Philly colleges promote progressive ideology

Three liberal arts colleges in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, are offering selected incoming freshmen a week-long "social justice boot camps" to promote the schools' progressive ideology.

Sixty students — 20 each from Bryn Mawr, Swathmore, and Haverford – will attend the Tri-College Identity, Equity and Social Justice Summer Institute in the next school semester. The goal, according to the program description, is to enable students to "become social agents for change within their own institutions, in the United States, and in the world." But according to Heat Street, the goal is to "create a new breed of social justice warriors."

Day Gardner, president of The National Black Pro-Life Union, sees the program as an unhealthy trend.

"It seems that these colleges more and more are very anti-conservative," Gardner says. "They're very, very progressive, and what they're breeding now is ... more of a racial divide than ever before because of a lot of what the colleges are spewing out these days."

Gardner questions whether the participants are just young idealists who don't realize what the summer institute is really all about. She wonders if they may be simply succumbing to peer pressure and just following today's trend.

"I don't know if these young people really understand," she says.

As part of the application process, interested students must disclose their race, country of origin, gender identity, socioeconomic status, and religion – all in order to create what the application describes as "a diverse cohort across a range of identities and experiences."