If a picture is indeed worth a thousand words, a video must truly be priceless. Certainly, every frame of “Brainwashing 101” is a gem.
Filmmaker Evan Coyne Maloney’s first effort is essential viewing for those who believe that the politically correct campus is a myth. Unlike the entire filmography of that currently famous documentarian (you know, the obese one who tries to look homeless), Maloney’s movie is accurate.
Maloney takes us through a nice cross section of schools (Northeast, South and West) to show college-administered thought control, with gag orders, maybe not at its worst but at its, sadly, all too typical.
The speech code at Pennsylvania’s Bucknell University, Maloney’s alma mater, bans “intimidating” speech. In Bucknell’s economics department, Nobel-prize-winning free market economists such as Milton Friedman are not studied but revolutionary class struggle theorists are. Few departments at Bucknell are immune from the PC virus. A professor in an engineering class at Bucknell offered a novel rationale for the war that the United States is currently fighting in the Mid East: George Bush invaded Iraq to build a pipeline through it.
At California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, school officials attempted to threaten engineering student Steve Hinkle with a host of disciplinary actions up to and including expulsion in star- chamber proceedings. Hinkle’s crime? He tried to post a flier for a College Republican event. Maloney’s exchange with the Cal Poly bureaucrat that he attempts to extract information from is choice, as is the exchange with the campus police that the educrat calls. “It’s good to meet you guys and I hope we don’t see you again,” the cop tells Maloney.
At the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, championing political conservatives can be hazardous to your health, literally. When Sukhmani Singh Khalsa wrote a column defending the political right, the Sikh student received e-mailed death threats. The school’s administration has yet to investigate and is even attempting to suppress student demonstrations calling for an investigation of the apparent hate crime.
The warning label on the movie reads, “No university administrators were harmed during the production of this film.” As you will see, Maloney went out of his way to be cordial to his interview subjects.
Brainwashing 101, available at AcademicBias.com, will be featured in Accuracy in Academia’s Fall film festival on Capitol Hill in November.
