Campus Con
A flimsy new film treats young conservatives as victims.
By Philissa Cramer
Wednesday May 16, 2007
The premiere last month at the Tribeca Film Center of “Indoctrinate U,” a movie underwritten by a handful of wealthy conservatives to expose higher education’s lack of “intellectual diversity,” drew a small group of fans — so small, in fact, that the start time was pushed back as organizers wondered aloud what happened to their audience. While they waited, a cadre of young men with their collars popped meandered through a predictable litany of right-wing hot topics, from gun control ("Guns are illegal in the city? We have one – whoops!") to race relations ("The thing about Imus? No one’s actually investigating the possibility that they were hos!").
But when the film began, the crowd fell silent, reverent as scenes unfolded from the trenches of what director Evan Coyne Maloney calls “the all-out political war” unfolding on college campuses. The war over campus culture has a long history, but “Indoctrinate U” is part of the right’s recent battle for the misnamed “Academic Bill of Rights”— a host of policies intended to squelch the free expression of ideas by making faculty members accountable for the political content of their speech and privileging conservative thought. “Indoctrinate U” — with a title nearly identical to that of notorious gadfly David Horowitz’s most recent screed (the stodgier-titled Indoctrination U)— is an audiovisual component of the movement’s propaganda.
Currently without commercial distribution, “Indoctrinate U” grew out of Maloney’s 2005 short documentary subtly titled “Brainwashing 101.” Maloney, a graduate of Bucknell and several failed Republican campaigns in New York, has been called “a conservative answer to Michael Moore,” a mantle he appears to wear proudly, if not quite as adeptly in the director’s chair. (The film suffers from some amateurish direction, including overlong shots and intrusive voiceovers.) Producers include a millionaire crusader against single-payer health care and the founding director of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. The film is a product of On the Fence Films and the Moving Picture Institute, two companies that have recently birthed a handful of right-wing productions.
With such a pedigree, it’s not surprising that the film illustrates the fallacies of conservative nostalgia from its very first sequence, when Maloney extols "the good old days" of American universities over black-and-white footage of young men marching around a quadrangle in military uniforms.
Of course, these good old tensionless, no-backtalk days never really existed for the academy. It was tension within the academy that produced the Free Speech Movement, which began at Berkeley in 1964 and rapidly spread to campuses across the country as students called for changes to speech-limiting campus policies. Maloney and his colleagues say this movement inspired them; they’ve even trademarked the phrase “New Free Speech Movement.” But the original Free Speech Movement was characterized by students’ forceful assertion that they could think for themselves. The contemporary incarnation, in contrast, depends on the “empty-vessel” theory of education, which holds that students know nothing and absorb unquestioningly whatever they are told. Lack of respect for young people and those who choose to teach them is a recurring theme in conservative rhetoric, and here the New Free Speech Movement fits right in.
“Indoctrinate U” is structured around a series of case studies of incidents in which conservative students claim to have been persecuted. We meet Steve Hinkle, who was hauled before the Cal Poly judicial board for offending African American students when he advertised a controversial lecture in their student center. And we meet a host of young people who describe the feeling of being victimized and marginalized when their professors criticized Republican leaders in courses unrelated to politics. We also hear from a parade of students who complain that they’ve been assigned to read Marx multiple times and Adam Smith “not once.” Perhaps economics professors are trying to convert their students into communists, but based on the starting salaries for econ majors, among the highest for college graduates, it doesn’t seem to be working.
It’s not necessary to lay out the myriad flaws and logical lapses in these cases and the others portrayed in “Indoctrinate U” — there’s a whole Web site that has debunked “Brainwashing 101,” and Campus Progress partner Free Exchange on Campus is dedicated to disproving Horowitz’s claims. It doesn’t take a logician to understand that “Indoctrinate U” is as guilty of telling only half the story at least as much as David Horowitz says many professors are.
That’s not to say that the movie doesn’t raise any points worth considering. In ridiculing the left’s protest tactics — which unfortunately sometimes include profanity, ad hominem attacks, and rude disruptions of right-wing speakers — Maloney reminds us to consider how we might appear to others who don’t agree with us. Finally, hearing about a University of Tennessee student being called “raghead” in an email by a lecture board officer, for complaining that most guest lectures on campus are given by liberals, one realizes there truly are some kinds of speech that none of us should tolerate.
But these lessons are obviously quite different from that which Maloney and the FIRE folks want us to learn. Unfortunately for them, the movie fails to present a comprehensive pattern of bias or oppression at American universities, a fact that is worsened by its disjointed case-study structure. It’s one thing to say that Steve Hinkle did not deserve to be hauled in front of a disciplinary committee, and quite another to say that because Hinkle was disciplined we can conclude that conservatives are systemically oppressed on American campuses.
And so, through all of the voiceovers, ambush-style interviews, and cuts to stock footage, I found myself asking: what’s the point? Even if the vast majority of professors are registered Democrats, even if syllabi nationwide require reading Marx and not always Smith, who cares?
That’s a question that the Council of Alumni and Trustees, the conservative higher education organization, is unable to answer. In “Politics in the Classroom,” a 2004 report highlighted in “Indoctrinate U,” the council reported that nearly half of students agreed that “some panel discussions and presentations on their campus are totally one-sided” and that “some professors use the classroom to present their personal political views.” When it came to the effect in the classroom, the study found that about 30 percent of students agreed with the vague statement, “On my campus, there are courses in which students feel they have to agree with the professor’s political or social views in order to get a good grade.” The survey didn’t ask whether students’ own grades had been penalized when they expressed unpopular opinions. And no one in “Indoctrinate U” said his grade had been affected because of his conservative views.
What the students did say was that their feelings were affected; they felt afraid to air their true opinions, so they kept them to themselves. But in adopting “nobody has a right not to be offended” as a rallying cry, the New Free Speech Movement has made clear that feelings aren’t just cause for speech-curtailing policies.
Indeed, even the leaders of the movement don’t think there’s much more to their crusade than feelings. “I don’t think that professors are very successful at brainwashing students,” Maloney told me after the film. A lot of apathetic young people hear the culture wars only as “background noise,” he said, and in fact, dogmatic professors are likely to turn off moderate students from politics. For students who do care, liberal students’ views “tend not to be challenged in class” while conservative students’ views are “battle-tested.”
After the “Indoctrinate U” premiere, I talked to Stanley Kurtz, senior fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center (a title he shares with former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum), about what the anti-conservative climate on college campuses means for young people. He suggested I pick up a new book of essays titled Why I Turned Right, to read that, like Maloney, he believes that universities create conservative ideologues. “Today’s conservatives — this one included — are increasingly shaped by their years in the academy,” he writes. “By virtue of its one-sidedness and extremism, the academy serves as a key generator of our polarized and cultural battles.”
So there you have it. “Indoctrinate U,” like the rest of the intellectual diversity crusade, is actually a beneficent gesture toward students, who aren’t smart enough to think for themselves. Students can return the favor by continuing to oppose the irrational New Free Speech Movement and preserving space at universities for right-wing reactionaries to emerge.
Philissa Cramer is a writer living in New York.
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Comments
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We’ve had this same stupid argument come up on our campus and the one or two students who are strong supporters of it have my pity. Do they really think that the fact that most professors are liberals means that most students are liberals, and that this is because students just soak up whatever their teachers say? Not to mention the sheer nonsense of demanding that adding conservative authors into curriculums will somehow magically make professors apolitical?
— Miss Manners - May 18, 02:22 PM - #Why are “open-minded” and “tolerant” liberals afraid of a variety of ideas?
— mighty aphrodite - May 19, 01:20 PM - #I was deeply disappointed to see FIRE labeled here as a “right-wing reactionar[y]” group. Such a classification is both unfair and unfounded.
We at FIRE proudly stand by our record of defending the liberties of students and faculty members from all points on the political spectrum—a record we invite you to study at http://www.thefire.org/index.php/case. Like the protections afforded by the Bill of Rights, FIRE is fundamentally nonpartisan.
While one may not agree or sympathize with the speech in question in each case, I hope you agree that even speech with which one disagrees should be protected on campus. After all, as the Supreme Court held in the 1972 case Healy v. James: “The college classroom with its surrounding environs is peculiarly the `marketplace of ideas.‘” A college that allowed only popular and agreeable speech on campus would be either unconstitutional (at a public school) or a waste of money (at a private school).
FIRE has reached out to Campus Progress in the past, and we would be happy to work with Campus Progress in the future to fight for students’ rights.
— Will Creeley - May 22, 11:43 AM - #While viewing the debate between Robert Kuttner and Bill Kristol on the failure of conservatism, a question was asked that I thought was very salient and relevant to this post. The question was, “ Doesn’t the conservative campus indoctrination movement in and of itself signal a lack of confidence in the concept of conservatism to be able to stand on it’s own merits”? My answer is yes, however all are entitled to their opinions. It’s just odd to me that people like Horowitz cannot not see or acknowledge that everyone who cares knows exactly what their positions are, and what their ideology is, and yet apparently not enough thinking people really care.
— maurice - May 22, 01:07 PM - #Will is right. Although there are a few issues on which I disagree with FIRE, they do help students on all sides of the spectrum with restrictive and unconstitutional school policies. Most of what the author calls the “new free speech movement” is right-wing and reactionary (see American Council of Trustees and Alumni or David Horowitz), but FIRE offers information and resources that can be of use to students, uses reasoned arguments, and does not engage in the kind of politically-charged hyperbole that characterizes some of these other groups. They shouldn’t be lumped together.
— Pedro de la Torre III - May 22, 03:00 PM - #Flighty Aphrodite asks: “Why are ‘open-minded’ and ‘tolerant’ liberals afraid of a variety of ideas?”
1) That’s a strawman question that obfuscates the main points raised by the above erudite review of hilariously transparent propaganda.
2) Your question is based on a premise that is falsely bifurcative, simplistic, and at its core bogus. Political liberals in the are far more open-minded and tolerant than their conservative counterparts, as a large number of studies and surveys indicate. And there is a difference between politically liberal (i.e. supporting government programs that benefit large numbers of people and augment quality of life and national security) and educationally liberal (i.e. large doses of ideas, information and topics of study).
— Mightier Aphroditier - May 27, 09:11 AM - #Why do close-minded, intolerant conservatives think that they have the right to determine what the variety of ideas that students are exposed to consists of?
Why are strong-tough-minded conservatives wimpily crying for even more reunaway government regulation to salve their poor hust feelings?
— (: Tom :) - May 29, 08:51 AM - #I spent nearly SIX YEARS writing crap I did NOT believe, in order to keep my GPA up. My daughter is not going through the same hoops. NO institution should be forcing their political agenda on students, regardless of the direction of the lean. No one should feel compelled to have and articulate certain philosophical opinions in exchange for a decent grade. How can a writer on CAMPUS PROGESS believe any differently???
— JanH - May 31, 09:53 PM - #correction – “My daughter is NOW going through the same hoops.”
— Jan H - May 31, 09:55 PM - #Wow – I’m SOOO impressed by Mightier’s vocabulary – see what a good liberal arts program can provide??? Can Mightier cite some sources of these studies proving “Political liberals in the are far more open-minded and tolerant than their conservative counterparts” – that sounds like another sound byte from the brainwashing institute – I’ve met VERY few people on this forum who grasp the concept of research, statistics, and the studies involving these practices. I am very interested in the methodology – please enlighten me!!!
— Jan H - May 31, 10:02 PM - #And hopefully Mightier will explain how something can be “falsely bifurcative, falsely bifurcative, simplistic, and at its core bogus” – I’m stumped on THAT one as well :-(
— Jan H - May 31, 10:08 PM - #JanH, just because you can’t successfully articulate you truly believe in doesn’t mean other, more competent and intellectually honest students, can’t.
Further, maybe it means that your positions were weakly defended in your work. Good work gets good grades, shoddy work gets passed if the kid is nice. It takes a special kind of incompetence to have to overtly lie about your beliefs in order to demonstrate knowledge of the subject matter.
Institutions of any quality demand rigor and reason from their students. And every college insists on honesty. If the information you had contradicted the beliefs you held, and you remained unwavering, that’s not something that should be commended but something that should be corrected. Self-doubt and self-analysis are essential in any rigorous academic program. You don’t have the right to pass just because you paid tuition, and you don’t have the right to simply ignore the information you find if it makes you question your preconceptions.
Get over yourself.
— JR - Jun 11, 03:11 AM - #I know of people whose grades have been determined by their willingness to agree with the instructor’s opinions. In fact, my sister, then a graduate student in Education at the University at Albany, was told by her professor that she was the “worst teacher ever” and that she couldn’t pass someone who held the view that vouchers and school choice would be good for students and schools in general. My sister wisely changed her tune, all was forgotten and she is now a teacher. It may not be particularly admirable, but she did what she had to do in order to become a teacher, knowing that it wasn’t worth abandoning her vocation to get in a snit with a narrow-minded ideologue.
— Al - Aug 1, 08:12 AM - #Back in Maloney’s “good old days,” I attended the University of Texas. It was FULL of folks who shared the conservative ideology of Maloney and those who back him. Some of them were professors. Almost ALL of the Board of Regents shared that ideology.
The student body, by and large, saw these ideologues for what they were/are – people who wished to crush the free expression of ideas that might be contrary to the “traditional values” these folks represented.
“Free expression” of sexist and racist ideas does not need defenders, such expression is easy to find on most campuses, many times by professors. That kind of free expression represents the “traditional values” of most conservatives, but it creates a climate on campus similar to the climate in the 50’s, which most students resented.
So, to me, “Maloney’s lament” seems lame and unfounded.
— hterrya - Sep 16, 07:12 PM - #Since when is he defending sexism and racism?
— Mike - Oct 9, 11:17 PM - #what made you think this would be an even handed critique of the film? There is NO debate that liberalism is forced down the throats of college students to the exclusion of all other thought. THAT IS NOT DIVERSITY! If you really believe in something you should be willing to stand and show why your thought is superior to theirs. Why your’s works and their has not worked wherever it has been tried.
BTW hterrya, we are living in the present. If you lament those days you should surely lament these as the shoe is just on the other foot..or is that OK with you?
— HLM - Oct 10, 06:06 AM - #“There is NO debate that liberalism is forced down the throats of college students to the exclusion of all other thought.”
NO debate? Then let’s debate it.
I say that “liberalism …forced down the throats of college students” is what YOU want the world to believe so some “conservative” can get a professor’s job wheter she/he deserves it or not.
Affirmative Action for “conservatives,” right?
— hterrya - Oct 27, 06:53 AM - #What saddens me is that conservatives seem to think that being exposed to ideas that aren’t conservative are the equivalent of having an agenda “forced” on them. I agree with what previous posters here have said – if conservative ideas are so weak and feeble that they can’t withstand academic scrutiny, then why should anyone hold them? As someone who holds a combination of views that makes him unpopular on both sides of the spectrum, I can say that the only response is to fight for your beliefs, defend them with rigor, but always take the time to shut your word hole and listen. A person trying to expose you to new ideas is not oppressing you. If you can’t handle a little cognitive dissonance, then you’re nothing but a hysterical whiner on par with the very people you claim are oppressing you.
— Joe - Nov 8, 06:58 PM - #How can a site called “Campus Progress” claim that there isn’t a left wing indoctrination on our campuses, while in the same breath, be so blatantly left wing and hateful of anything conservative?
— Dave - Nov 11, 02:24 PM - #hterrya,
— Dave - Nov 11, 02:44 PM - #OK, I’ll debate you…. Would you call this liberal indoctrination? http://www.thefire.org/pdfs/730a8163b35b360f8edd2b889c832ce9.pdf This is from the U of Del. According to this, EVERY, I repeat, EVERY white person is racist. This is mandatory for all students living on campus. Do you have any conservative examples? I figure I’ll give you an example, then you can give me an example. The first one to run out of examples loses. Anyone want to make a wager?
Tom said “Why do close-minded, intolerant conservatives think that they have the right to determine what the variety of ideas that students are exposed to consists of?”.................. It seems that you’re implying that only libs have the right to determine the ideas the students are exposed to. This is the entire problem. The lib elites always think they know, better than I, what’s best for me. ———- It is my opinion that ALL ideas should be welcomed in our liberal education system. The U’s should not be policing thaught.
— Dave - Nov 11, 03:17 PM - #hterrya wrote.. ““Free expression” of sexist and racist ideas does not need defenders, such expression is easy to find on most campuses, many times by professors. That kind of free expression represents the “traditional values” of most conservatives”..................Did they give you any examples to support your claim during your indoctrination at the University? Or did they just repeat this garbage over and over until you bought into it?
— Dave - Nov 12, 01:43 AM - #Dave wrote… “Did they give you any examples to support your claim during your indoctrination at the University? Or did they just repeat this garbage over and over until you bought into it?”
No, you pompous little ass; I LIVED through segregation in the South, and the SAME conservative Democrats who said that those who opposed segregation were communist dupes are now screaming conservative Republicans like you!
Do I want your racist, sexist attitudes on Campus, no I do NOT! But you and others who share your views are there making the same silly, bogus claims and acting like YOU are the victims!
Get a life.
— hterrya - Nov 13, 04:06 AM - #As a foreigner who was asked to accompany an ultra conservative Republican friend to see this film on campus, I find the whole liberal/cons debate fascinating. Even before viewing the movie, I had an idea that the audience would be primarily Republican or perhaps libertarian. Though I had been unaware of all the implications of the liberal/cons divide before moving to the South, I became all too familiar with the notion that ‘campuses are too liberal’. In fact, some folks defend some faculty members who make their conservative stance well known (and even if they were silent on these topics, they’re well known figures, some of them having spearheaded the Bush Natl Security Doctrine). The grounds of defense usually went ‘it’s OK when liberals assume the audience (of students) agrees with their statements and therefore disrespect alternate views. Why is it a problem when Republicans do it?
— elfppl - Feb 1, 06:18 PM - #Hence, I can understand why these folks would be fans of the movie. Therefore, I find it ironic to claim that the movie is completely unbiased and harbors no conservative agenda.
Interestingly, the domestic scene back home in my country is witnessing a similar divide. It has nothing to do with liberalism/conservatism in the US sense (the issues that are salient here, such as abortion, gun control, welfare, health cannot be politicized in the same way), the language of ‘liberalism’ is used in much the same way. In other words, back home, there is a clear divide on one critical issue with the ‘old elite’ on one side and the ‘new elite’ clamoring about freedom of speech . The same story: the current party in power and their supporters want to claim that academia and intellegentsia had heretofore been dominated by ‘the old elite’ views on that critical issue. Additionally, the ‘new elite’ are conservative but employ the language of liberalism in putting forth their arguments.
I am agnostic to the whole liberal/cons debate. I am a foreigner and especially according to the conservative perspective, I have no rights to voice my opinion on something clearly American. Second, the issues that are politicized here could never be politicized where I come from-abortion for instance is a non-issue. Third, the conservative/liberal divide maps onto other cleavages-such as religion, SES, in nontrivial ways. I know, many of you would dispute the fact. One thing is clear though: the effects of socialization, namely that conservatives are successful in tutoring (yes, tutoring, I deliberately used the word) conservative children.
Without diverging from the topic, no matter what the producers of the movie might claim, I think the undercurrent is definitely right of the spectrum, as is the audience who selects to go and see the movie
An English author has recently said
— Brian Lambert - May 2, 06:45 PM - #that the liberal/conservative argument is dead in Europe. Liberalism is the mainstream thought. The only country that this argument is alive and well in is America. Honor the opportunity.Synthesize your minds with tolerant dialog.When
a mentor demonizes opposing thought that mentor degrades the name teacher. For it is in tolerance of divergent thought,
Liberal/Conservative, that we can truly be a diverse culture.
Diversity is not just an external thing. Diversity of thought is the most important. Because it is minds that hate. Skin does not hate,ethnicity does not hate,
class does not hate. It is minds that hate. The college campus is in a phase of intolerance and bigotry toward the conservative
mind set. The Chomsky’s of academia are the new high priests of the campus. The denial of leftist dominance on campus will be revealed. And in time our universities will be a place that divergent thought is not only respected but celebrated