Update: 9/17/07 - Stanley Kurtz offers a powerful positive review of "Indoctrinate U." He notes further that "folks in the Washington DC area have a chance to see it–and more. Indoctrinate U will be showing at the Kennedy Center as part of the American Film Renaissance film festival, which looks like it will be traveling to Dallas, Traverse City, and Hollywood as well. This festival will be showing a number of movies of interest to conservatives, including "The Call of the Entrepreneur" and "ACLU: At War With America."
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Deroy Murdock writes of Indoctrinate U. as
a fascinating and jarring new film by first-time documentarian Evan Coyne Maloney. Supported by the Moving Picture Institute and premiering September 28 at Washington, D.C.’s American Film Renaissance festival, “Indoctrinate U.” CAT-scans the politically correct cancer that gnaws away at American higher education.
Murdock writes further:
Maloney reports that 91 percent of campuses restrict student speech. Brown University banned words that cause “feelings of impotence, anger, or disenfranchisement.” West Virginia University instructed students that “instead of referring to…‘girlfriend’ or ‘boyfriend,’” they should
“use positive generic terms such as ‘lover’ or ‘partner.’” One can get into trouble without saying a word. The University of Connecticut prohibited “inappropriately directed laughter.”
Even more chilling, Maloney introduces us to numerous victims of the p.c. disease. . . .
Conservative university journalists cope with the campus Left’s neo-Stalinism. The Yale Free Press has seen entire print runs thrown into the garbage, prompting yawns among university executives. After editions were dumped en masse, staffers handed out the conservative UC Berkeley Patriot to individual students. Leftists taunted Patriot writers as “racists,” “Nazis,” and “Hitler Youth.” One co-ed recalls when “a guy came up to us with a bull horn and said, ‘The only good Republican is a dead Republican.’” As the Patriot’s Vanessa Wiseman distributed one issue, another student spat on her.
Maloney shows that on today’s campuses, everything local is politics.
“I’ve been learning in geography class that gender is socially constructed,” says Tennessee’s Sukhmani Singh Khalsa. Adds Oliver Wolf of Bates College: “I really don’t know why issues such as global warming, globalization, and militarism are brought up in a class on German literature.”
As Duke’s Madison Kitchens puts it: “That’s what passes for education.”
Just after the September 11 attacks, Central Michigan University told students to take American flags off their dormitory doors. Arizona State pulled a U.S. flag from its cafeteria, lest it rankle foreign students. At Holy Cross, the school’s sociology chairman told a friend of Todd Beamer — who led the passenger revolt against al Qaeda’s hijackers on United Flight 93 — that she must remove the flag from her desk in the department’s office.
The Left reserves its most toxic poison for the military. North Carolina State’s and UNC Chapel Hill’s ROTC buildings have been vandalized. One group of Pentagon recruiters arrived to a greeting that read: “U.S. out of Berkeley.” A San Francisco State mob disrupted an employment event featuring the Army Corps of Engineers. The chaos shuttered the entire jobs fair — for everyone.
Is there an antidote to this venom?
Supporting freedom-oriented scholastic organizations — such as the Institute for Humane Studies, the Leadership Institute, and the Young America’s Foundation — bolsters students who resist such evil. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education also backs students targeted by the p.c. commissars. Alumni also should shut their checkbooks to such schools.
Political correctness has sickened many American universities. The good news is that filmmakers like Evan Coyne Maloney and brave, conservative and libertarian campus activists are dragging this ailment into the open where it should dissipate beneath the Sun’s disinfecting rays.