{"id":1515,"date":"2007-10-29T05:24:22","date_gmt":"2007-10-29T10:24:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1515"},"modified":"2007-10-29T12:39:15","modified_gmt":"2007-10-29T17:39:15","slug":"indoctrinate-we","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1515","title":{"rendered":"Indoctrinate We"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I attended the Twin Cities&#8217; debut of <em>Indoctrinate U <\/em>Friday night at the Oak Street Cinema on the U of M Campus (<a href=\"http:\/\/st.blogads.com\/952347692\/15702212\/click?d=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.educationnotindoctrination.com\">details here<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p>Things I liked:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>It was the kind of movie I&#8217;d love to see more of, in this Youtube\/ITunes\/Blogger driven era of grassroots media; you could tell it was shot on video on the cheap.<\/li>\n<li>Which didn&#8217;t distract from the message; there is a systematic anti-right, anti-conservative, anti-Christian bias in american post-secondary education, at schools big (Scott Johnson&#8217;s daughter Eliana, known to bloggers of a certain age as &#8220;Yale Diva&#8221;, testified about life as an underground Republican at Yale) and small (Ahmed al-Quloushi, a former guest on the Northern Alliance, who testified about being pushed into a psychological gulag at his small California college for writing a pro-American essay.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Plenty of other notables were there: <a href=\"http:\/\/deltondigest.blogspot.com\/\">Jamie Delton<\/a> was there (and I&#8217;ll hope he writes a review soon). Scott Johnson <a href=\"http:\/\/www.powerlineblog.com\/archives2\/2007\/10\/018865.php\">wrote about it <\/a>on PowLine this morning:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The theater was also packed with a responsive crowd last night, a large part of which stuck around after the screening to hear from Evan and film producer Thor Halvorssen. I haven&#8217;t seen such a big crowd in that theater since &#8220;Putney Swope&#8221; opened there in 1969. Several University of Minnesota students were in the audience and testified to the accuracy of the film&#8217;s depiction of university life. In a recent <a href=\"http:\/\/fish.blogs.nytimes.com\/2007\/10\/14\/yet-once-more-political-correctness-on-campus\/?hp\">New York Times column<\/a> Stanley Fish (wrongly, in my view) pooh-poohed the film&#8217;s portrayal of the university, but he also smartly captured Evan&#8217;s genius<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I&#8217;m tempted to say Robin &#8220;Rew&#8221; Marty of the MinMon went to and wrote about the wrong movie &#8211; but no, I actually saw her there. So that doesn&#8217;t explain her review.<\/p>\n<p>A better one might be that the standard knee-jerk response on the left is to ascribe all conservative complaints as &#8220;whining&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>In response to Maloney&#8217;s tales &#8211; of conservative newspapers being stolen from their drop sites, of conservative students being spat upon, of conservative students being forced to attend psychological counseling for&#8230;being conservatives, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.minnesotamonitor.com\/showDiary.do?diaryId=2668\">Rew wrote an anecdote about one of her professors<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;and concludes:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Are there left-leaning professors who push their students? I&#8217;m sure there are, and I am sure that just like the other professors I have encountered, they have what they believe is a good reason for doing so. College is a time for new ideas, new challenges, and new outlooks. I responded by becoming more firm in many of my beliefs, just as Mitch Berg and other responded by finding a new path more suited to their convictions. But that&#8217;s education, not indoctrination.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Well, yes. That, indeed, was the point of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1509\">my piece yesterday<\/a> &#8211; where my advisor, Dr. Blake, helped me question the bases of my own &#8220;beliefs&#8221; as a late-teen\/early twentysomething. Robin tells a similar story, and tells it modestly well (although she fails to indicate why any survey of English literature would be intellectually honest in eschewing Robert Browning&#8217;s work for his wife Elizabeth&#8217;s &#8211; indeed, there is none).<\/p>\n<p>But it has absolutely nothing to do with Maloney&#8217;s point in <em>Indoctrinate U<\/em>. The film isn&#8217;t about people feeling uncomfortable about having their beliefs challenged, or about professors &#8220;pushing&#8221; their students. It&#8217;s about:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strike>A student<\/strike> Several students being accused of harassment and being coerced into getting psychological treatment for (in one example) pasting up fliers to a conservative speaker&#8217;s appearance.<\/li>\n<li>A psychology department head being harassed to within an inch of her job after being &#8220;outed&#8221; as a conservative &#8211; and the attendant lopsidedness of political beliefs on college campuses, especially in the humanities and liberal arts.<\/li>\n<li>Conservative newspapers being systematically stolen from their drop boxes.<\/li>\n<li>Conservative activists being attacked, spat upon, and harassed &#8211; for exercising their First Amendment rights (which we&#8217;ve seen in spades in the Twin Cities over the years)<\/li>\n<li>Professors using their bully pulpits to vent about politics in courses that have nothing whatever to do with politics.<\/li>\n<li>Liberal groups using mob tactics to bully non-PC groups &#8211; recruiters, especially &#8211; off campus.<\/li>\n<li>Administrations systematically enacting double standards &#8211; allowing left-leaning students to behave in ways that are sanctioned when the students lean right&#8230;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&#8230;and on, and on. The movie is 90 minutes; it&#8217;s funny <em>and <\/em>aggravating <em>and <\/em>has nothing, really, to do with anything Robin talked about.\u00a0 Rew giggles, comes up with an off-topic but personal anecdote (which is intended, one supposes to counterbalance all 90 minutes of Maloney&#8217;s material) and says conservatives are whining, that it really cuts both ways (absent any actual counter-evidence).<br \/>\nWhich, to be fair, is still no worse than the rest of the left does in addressing this issue.<\/p>\n<p>You don&#8217;t have to take my word for it, of course. Get your butt on down to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mnfilmarts.org\/oakstreet\/\">Oak Street Cinema<\/a> at 7:15 PM any night this week.<\/p>\n<p>Kudos to the Minnesota Association of Scholars for participating in the showing.<\/p>\n<blockquote \/>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I attended the Twin Cities&#8217; debut of Indoctrinate U Friday night at the Oak Street Cinema on the U of M Campus (details here). Things I liked: It was the kind of movie I&#8217;d love to see more of, in this Youtube\/ITunes\/Blogger driven era of grassroots media; you could tell it was shot on video [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-n-e","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1515"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1515\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}