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by King Banaian
One thing about missing the ‘gala’ opening of Indoctrinate U Friday night at the Oak Street Cinema was that I got instead to sit the following night with a regular crowd. Some families came, some couples, and thanks to its location across from the University of Minnesota campus, many students. The students seemed to enjoy the movie best.
The movie is pretty easily divided into three parts. One part dealt mostly with the battle over affirmative action. An interesting device was the use of a family that had adopted a child of a different race; the college-aged daughter made a mistake by arguing in a letter to the school newspaper that her brother of a minority race has the same benefits of upbringing as she does and therefore did not need affirmative action. The reaction of the faculty and students to her was predictable.
In the middle, the movie turns to free speech, relying on several examples that were familiar to me. One of the most shocking things to people not on American campuses is the use of “free speech zones”, which as the movie argued meant that the rest of campus was censored. At my university, St. Cloud State, there are four designated “public expression areas” where one may speak without seeking prior permission. Other places are available by “established procedures.” But as we see in the movie, finding an administrator to go through these procedures, or to ask questions of them, are met with silence and, too often, a call to campus security. Director Evan Coyne Maloney time and again would visit campus offices seeking to ask on camera questions of administrators about decisions they had made, and time again was met with silence. The search for a campus “men’s center” is particularly humorous.
The last third of the movie seeks to address the question of intellectual diversity. Several studies, including those by Dan Klein, and by Stanley Rothman (both of whom appear in the film) have shown there is a severe imbalance of liberal and conservative faculty on American campuses. Faculty who are even married to Republicans are persecuted. In a most telling scene, you hear faculty tell of their liberal colleagues who react in shock to the loss of John Kerry, saying they did not know a single person who voted for George W. Bush. Remarks Duke University political science professor Michael Munger, “maybe they should get out more.”
But they do. The presence of faculty unions on campuses like mine means union activism that is predominantly for one party. Opining on politics in the classroom is frequently mentioned in the movie, and it is heard by many faculty in whom students trust to tell of what happens in other courses. Interestingly, this movie was made by a director and by producers who identify themselves as politically liberal. Refreshingly, they believe in thinking for themselves and letting others do the same. Maloney looks like the recent college graduate he is, and thus is a sympathetic character against whom the administrators end up looking like fools.
As stated at the outset, many of the viewers of this movie when I saw it were students. Their reaction was the most pleasant part of the evening to me. They reacted with shock to some of the things said to students by faculty. Their laughter was the loudest. The laughs were in my mind knowing ones. You suspect that in the dorms the stories sounded very familiar.
At the end, the director is quite clear that there is something in American campuses that needs to be changed, and closing on intellectual diversity as he chose was the point. The marketplace of ideas, in his mind, had become a monopoly. Maloney does not offer any specific solutions to this, but encourages people to see the movie. As he points out, conservatives have long believed this monopoly exists, but he believes that many Democrats and liberals do not know and would want to change what is happening if they did know. So perhaps the best thing for me to recommend about Indoctrinate U is to take a liberal friend to see it. Tell them they should get out more.
King Banaian, chairman of the Economics Department of St. Cloud State University and a Minnesota Free Market Economics Fellow.
Links of Interest
Craig Westover’s Pioneer Press column: 'Indoctrinate U.' -- the ill effects of an illiberal liberal bias
“Indoctrinate U.” homepage – view the trailer
On The Fence Films – “Indoctrinate U.” production company
Cato on Campus – a new online resource created for students by the Cato Institute
libertyguide.com – the ultimate e-source for the ideas of liberty
Intellectual Takeout – a project of the Center of the American Experiment
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