Last night the Manhattan Institute sponsored a screening of Evan Coyne Maloney’s brilliant documentary, Indoctrinate U. Some 400-500 people attended, laughing in all the right places. (It’s hard to explain why a film about campus repression is so funny, but it is.)
Not one campus administrator (on or off camera) even tries to answer any of Maloney’s questions about campus policy. Instead the normal reaction from a normal university bureaucrat is to call the cops. The lesson here, a familiar one to those who follow the issue, is that the people who run the universities are not willing to defend in public what they do in private. Instead, they are deeply affronted and want the ever-polite Maloney carted away for asking questions.
Indoctrinate U undercuts the usual reaction to complaints about campus repression–that anti-PC commentary relies solely on a few endlessly recycled anecdotes. Not so. Maloney makes clear that censorship and indoctrination run from coast to coast, from public to Catholic colleges, from elite universities like Yale to California’s Foothill College.
One memorable tale is the saga of Republican student Steve Hinkle, who was subject to vast pressure and abuse for trying to post, in a Cal Polytechnic multicultural center, a flier announcing a speech by black conservative C. Mason Weaver, author of It’s OK to Leave the Plantation. Maloney is too kind to mention the president of Cal Poly who presided over the mess that cost taxpayers $40,000 in a prolonged effort to punish Hinkle, but his name is Warren Baker, co-winner of my 2003 Sheldon award given annually to the worst college president in America.
A week ago, Indoctrinate U. went on sale as a DVD. It’s available from the Indoctrinate U website for $21.99.
