Indoctrinate We

I attended the Twin Cities’ 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’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.
  • Which didn’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’s daughter Eliana, known to bloggers of a certain age as “Yale Diva”, 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.

Plenty of other notables were there: Jamie Delton was there (and I’ll hope he writes a review soon). Scott Johnson wrote about it on PowLine this morning:

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’t seen such a big crowd in that theater since “Putney Swope” opened there in 1969. Several University of Minnesota students were in the audience and testified to the accuracy of the film’s depiction of university life. In a recent New York Times column Stanley Fish (wrongly, in my view) pooh-poohed the film’s portrayal of the university, but he also smartly captured Evan’s genius

I’m tempted to say Robin “Rew” Marty of the MinMon went to and wrote about the wrong movie – but no, I actually saw her there. So that doesn’t explain her review.

A better one might be that the standard knee-jerk response on the left is to ascribe all conservative complaints as “whining”.

In response to Maloney’s tales – 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…being conservatives, Rew wrote an anecdote about one of her professors:

…and concludes:

Are there left-leaning professors who push their students? I’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’s education, not indoctrination.

Well, yes. That, indeed, was the point of my piece yesterday – where my advisor, Dr. Blake, helped me question the bases of my own “beliefs” 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’s work for his wife Elizabeth’s – indeed, there is none).

But it has absolutely nothing to do with Maloney’s point in Indoctrinate U. The film isn’t about people feeling uncomfortable about having their beliefs challenged, or about professors “pushing” their students. It’s about:

  • A student Several students being accused of harassment and being coerced into getting psychological treatment for (in one example) pasting up fliers to a conservative speaker’s appearance.
  • A psychology department head being harassed to within an inch of her job after being “outed” as a conservative – and the attendant lopsidedness of political beliefs on college campuses, especially in the humanities and liberal arts.
  • Conservative newspapers being systematically stolen from their drop boxes.
  • Conservative activists being attacked, spat upon, and harassed – for exercising their First Amendment rights (which we’ve seen in spades in the Twin Cities over the years)
  • Professors using their bully pulpits to vent about politics in courses that have nothing whatever to do with politics.
  • Liberal groups using mob tactics to bully non-PC groups – recruiters, especially – off campus.
  • Administrations systematically enacting double standards – allowing left-leaning students to behave in ways that are sanctioned when the students lean right…

…and on, and on. The movie is 90 minutes; it’s funny and aggravating and has nothing, really, to do with anything Robin talked about.  Rew giggles, comes up with an off-topic but personal anecdote (which is intended, one supposes to counterbalance all 90 minutes of Maloney’s material) and says conservatives are whining, that it really cuts both ways (absent any actual counter-evidence).
Which, to be fair, is still no worse than the rest of the left does in addressing this issue.

You don’t have to take my word for it, of course. Get your butt on down to the Oak Street Cinema at 7:15 PM any night this week.

Kudos to the Minnesota Association of Scholars for participating in the showing.

8 thoughts on “Indoctrinate We

  1. Oh, boohoo! Little wingnuts have to endure a world where some people disagree with them. Maybe you can home-college your kids. Wouldn’t want to expose them to bizarre ideas like the scientific method, evolution and gravity.

  2. Nah – like me, my kids pretty well kick teacher ass.

    But then you – like Robin – have no idea what the movie’s about, right?

  3. Which brings up the question of anti-Christian bigotry in higher education. In Wisc, Madison, Eau Claire, and Superior all have recently chosen to discriminate against their Christian students. All three schools were sued over their bigotry, lost, and had to pay the legal fees of their victims.

    I suppose when it’s the taxpayers money you’re spending, you will do things like that, even though you know you’ll be sued and lose in court.

  4. This blog is my one-stop source for fringe right wing propaganda.

    Well, if you know any lawyers, you could find out about some of the cases that some of Maloney’s subjects have won over the years…

  5. you haven’t seen it AC? But a lib who condemns stuff sight unseen? The rule of horses has come about!
    ….

    A Hellenistic pun!

  6. Angryclown criticized Mitch’s post, which Angryclown did read, buttheadrick. Guess you’re dumb cause you went to one of those horrible PC colleges.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.