DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH: Princeton Freshman: They’re Training Us To Hate Each Other.

This mandatory orientation event was designed to help us appreciate our diversity as a student body during the first week of classes. But what did it really accomplish? In compressing us into isolated communities based on our race, religion or gender, the minister belittled every other piece of our identities. He faced a crowd of singular young adults and essentially told them that their heritage outweighed their humanity. The message was clear: know your kind and stick to it. Don’t risk offending people from other backgrounds by trying to understand their worldviews.

Cost of attending Princeton University: $64,390 per year. Too damn much to be force-fed crap like this. But you know, I had a college girlfriend who spent some time post-college working in the admissions office at Berkeley. She was (and is) a language savant, and she’d spent a summer at the University of Zagreb in what was then Tito’s Yugoslavia, after which she spoke Serbo-Croatian like a native. But she said the message from Berkeley’s administration to the students was just like Tito’s: You all hate each other, and you can only live together peacefully because of me. You can only deal with each other through me. Divide and conquer.