It wasn't about widening one's perspective or questioning one's assumptions

Ace of Spades points out the flimsiness of the claim that the Florida Atlantic University stomp-on-Jesus exercise was intended to get students to step outside the parameters of their assumptions:

Consider, there might be some kind of a bracing Kill Your Assumptions/Smash Your Symbols experience were a Christian to stomp on the name of Jesus. (Just roll with the hypothetical for a moment.) In that particular case, the Christian would, arguably at least, be learning (or at least being subject to) some kind of lesson that The Word is Not The Thing and The Symbol Is Not the Signified and also various Question Your Beliefs type kindergarten horsehshit.

But does a Muslim learn that lesson from stomping on the name Jesus? No. How about an atheist? Again, no. How about a gay guy who hates "Bible Thumpers"? No. How about a feminist who hates the Patriarch and considers patriarchal religion to be the most important perpetuator of Male Privilege? Again, obviously not.

These folks don't learn any of these Very Important Lessons from these actions. In fact, they learn the opposite lesson, don't they? While the Christian is arguably learning to "not be so tribal in outlook," or something, the other groups are learning the power of tribalism.

After all, their symbols aren't being smashed. The symbols of their Destested Enemy are being smashed. Their Symbols are being elevated by contrast to the treatment of the Symbol of the Enemy.

This isn't just about double-standards. It is about that, of course, but it isn't just about that. It's also about the bizarre assumptions encoded into the Non-Thinking among our supposed Cognitive Elite.

Because, obviously, if you wanted to teach all students something along these lines, you'd ask each to smash the symbols of something personally/psychologically important to himself or herself. How on earth is a committed Patriarchy-hating church-hating feminist learning about smashing her own symbols by trodding on the symbols of the Other? In that case, she learns no lesson at all, except "You're awesome and people who disagree with you suck."

What lesson is that? We do not need to teach people to have an overinflated opinion of themselves and to denigrate the beliefs of people not like them. People are already kind of pretty good at that already.

Now, if the professor asked the Christian to stomp on Jesus, the Muslim to stomp on Allah or Mohammad, the feminist to stomp on a Giant Vagina costume, and the atheist to stomp on a sheet of paper reading "Trivial acts of intellectual rebellion will make Daddy notice and love me,"then I concede the lesson would have had some actual purpose to it. I wouldn't necessarily agree with the lesson -- it's still too much to have a state-funded school demanding public renunciations of faith from its students -- but I would concede there was some sort of lesson lurking around there. Or, if not a lesson, at least an experience. (And experience is the raw stuff of "lessons.")

But of course they did not do that, because they wouldn't do that. They wouldn't even think of doing that. Because they do not want to ask any part of the Leftist/Diversity coalition to give up, or even question, any of their bugaboos and shibboleths. In fact, the entire exercise, as constructed, is simply a coalition-unification exercise which increases In-Group Solidarity by identifying an Out-Group Other and inviting the In-Group to further debase the Out-Group, and moreover takes it one further step by demanding the identified and marginalized member of the Out-Group himself participate in and thus condone his own debasement.

The bizarre assumption at work here seems to be that Only Christians are capable of tribal and/or irrational thought, and thus that only Christians need to be "educated" out of such thinking.

In post-America it always comes down to that.  It is the Christian who must puke all over himself to prove he's not a hater.