Brainwashing 101

A cinematic perspective on bias in academia

By Nick Martin
From the April 2005 Print Edition

There is no denying the outstanding progress conservatives in America have made in recent years. We have re-elected a Republican president and gained wide majorities in Congress. Our pro-freedom foreign policy has been wonderfully vindicated by the waves of democracy spreading through Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon, and the Ukraine, to name just a few locations. In the battle of ideas, free-market competition and consumer choice have led to great gains in cable broadcasting, online media, and hardcover publishing.

Combined with strong economic numbers, 2005 already feels like another “morning in America.” Yet conservatives will reach a higher peak still with an impending breakthrough in the motion picture industry. With the advent of documentary filmmaker Evan Coyne Maloney, the conservative sun will rise quite high before this day is done.

The New York Sun calls Maloney the “conservative answer to Michael Moore,” and with his breakout conservative documentary, Brainwashing 101, in theaters at year’s end, he is poised to humiliate and expose your biased professors, school administrators, and liberal student groups. Squarely taking aim at the universities “educating” millions per year, Maloney documents the discrimination and hate speech faced by conservative students across the country and the selective enforcement of university codes supposedly designed to protect freedom of expression. The film’s message is simple: Conservative views are not welcome on campus. A lengthy preview is available at www.academic-bias.com.

Brainwashing 101 is simultaneously hilarious and terrifying in its presentation of the naive bias and arrogance of professors and administrators who discriminate and intimidate conservative students. Shooting in a direct and non-confrontational manner, Maloney spins nothing from his subjects; he lets their words and actions illustrate with great effectiveness the depressing state to which academic institutions have fallen. Maloney hits a grand slam by matter-of-factly illustrating that liberals love free speech, but only when it is theirs.

Highlighted in particular are university speech codes, which Maloney claims are enforced only when liberal ideas are under attack. Using several examples of the restrictive language and selective enforcement of speech codes, Maloney documents that their practical effect has been the silencing of conservative voices. A liberal free-speech advocate with FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, says in the film that most of the cases he solves involve Christians and conservatives being “ruthlessly mocked” on campus, but he notes that “no one cries hate speech in those situations.” Instead, he claims, speech codes are used to target the “clearly protected speech” of conservative students, who are “told they have fewer rights than they do.”

This selective punishment is made possible by vague and expanded definitions of what constitutes harassment or offensive language. For example, Colby College prohibits language that could lead to a loss of “self-esteem,” the University of Connecticut prohibits “inappropriately directed laughter,” and West Virginia University warns students not to use gender specific terms such as “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” but “positive generic terms such as ‘lover’ or ‘partner.’”

One professor at Bucknell University even states that “If you’re offended by it, that’s implicitly considered harassment.” If that’s the case, I’m harassed on a daily basis by professors who arrogantly attack my beliefs from their tenured positions of authority.

In one alarming case, Maloney documents the story of an outspoken pro-American Sikh student at the University of Tennessee who wrote an editorial for the school paper critical of a leftist student committee and found himself the target of hate-filled e-mails. One of the e-mails stated, “the next time you see one of these rag-heads, shoot him right in the f---ing face.” Disturbingly in a post-Columbine world, there was no punishment for the student author of the e-mail, and the faculty adviser of the committee of being sorry this comment was made public — not of being sorry it happened.

Maloney juxtaposes this case with another at the University of Tennessee, in which five white students dressed as the Jackson 5 with black-face at an off-campus Halloween party were subsequently reprimanded and their entire fraternity suspended for offensive conduct. One interviewed student asks whether three black students dressed as the Bee Gees would face a similar punishment or whether it would be considered just a funny costume. Maloney also notes the double standard whereby an entire fraternity was punished for the off-campus Halloween behavior of a few members, but the author of an e-mail telling its recipients to shoot a “rag-head” student “in the f---ing face” went unpunished.

In another humorous but shocking interview, one professor explains the “unconscious racism” he sees in the average rich student at Bucknell University and claims that the most cutting-edge work in economics involves the improvements on Marxist ideas by “Feminist Economics and Black Political Economy.”

Of course, the crux of the film is not that every college and professor proactively discriminates against conservative students, but rather that the bigotry is real, conservatives lack protection on campus, and university practices must change.

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