugget of information that, alone, can short-circuit everything the far-left attempts to do to students — this would be it.
It is the one thing that students possess that the left desperately requires to get their thought reform program in motion.
And so, the most crucial warning I can give to students who are attending college for the first time, and even those jaded college students who have been around the block for a number of times is this:
Don’t trust these people.
Just don’t.
They’ve done nothing to gain your trust.
They haven’t earned your trust. You have good reason not to trust them. They will betray that trust.
In fact, that’s what they intend to do all along.
Once you give them trust — which is critical to their enterprise — they will then solicit information from you in a host of ways, and they will use this information against you to move you along the conveyer belt of conversion to what they call “critical consciousness.” This means only that you end up accepting their dystopian, racialized view of the world.
But before this can happen, you have to give them personal information that they can then leverage against you.
They use various techniques to get you to confide in them — journal entries, in which you share your private thoughts, seminar classrooms set up as “brave spaces” or “accountable spaces” to do the same vocally.
In the seminar format, they will move you through three stages that are designed to attack your belief system and replace it with theirs, which is grounded in “critical consciousness.”
These stages are variously called: Unfreezing, Changing, Refreezing or Defending, Surrendering, Transforming or the most benign-sounding and most au courant of all: Confirmation, Contradiction, Continuity. This appears in Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice (4th edition), especially pages 71-78.
For this plan to work, everything depends upon your reaction in the first stage. They must gain your trust, to get you to divulge information about yourself — family, friends, your parents, your personal beliefs. It’s no coincidence that this is exactly how cults operate to gain the confidence of new recruits.
These workshop facilitators will “model” themselves in front of the group and call for “making yourself vulnerable.” This is the exact language they use — “make yourself vulnerable.” It appears in their manuals, and it sounds creepy, doesn’t it?
They call on students for “self-disclosure,” and they will set the tone by offering their own disclosure, presumably some private tidbit about their life. In tit-for-tat manner, they then ask for students to “disclose.” They call this “trust-building” and they absolutely must have your lower your defenses for their ploy to work.
Says social justice educator Diane J. Goodman: “Students must be able to trust the educator before they will be willing to allow themselves to be vulnerable.”
“Low-risk personal sharing and self-disclosure activities help to build trust . . . In order for people to let down their guards and grapple with challenges to their belief systems, there needs to be a safe and supportive environment that includes trust of the educator as well as peers.”
Diane J. Goodman
See page 36 of Promoting Diversity and Social Justice
Ask yourself: Why are these people are so determined to gain my trust?
Who are they?
What’s their goal?
Why is it allegedly necessary?
Yes, step back a moment and query just who these people are. You don’t know them. They’re strangers.
You’ll find that most of them are some of the most unqualified persons on the university campuses to be dealing in student-facing positions. These are the foot-soldiers of student affairs, and they are actually clerks, advisors, enrollment managers, reslife admins, and such like.
And yet here they are, wheedling you to “make yourself vulnerable” and to disclose personal information. The actual instructions these facilitator/interrogators learn to give is to “Model vulnerability and self-disclosure.” See page 76 of Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice (4th edition).
Why “model vulnerability and self-disclosure”? Because their manual tells them: “If the environment is perceived as supportive, a participant’s defenses can be more permeable.” See page 72 of Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice (4th edition).
That’s you they’re talking about . . . it’s your defenses they are trying to make more “permeable” by creating a faux climate of trust, when in fact, there is no discernible reason to trust any of the louts involved in this exercise.
I do not use the pejorative “lout” lightly, as these characters apply freely the trust-building tactics of cults to unsuspecting students.
One of these trust-building tactics used by American cults to soften up recruits is called “love bombing.”
Under the rubric of vague and unobjectionable phrases, the group targets its recruits with an artificial aura of acceptance. The Unification Church (the “Moonies”) uses “peace and unity.” Colleges’ ideological equivalent today is “inclusion and belonging.”
The cult tactic is to surround the recruit with constant positive messaging and flattery of the personal sort — your singing voice is melodious, your jokes are hilarious, your clothing is stylish, your skit was powerful, you’re an incredibly interesting person, and so on. The laughing’s too loud, the applause too long, the smiles too forced.
The goal is to give the impression of unconditional and unqualified acceptance to create the conditions of self-disclosure and vulnerability.
The complete attention of the newcomers is engaged through a heavy schedule of such activities as playing games, attending lectures, group singing, doing collective work, studying basic texts, joining picket lines, going on fund-raising drives, or completing various assigned tasks, such as writing a personal autobiography for examination by the group. In this way, recruits are kept occupied to such a degree that they don’t get around to thinking about what they are doing or what is being done to them.
Margaret Thaler Singer
Cults in OUr Midst
Says cult expert Margaret Thaler Singer, “Love bombing — or the offer of instant companionship — is a deceptive ploy accounting for many successful recruiting drives.”
The louts on campus who employ these cult tactics are most typically bureaucrat functionaries, with the occasional fellow-traveler faculty joining in. Most of them are not faculty, however, and most are not licensed psychologists, even as they practice amateur psycho-therapy in workshops and seminars.
They are people not much older than you, who have swallowed a noxious ideology on offer. They typically have received an “advanced degree” from one of the country’s abysmal schools of education in one of several undemanding and generically named fields — “student affairs,” “higher education management,” “educational leadership.” Deception is an integral part of their activity, and many of them are engaged in subverting the very institution that employs them — they call themselves “tempered radicals.” See also here.
They’re eager to apply what they’ve learned, a form of hip-pocket therapy, and they want to apply it to you.
Revelation Games
They manipulate students to gain personal information in any number of ways, in the aforementioned journals, for instance, or in seminars called “difficult dialogues.” But one of the most popular techniques of cajoling information from students is the use of ersatz “games” to interrogate students. These games have interesting labels: “Fishbowl.” “Circle of Voices.” “Stereotype Game.” “Privilege Walk.”
These are not actual games in the competitive or harmless fun sense, such as Cornhole competitions or the like. These are revelation games, where students are manipulated into revealing confidential and ordinarily private information about friends, parents, personal life, and political beliefs.
This is information that these student affairs louts have no business knowing. None at all.
It’s only natural that the folks who advocate these games should rate them according to ”risk.”
The most common of these games is called the Privilege Walk. I’ve written much about this farce here.
The Privilege Walk is an insidious activity that masks interrogation under the fraud of a game. It’s an exercise that seeks some of the most private information about a young person that no reasonable person would provide in a transparent situation. This information is then marshalled to use against the student to destabilize the student’s belief system to induce “intellectual vertigo” with a ”Dissonance Provoking Stimulus.”
This is exactly what Sherry K. Watt does at the University of Iowa when she employs what she calls her ”Privilege Identity Exploration” model. See pages 42-45 of Designing Transformative Multicultural Initiatives.
The upshot of all of this is that it is this first stage where the facilitators are weakest. If you refuse to cooperate in this initial phase of the conversion process (they call this refusal ”student resistance,” which means simply that you won’t permit indoctrination with this primitive nonsense) they cannot gain traction to attack you.
You can short-circuit and frustrate these louts at the entry point.
Don’t step onto their conveyer belt of conversion [a metaphor used by Beverly Daniel Tatum and Derald Wing Sue]. Don’t accede to their “stages of student development” model [advocated by the critical racialists of sketchy off-campus groups such as ACPA, NASPA, and NOCADA]. Just say no to their “identity development” amateur psychology [cobbled together by critical racialists such as Janet Helms, Rita Hardiman, and Bailey Jackson].
Note that these are amateur psychological interventions. Because of this, you can ask them a series of uncomfortable questions:
Ask these posers: Are you licensed psychologist(s)? (almost none are)
Ask these folks: Have you run your program through the local Institutional Review Board for approval to ensure it doesn’t violate protections against psychological experimentation? (almost none do)
Ask these folks: Where is my informed consent form that you are required to provide for this amateur psychotherapy session?
Ask these folks: Are you aware that some of your activities are in violation of the protections afforded by the Office of Human Research Protections of the US Government? (they are typically ignorant of this).
You are spot-on if you think it looks like these folks are not on the up-and-up. You have hit upon their key characteristics. As with those persons in any cult, they are deceptive and they are deceitful. In the guise of fun and games, they use their access to students for unauthorized psychological manipulation exercises without the ultimate purpose revealed.
I think that you know by now why it isn’t a good idea to trust these folks. In fact, it’s a good idea to actively distrust them.
And with that active distrust, you can neutralize them. It’s your most powerful weapon.
For more weapons to emasculate and roll back the social justice education louts, see BRUTAL MINDS.