Indoctrinate U

Tantor made his way last night to the Terrace Theater of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to see the worldwide premiere of Evan Maloney's new documentary, "Indoctrinate U." At least four hundred like-minded souls came to see Evan's fine product, many of them pretty young women in little cocktail dresses, which gladdened the heart of the curmudgeonly Tantor. From there, it just got better.

The documentary is about the near monopoly the Left enjoys on US college campuses and the ridiculously biased environment they have produced. Evan started this project with no experience in filmmaking but perservered to make a short film called "Brainwashing 101," followed by "Brainwashing 201." He went on to convince Thor Halvorssen of the Moving Picture Institute to fund and support a longer film. Evan took about four years to shoot a hundred hours of film at various campuses which he edited down to about ninety minutes of comedy.

It's all about the assault on the First Ammendment being made by radical lefty professors and administrators on those in the minority on campus, mainly Christians and conservatives. The lefty establishment is heavy-handed on dissenters. There were no smiles when a protest of affirmative action on campuses sold cupcakes to passersby for different prices based on the cusomter's race. On some campuses, the races are separated in the name of diversity from orientation, through separate housing, and on to separate graduation ceremonies. Some colleges enforce speech codes that prohibit anything that could lead to a loss of self-esteem. One college goes so far as to outlaw the use of the terms "boyfriend" and "girlfriend" as gender-specific and therefore discriminatory.

College faculties are about three-quarters liberal, with liberals concentrating in the fuzzy-wuzzy humanities while growing scarcer in the engineering departments. One professor opined that what faculty members really want is for students to validate their pathetic life experience.

College professors and administrators are shown to be comically anti-American. One student comments that there are plenty of why-America-is-bad courses but no why-America-is-good courses. After the Sep 11 attacks, some colleges banned the display of the US flag on their campuses lest it offend foreign students. A Kuwaiti student, Ahmad Al-Qloushi, who wrote a pro-American essay was called into his professor's office, berated for defending America, and told to go seek psychological counseling.

Liberal faculty can be ruthless in dealing with conservative faculty. When a professor at Cal Poly was found to be conservative, she was harassed and eventually forced out as head of the psychology department. Some professors relate being told they would have never been hired had it been known they weren't liberal. The liberal professoriate prefers ideological conformity, which is antithetical to the idea of a university. Through this process universities are converted from centers of learning to centers of indoctrination.

There were too many funny moments in this documentary to tell. It was amusing to see Evan wander around campuses asking for directions to the men's center or asking about men's studies programs, questions which aren't going to make you any friends at the Women's Center on campus. Colleges seem to be awfully quick to call the police on filmmakers asking questions. In this regard, college administrators acted more like bank robbers who didn't want to be filmed than decent people with nothing to hide.

The entire documentary paints a rather funny but depressing portrait of political correctness run amok on our campuses. I can only hope that today's students followed my own strategy in defeating indoctrination by radical leftist professors: waiting until the last night before the test to read all my assignments and not paying attention in class. It worked for me.

After the film was shown, Evan complained that the The New York Times gave a negative review of "Indoctrinate U" while citing cases that were not in the film. In one case that actually was in the film, a conservative student paper was shut down by Vassar for criticizing the construction of special student centers for minorities and gays. The New York Times argued that free speech was respected because the paper was allowed to publish again after a year. Evan emailed the Times, asking them if they would hold that free speech was respected if the government had shut down the Times for a year after they revealed how the US was investigating terrorist financing. The Times replied he should be lucky he was mentioned in the Times.

"Indoctrinate U" was well worth watching, but finding a way to watch it will not be easy. They're happy to show it anywhere they can get 500 or more people to pay to watch it. Otherwise, you have to wait for it to come out on DVD, which will take another fourteen weeks. Maybe you can catch it on Netflix then.