Indoctrinate U

After the lengthy excerpt below (which you're allowed to skip, I'm not watching) is a deleted scene from Evan Coyne Maloney's Indoctrinate U which covers free speech issues on college campuses. I saw a good deal of this film while it was still called Brainwashing 101, and it was on his website. The film is provocative, but the delivery of the message is lighthearted. He's a fair and polite libertarian guy, and I appreciate the way he interviews people and approaches the issue of diversity of thought on college campuses.

Here's an example of that fairness in his discussion of "groupthink" with Newsbusters. (Boldface mine.)

NewsBusters: Yeah, I think that's right. As far as some of these problems go, in the film you talk about that you think that if conservatives had control of academia that we would see similar instances, almost as common of liberals being, having their speech trampled on. Expand on that.

MALONEY: Yeah I think that's probably true, I mean I don't have any way of testing the theory but my theory is basically this: that it's not necessarily just ideology that causes people to do some of the things that the campus left is doing to suppress dissent today. I think that part of the problem, unfortunately is a natural human tendency towards group-think. We've seen plenty of examples throughout history of group-think and I think we've seen enough examples that you can't say that group-think is limited to one point in the ideological spectrum.

So I think yeah, I don't know what the exact numbers would have to be for the same problem to exist in reverse, but I'm sure that if there were the number of conservatives on campus equal to the amount of liberals that there are today-so in other words, if the roles were exactly mirror of what they are now-if conservatives were in the vast majority, I don't have particularly good faith that things would be much better. I think the problem is group-think that the size of the group, as it becomes more and more ideologically uniform, I think that's what ultimately results in the problem.

So yeah, I think that's why it's important to respect free speech in the abstract because, just because you might be calling the shots on campus today doesn't mean that you will be tomorrow. And if you create an environment that doesn't respect speech, well it's not going to be very good for you if that environment exists when other people are running the campus. So I think it's important purely for selfish reasons to support free speech and free thought on campus in the abstract and not have it be an ideological battle. There is nothing inherently ideological about free thought. Everybody should be actively engaged in it.

I remember back when in the Brainwashing 101 days he did a good bit of filming at the University of Tennessee. I would really like to see this documentary come to Knoxville. In order to get a screening he has to get enough signatures from your city. The Sikh student in the trailer below, Sukhmani Singh Khalsa, (in the turban obviously) is from UT.