‘Indoctrinate U’ Film Alleges Repressive Climate on Campuses

Daily News Article — Posted on March 26, 2007

(by Randy Hall, CNSNews.com) – ….A young filmmaker is preparing to release a full-length documentary that will “tell the story of how, in the name of education, schools from coast to coast ruthlessly compel conformity of thought.”

“When we think of college, we think of intellectual freedom. We imagine four years of exploring ideas through vigorous debate and critical thinking,” filmmaker Evan Coyne Maloney told Cybercast News Service Friday regarding his upcoming movie, “Indoctrinate U.”

“But the reality is very far from the ideal,” he said. “What most of us don’t know is that American college students surrender their rights to free thought and free speech the minute they set foot on campus.”

Maloney spent two and a half years investigating what he called “jaw-dropping incidents of political persecution” directed at students and professors at more than 20 schools across the country, ranging from elite Ivy League campuses to the largest state universities and the smallest community colleges.

The filmmaker’s interest in the subject began when he was an undergraduate student at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa. “What I noticed was that basically, from the first day you set foot on campus, the notions of tolerance and diversity were drilled into your head,” he said. “But there wasn’t a lot of tolerance for diverse points of view.”

At the time, Maloney thought the political imbalance was unique to his campus. “But instead, this assault on free thought is taking place all over America — right now — on our nation’s campuses,” he noted.

“It occurred to me that the best way to illustrate the problem was to hear from the people who had been affected by it,” he said, but “I noticed this topic didn’t fit into the Al Gore-Michael Moore worldview,” so “I decided I had to do it on my own.”

One of the stories Maloney recounts in his film involves Steve Hinkle, a student at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo on Nov. 12, 2002, when the College Republican posted flyers on campus promoting a speech by conservative African-American author Mason Weaver entitled “It’s OK to Leave the Plantation.”

As Cybercast News Service previously reported, Hinkle was accused of disrupting a campus event while posting the flyers in the school’s multicultural center and ordered to write letters of apology to any students who were offended by his actions. Hinkle refused to do so.

The impasse continued until September of 2003, when Hinkle sued the university over its refusal to clear his record of any charges related to the incident.

In the end, Maloney noted, “the university had to pay Hinkle’s $40,000 in legal fees, which by the way came from the taxpayers because that’s a public campus.” Still, he said that a school “harassing a student for 18 months is completely unacceptable.”

To promote the documentary, production company On the Fence Films has posted a three-minute trailer at the “Indoctrinate U” website showing clips from the documentary and stating: “Welcome to the new American university. Keep your opinions to yourself.”

However, Pedro de la Torre III, associate manager of organizing and outreach for campus progress at the Center for American Progress, told Cybercast News Service that “the film’s website seems flush with hyperbole.”

“This sort of exaggeration seems consistent with an approach that claims to champion free speech and academic freedom while working against those values,” he stated. “Most students do not think that there is a lack of academic freedom on campus, and they enjoy the wide range of free discussion and debate they encounter.”

In addition, “while the trailer does mention some valid concerns, such as speech codes, we hope the film does not exaggerate the situation on campus and rely on weak or unsubstantiated claims,” de la Torre said.

Maloney responded that he studied instances at different universities for over a year before deciding which cases should be filmed and documented. “We were left with a nice pile of compelling stories from all over the country,” he said.

“We could have made a 50-hour film that would have documented the problem even more extensively, but I don’t think I’d have any luck in getting anyone to sit through that,” the filmmaker stated.

Still, making “Indoctrinate U” available for “anyone to sit through” has proven to be a problem for Maloney and On the Fence Films.

“If you look at the cable TV ratings for news, at the best-seller lists for books, at talk radio ratings, it’s obvious that a market exists for this film,” Maloney said, but “Hollywood doesn’t seem to see it that way yet” because “the same political uniformity you see on college campuses is mirrored quite accurately” in the entertainment industry.

Therefore, “we have a map on our website where people can type in their ZIP code, and it puts a pin on the map signaling where interest lies in this film across the country,” he noted. “When we show this map to distributors, I think their eyes are going to be opened.”

In the meantime, the filmmaker noted that the message of his documentary is clear.

“To the tune of tens of thousands of dollars a year, students are being robbed of their educations,” Maloney said. “Higher education is systematically defrauding students, parents and taxpayers. And many trustees, the people who are supposed to be overseeing this system, are letting it happen by failing to act.”