Woke Bootcamp: Part 2

Part 2 of a three-part series, DEI in the Dormitories.

Eddie came to the University of Virginia as an out-of-state student. The move was a big leap for him, and the transition was not easy. Fortunately, the Resident Adviser (RA) on his dormitory hall helped him fit in. “He was here for me,” Eddie recalls. “I wanted to do the same for other guys.”

After applying to the program and getting accepted, Eddie (not his real name) arrived in Charlottesville before the fall semester to undergo week-long training. He expected to get practical counseling tips: how to help someone through a hard time, for example, or how to establish healthy boundaries. Some of the advice was useful, such as recognizing depression and dealing with suicidal ideation, but he says the training took an unexpected turn.

Much of the conversation revolved around the trainees’ “identity” — their racial, ethnic, religious, and gender background. Instead of focusing on academic excellence or the Honor Code or the multitudes of ways students could bond with others over common interests, Eddie says, RA training dwelled on the challenges of “marginalized” students.

White students were told at times to confront their privilege, Eddie says. “They’re very strict with the type of mindset they want you to have…. It’s almost to the point where you’re being indoctrinated into the DEI ideology.” He describes the training as “woke bootcamp.”

UVA President Jim Ryan is scheduled to report back to the Board of Visitors by April 7 on the progress he’s made in eliminating racial preferences and dismantling Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at UVA in line with presidential and gubernatorial directives. A close look at the Housing and Residents Life program shows how tricky that will be.

It’s easy to give jobs and programs new titles and delete DEI rhetoric from website pages — just swap out “DEI” with “inclusion and belonging.” Such superficial actions don’t touch the philosophy that animates DEI, however. It is difficult for Board members, who are fed carefully curated information by the administration, to know what’s happening on the ground.

If RAs and university staff view everything through the lens of racial, religious, and gender bias, the university culture can enforce racial preferences informally even if official policy does not. What counts as a “racial preference” and “DEI” in the first place? The Board of Visitors’ resolution never defines the terms. Would “DEI” include prompting dormitory residents to talk about their racial/ethnic identities? How about holding group discussions about racial bias or White privilege? What about lectures on “implicit bias”? And what happens when the edict to eliminate DEI bumps into the free speech of RAs who happen to share the philosophy?

There is a lot of gray area. Where should Ryan draw the line? And who will check to see if he’s drawing the line properly?

The selection process

RAs are selected through what the Housing & Residence Life website describes as a “peer-driven selection process.” Interviews for RA positions are advertised, and candidates are interviewed by other RAs.

Manuel (not his real name) applied for an RA position to get free housing and meals. He took part in a group interview involving four other candidates and three RAs. The first-round questions were focused largely on “inclusivity,” he recalls. The RAs were interested in how he would deal with others with different racial, ethnic, religious, and gender identities.

Manuel made the cut and entered a second interview round. Three RAs asked him six questions touching upon the administration’s core values for housing and residence life. One of the six asked how he would advance “diversity.” (This interview took place three years ago; after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on racial preferences in admissions, UVA changed the interview topic to Inclusion & Belonging.)

Ironically, for all the talk about preventing unconscious bias, the selection process was itself unconsciously biased.

“The interview process favors people who are disciples of DEI,” says Eddie. “A lot of the questions were how you’re going to implement DEI on the hall. I got around that by talking about the different cuisine and culture I’ve been around.” But students from regions where the population is overwhelmingly White, such as Southwestern Virginia, haven’t been exposed to much demographic diversity, he observed. They have no experience to draw from to answer the question. The interviewers see them as “a more antiquated thinker who can’t manage the job in a diverse way.”

The training

Although students run the training program, they draw extensively upon the DEI-related expertise of UVA staff.

Sam Cole, a housing and resident life coordinator, recorded a half-hour video that trainees were told to watch. Entitled, “Inclusivity on the Hall,” the video explored “what makes diversity, equity and inclusion important.”

Befitting his Quaker background, Cole took a gentle, therapeutic approach to describing RA duties. No one would describe him as dogmatic or militant, but DEI was a persistent thread in the presentation. He described DEI as a benign force that centered on inclusivity: making everyone feel welcome, like they belong, and like they have “a place at the table.”

Although college is a new experience for all students, Cole came across as most concerned with the identity of “marginalized” groups whose members might feel “othered” or “lost.” In his account, identity is tied inextricably to race, ethnicity, sex, and gender. “The role that DEI plays,” he said, “is making sure that every part of [the student’s] identity matters.”

It is imperative for RAs to use inclusive “non-gendered” language along with a person’s preferred names and pronouns, Cole said. He also recommended growing one’s “cultural intelligence” by attending workshops and events “to get as diverse a perspective as possible.”

Although he did not say so explicitly, Cole implied that the problem of belonging is an issue mostly for members of marginalized groups. Everyone should be mindful of the experiences of others, but the onus falls especially upon people like himself to make the effort. Drawing upon his personal experience, Cole noted that he had grown up in a “tight-knit community, a very homogeneous society.” If his views reflected only his experience at home, he said, “I would have some really warped understandings.”

How should RAs respond in the event of “an incident” in which someone makes a “problematic” statement or “misstep”? On the one hand, Cole advised against ostracizing the offender. Resist the temptation to shame someone, demand “justice,” or say “some people don’t belong in our community.” Focus instead, he suggested, on encouraging the offender’s long-term growth.

Such advice would seem to be the antithesis of cancel culture. In the next breath, though, Cole updated the RAs-in-training about enforcement mechanisms in the UVA system. Dormitory residents can refer hostile or harassing incidents to the University’s “Just Report It System,” which funnels them to the Office of Equity and Civil Rights for review and possible investigation. Also, RAs are encouraged to “document” incidents in the SafeGrounds system.

“Dealing with challenging situations relating to DEIB (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging) can be really impactful,” Cole noted. “It can have some traumatic after-effects.”

Using SafeGrounds, it is easy to compile lists of offenses. “If there’s a failure to fulfill expectations, if you’re absent from the hall or violating a university policy, they have a system where you report other RAs,” Eddie says. Except they don’t say “report.” They say they’re “documenting” the offenses. The system breeds disharmony. Instead of working through a problem with someone, RAs have learned to file an incident in SafeGrounds instead.

No one knows what administrative or ideological transgressions have been “documented” and can be used against them, he says. Between social media and SafeGrounds, the pressure to conform with DEI ideology is intense. Both Eddie and Manuel say other RAs share their concerns but fear to voice them, even anonymously.

RAs-in-training also listened to a presentation by Sylvester “Sly” Mata, whose title at the time was director of diversity education. His slide deck, entitled “Free Your Mind: Implicit Bias,” urged RAs to resist implicit biases that might interfere with students’ “sense of belonging.”

There are many types of bias, Mata said. His presentation employed the detached prose of an academic, not a culture warrior, but he focused on bias based on race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, education level, and socioeconomic background. “Everyone has implicit biases,” he wrote. “They do not come from one type of person or type of identity.”

While Mata allowed for the theoretical possibility that anyone can be biased, the only biases that seemed to matter to him reflect the preoccupations of the woke left, says Eddie.

Land acknowledgment of Virginia Indian tribal groups. Image credit: “Free Your Mind: Implicit Bias”

Mata tipped off the types of biases that most concerned him by commencing his presentation with a “land” acknowledgement and a nod to enslaved laborers — genuflections to UVA’s historical wrongs against Indians and Blacks.

“Sly was quite sly with how he presented,” Eddie says. “He called out everyone as having biases. When he called on the audience, he spotlighted people like a gay student who faced bullying in high school and a Black female student who experienced racism at work, which began a chain reaction of complaints about institutional problems in our society. It became: Let’s complain about every difficulty we’ve ever had, every hurdle we had to face, and how the system is so broken, rather than how we come together here at UVA and pursue the truth together.”

Memorial to Enslaved Laborers. Image credit: “Free Your Mind: Implicit Bias,”

Manuel describes Mata’s presentation similarly. “He would call on random people and have them share things about diversity about them…. You had to talk about an experience where you got discriminated against or felt shame about your identity.”

Here is the discussion topic Mata included in his presentation as a “final exam”:

Listening to the local radio station you hear the DJ say that police have been called to the local Whole Foods store after an elderly white woman feared for her life. She believed that a Mexican looking male wearing red was following her around the store. Fearing for her life, she approached two security guards: one black male and one white woman. The white security guard has decided to call the police after seeing the gentlemen in question on camera. The other security guard has left his office to talk to the gentlemen. After learning of the situation, the gentlemen and his family member (an off duty sheriff deputy) would like to leave the store, while his family member wants to talk to the woman who believed she was being followed.

“Can you spot any and all biases (both explicit and implicit) that may be present?” Mata asked.

The subliminal message of the RA training, Eddie says, is “you can’t study anything without thinking of how it’s racist or sexist…. Our backgrounds make us fundamentally different.”

In addition to the woke bootcamp, RAs must attend two training presentations put on by Senior Advisors each semester. At least one session touches on DEI; the other can vary. Manuel says some topics are practical, like supporting international students with immigration documentation. But the DEI sessions can get intense. This year, he says, they discussed “how to acknowledge your privilege.” Whites, he says, were “shamed” for their privilege.

Applying the training

The RAs, in turn, are told to design events and programs with their dormitory residents that reinforce these themes. Many students are already primed by their high-school experience to define themselves by their demographic identity and to see themselves as victims or oppressors. UVA’s RA program only reinforces the centering of an individual’s identity around race, gender and sexuality.

Source: “Utilizing DEIB Resources in HRL 0-Week 2024”

There’s a consistent push in the program for students to explore their personal “identity” by reaching out to the multitude of identity-based organizations for Black, LGBTQ, Muslim, Hispanic, and minority students on Grounds, Eddie says. Whites and Christians are left to figure out things on their own.

More to the point, there’s far less emphasis on students relating on the basis of common interests, or their common identity as Wahoos, he says. “There’s no, ‘Hey, let’s grab a meal together. Let’s go to a football game together.”

Part 3 of this series will describe in more depth how RAs apply their training to create programs for dorm residents.