The crowning irony of the endless push for diversity education in institutions of higher learning is that the places where you are most likely to hear racial epithets anymore are college campuses. “Usually supported by Student Life and Housing departments as well as student-led groups concerned about race, ethnicity, gender, disability, and sexuality, the Tunnel of Oppression is an interactive exhibit in which student actors, films, and recordings are used to expose participants to a variety of abusive situations,” Rebecca Barrett-Fox writes in Radical Teacher. “These range from scenes of suicide to an interracial set of friends being rejected from a restaurant.”
“Often, the skits get distilled to screaming profanities at the audience or in other ways, subjecting them to the abuse that has been heaped upon members of non-dominant cultures in America.” Barrett-Fox teaches at the University of Kansas, which partakes of these dormitory activities.
Radical Teacher is “a socialist, feminist and anti-racist journal of the theory and practice of teaching. “In one scene suggested by the Kansas how-to instructions, a student guide leads participants into a shower stall area, then slams the paper towel holder to simulate the slamming of a door,” Barrett-Fox recounts. “The room is filled with dry ice as the hissing of gas is heard in an effort to create the sensation of a Nazi gas chamber.”
“In some Tunnels, participants are handcuffed to recreate the experience of slavery, or racial epithets are hurled at audience members in order for them to identify with victims of racism.” Apparently, it never occurred to the geniuses who put these “tunnels” together to urge students to read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer, Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe or much of anything else.
Such an alternative might be particularly useful at a time when students at elite colleges and universities cannot say when the Civil War was fought with any degree of precision. Picking the side the United States fought on in the Second World War seems to be another brain twister for underclassmen at these schools.
Nevertheless, diversicrats are hell-bent on shepherding collegiates into oppressive tunnels. “The majority of participants do not share insights,” Barrett-Fox reports. “Those who did offered only a few sentences expressing surprise at the kinds of oppression they had witnessed, saying, for example, that they had not considered bulimia linked to the oppression of women, a comment consistent with student evaluations of the program.”
“Notably, a majority of students admitted their attendance was mandated by their fraternity or sorority or was in response to a promise of extra credit.” This, in an age when college students cannot earn credits, let alone additional points, for Shakespeare, Milton, or, for that matter, Ralph Emerson.
Nonetheless, college administrators evince a faith in these “tunnels” that they scoff at in religious people who express belief in a higher power based on a much more substantial database than the caverns of oppression have thus far produced. “At this point, no research has been completed on the effectiveness of the Tunnel of Oppression; no data has been collected to determine if and how the Tunnel ‘increases awareness’ or, more importantly, if the presence of a Tunnel on campus decreases racist, xenophobic, homophobic or other violence, leads to fairer policies and practices or in other ways alleviates oppression,” Barrett-Fox relates.
“Though the effectiveness of the program has not been proven, official university offices at Kansas such as University Relations and publications such as the employee newsletter, are supportive of the event, expressing belief that it fulfills some of their goals regarding diversity on campus.”
In a story rich in ironies, perhaps the penultimate one is that this quintessentially politically correct exercise should be judged to be insensitive by one of the very groups that its organizers claims to champion. “At Syracuse [University], the students who mobilized to stop the use of the Tunnel rasied the concern that it failed to depict people with disabilities in the context of real life, marking an important intervention by people, who, supposedly, the Tunnel is supposed to ‘protect’ through its educational purpose,” Barrett-Fox informs us. “So who is being convinced by what at these events?”
“As it stands, the Tunnel operates on the theory that drama helps participants enter the experience of the oppressed in a manner that is more compelling to them.
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
