(FORTUNE Magazine) – -- Herewith a few things one has learned as a result of looking into the Federal Aviation Administration's suddenly infamous sensitivity training program, which the American people learned about only because one of the guys being programmed -- a flight controller named Douglas P. Hartman, based in Aurora, Illinois -- got mad and sued his employer. Had Doug merely sulked in a corner, we would possibly never have learned that chaps working for the FAA were coerced into running a gauntlet in which they were aggressively fondled by females, a procedure whose educational implications were explicated on CNN by Louise Eberhardt. Said Louise, who is president of the firm that designed the program: "I think we need to explain that generally, what it was, is one minute of men experiencing what women in male-dominated organizations experience often, daily. . ." One hadn't known, frankly, there was that much groping at FAA. Presumably a rationale similar to Ms. Eberhardt's would be served up for another FAA procedure described by Joseph M. Bellino of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. Bellino says that black employees at sensitivity training sessions have been encouraged to go off by themselves, discuss their problems in a "white, male-dominated society," and then return to the main room and verbally assail some individual white male employees. Nobody knows how many federal agencies are thusly managing to poison workplace relations. Neither the Office of Personnel Management nor the Office of Management and Budget has any information on which agencies go in for sensitivity training, which is not mandated by any legislation and gets to be put in place mainly in agencies where in-your-face activists are in a position to represent it as going with the progressive flow. It is clear, however, that the Defense Department -- still paying its dues for the Tailhook scandal -- has several such programs. So do the departments of Labor, Energy, State, Transportation (FAA's parent), and Housing and Urban Development. In the Clinton years, HUD has emerged as one of our more wildly politicized agencies. It is apparently alone in requiring managers to engage in what are called "cultural diversity activities" off the job. Wait. That's not quite right. They aren't required to engage in such activities. But HUD memoranda have specified that certain off-hours activities (e.g., "participate as active members of minority, feminist, or other cultural organizations") will be expected of anybody hoping to receive an "outstanding" job evaluation. Sensitivity training is coercive at its worst, as the FAA's current embarrassments remind us, but its benefits seem hard to trace even when the training involves no more than cheerleading for workplace diversity. A big problem about diversity is that people really are diverse -- so much so that they don't necessarily want to be told to embrace the views and living arrangements of others who are different. Chester Finn Jr., a scholar who served in the Bush Education Department, has argued persuasively that there are large problems built into the federal government "force-feeding other people's cultures" to ordinary bureaucrats. In an interview with the Washington Times, Finn added sardonically: "I bet the FAA is not holding any diversity training programs to get people to appreciate the virtues of Christian fundamentalists."