Apr

17

INDOCTRINATE U A Documentary by Evan Coyne Maloney

Not my favorite screening duty, documentaries. I regularly view and judge several hundred in the course of film festival judging, and many, while important and often necessary, are grim. But my jurying of a new doc, screened for the first time at the Directors Guild of America theater, and generously hosted by the Manhattan Institute, was not only clever and welcome, but also quite often laugh-out-loud funny. If a documentary on the wholly-owned left-wing dominance of higher education can conceivably be funny.

Evan Coyne Maloney, the filmmaker, is the progeny of two hippies of the 60s love-and-flower generation. They must have done something right. He is affable, persistent, smart, discerning, sarcastic with a cherubic smile, and always, scrupulously polite. Maloney and his cameraman visit college campuses around the country, from the royals of Harvard, Yale and Princeton, to the more rural or less noteworthy college campuses in flyover precincts.

Maloney’s goal: How neutral are teaching faculties at our nation’s expensive and highly regarded (at least until this film and Ben Stein’s forthcoming exposé of a similar nature, “EXPELLED,” become de rigueur viewing) colleges?

Whatever he attempts to ask, whether on the absence of men’s studies or resource centers (grim-faced females in Che Guevara-plastered offices stare stolidly at him, not ‘getting his point), the attacking of Republican students for posting provocative yet inoffensive fliers (lawsuits that invariably and ignominiously spell loss of thousands for the colleges foolish enough to pursue such groundless suits), the location of the diversity office to ensure diversity of opinion (huh??), or the ratio of left-liberal professors to conservative (the smallest ratio of Marxist-leaning ‘liberals’ to conservatives is 7 to 1; the highest is 134 left-wing teachers to 12, conservative), to how alternative papers on campus are received (entire press-runs are routinely stolen, in hundred-weight batches, as soon as they hit the stands), he is stonewalled, thwarted and…threatened with arrest.

His cheerful and diffident requests are met with flinty official agita. The response? Invariably the same: When the camera duo shows up, there is instantaneous recourse to campus or muni police. Not a single administrator attempts to answer his polite requests. The relevant parties quail and cringe from the camera, repeatedly demand he turn the camera off, and seek the nearest escape.

The packed house I viewed the film with laughed as the film proceeded, anticipating the response of yet another administrator who denies he or she is in charge. Maloney sits in anterooms all day, while colleagues of the designated official deny the job, schedule or existence of the person he has come to interview. We laughed throughout, though the topic is sober, and actually kind of frightening.

Brave students in each campus confide that they end up mum in classes, lest they forfeit grades or become the butt of verbal attacks. Contrarily, conservative students with complaints are rarely helped, abuse against them is ignored, their problems somehow lost or forgotten. Verbal abuse and vicious calumny against one hip Sikh student, for instance, amount to death threats—never acted on. Students responsible are never disciplined.

Toe the line or be ostracized, attacked, ridiculed. Pro-choice, only. Pro-gay marriage, only. Pro-affirmative action, only. Professors who are ‘liberal’ (in the new sense of illiberal and lockstep mindset), quash adverse opinion and keep a watchful eye out for those not like them. Teachers who are conservative say nothing, so as not to out themselves. “If I admitted I was a conservative,” one Stamford Professor of Biology says with a rueful laugh, “I lose my job.”

The way her students ‘know’ she is a non-majoritarian non-radical (shhh) right of center professional?

“It's not what I'd say in class. Because all I do is teach biology, as I was hired to do. It’s that I never start every class with a harangue on how Bush and co. are bad. Or how Iraq is a mistake. Or how white America is evil.” For the radical teachers, no matter what the course content, every class includes a discussion on RGE: race, gender and ethnicity. Even decorating. Even math.

A shocking episode shows Republican Steve Hinkle, a student subject to unremitting attack for posting a flyer announcing a presentation by [black] conservative C. Mason Weaver, author of It's OK to Leave the Plantation, in a Cal Polytech student center. That groundless lawsuit sets the taxpayers back $40,000—and Hinkle won on every (ludicrously unpremised) count.

The lesson, a familiar one to those who follow the issue, is that the people who run the universities are not willing or able, perhaps, to defend in public what they teach in private. They can’t take the heat when the camera is turned in their direction. Affronted and furious, they want the meticulously diffident Maloney carted away. Charges of ‘racist,’ ‘fascist’ and ‘nazi’ are regularly hurled at those who politely differ from the mainstream teacher-led doctrinaire brainwash.

Indoctrinate U undercuts the usual reaction to complaints about campus repression: These are no recycled anti-PC tall tales. No way. Maloney shows that censorship, lack of choice, forced views and indoctrination run both coasts, public to private higher-ed launchpads, rarefied elite ivies to the West Coast’s Foothill College.


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