“If you don’t like gay marriage, don’t get one, and shut the f— up.” This eloquence, uttered by a professor of mine at American University, was my first wake-up call.
Now, Moving Pictures Institute founder Thor Halvorseen and director Evan Coyne Maloney have produced a finely edited and rather hilarious documentary that brilliantly sums up the politically-correct environment that prevails on many campuses today.
What is revealed in “Indoctrinate U,” through many episodes of Michael Moore-type comedy where people unintentionally shoot themselves in the proverbial foot while being videotaped, is that universities are filled to the brim with social-, gender- and class-obsessed professors who lack even the appearance of fairness or desire for genuine inquiry and debate.
Countless students are punished and intimidated for organizing themselves under conservative colors. And a pervasive hypersensitivity has almost completely squashed free speech and free inquiry on campus.
Whatever offends liberal professors isn’t really allowed. If a conservative speaker somehow manages to sneak through the border patrol to speak to the students, he or she is likely to be met at the front door by a rude mob demanding that they leave. Conservative speakers usually expect this frigid welcome and prepare themselves accordingly.
Because of all the no-nonsense muscle that right-leaning students, speakers and other advocates of free speech must display while dealing with liberal university administrators, teachers and brainwashed students, the most passionate radicals on today’s campuses are primarily conservatives and libertarians. This point is highlighted to great effect in “Indoctrinate U.”
Most of the professors and administrators nowadays were 1960s radicals who were arrested by the police for spouting their opinions, much like the conservative students they despise are today.
Indeed, anyone who has attended college since 1990 will have a story about that leftist professor who once spent an entire class session regaling students about his protest and arrest at Berkeley. In 20 years, it will be the right-wing professor reminiscing about the time campus police arrested him for putting up a Republican poster.
The documentary shows quite clearly how liberal American professors and administrators fail to see the underlying comradeship they share with these agitating conservative students.
They also fail to comprehend how hypocritical they are. “The University Speech Code” adopted on many campuses not only runs counter to the basic exploratory, free-for-all mission of a university, but is the opposite of American democratic ideals.
But it’s not only right-leaning students or quirky Ayn Rand types who are getting punished for holding such radical views as a belief in free markets.
If a professor dares to step outside the box and present a point of view that runs counter to the prevailing left-wing orthodoxy, he or she is ruthlessly castigated and chastised. “Indoctrinate U” features one such professor who was harassed for not being “political” enough.
Our once-great universities are now at the tipping point. Think-tanks are replacing them as the outposts for creative thought and inquiry.
Most free-thinking students know their professors will be very liberal and automatically discard most of what they say.
Universities with large endowments won’t disappear, but if enough students and parents wake up to the abuses of free speech so hilariously but realistically depicted in “Indoctrinate U,” radical academicians’ power over our culture will shrink accordingly.
Thomas Cheplick is an editorial intern at The Washington Examiner.
