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Deep Deprogramming: The Baloney of Brainwashing 101
by Sean Shannon

Part I: Introduction/The Tone (00:00-09:21)

(00:00) The Beginning
Brainwashing 101 starts off innocuously (and expectedly), with stock footage of college campuses and classrooms mixed in with a few clips of modern campus life, played over the Notre Dame fight song. Evan Coyne Maloney begins his voiceover early, waxing nostalgic about "the good old days" of the American university, and sounding a bit like Garrison Keillor, only without the folksy charm or warmth or humour or ... okay, he doesn’t sound like Garrison Keillor at all. Notable among Maloney’s voiceover here is the quote: "Traditionally, the mission of higher education has been to equip students with the tools necessary to think critically." I’ll get back to that quote in a while.

(00:40) World War II?
It doesn’t take long, however, for Maloney to start his segues into conservative rhetoric. At this point he begins a sentence with, "Colleges embodied the very philosophy on which our nation was founded ..." That’s a reasonably fair statement, although it would be possible to debate exactly what that philosophy was. (All people are created equal? People have the right to rebel against unfair institutions of government?) However, Maloney then finishes the sentence, "... and educators recognized that their academic freedom was made possible by America’s freedom." This part of the sentence deviates strongly from the tone set by Maloney in his previous voiceover, and signals the start of Maloney’s first political overture.

We then get treated to stock footage from World War II and classrooms from that era, and Maloney explaining to us how universities knew that they had to send students to assist in the war effort. This seems totally off the track from how Maloney started, except of course to interject one of those insidious conservative tenets: That everything we enjoy as American citizens is directly attributable to the actions of our military. (Not just the military of 1776, mind you, but our military throughout the past 225-plus years.) Besides, universities are still sending students off to the armed forces. You might have heard of it, it’s called the ROTC, and it has a presence on hundreds of public universities in the country. At the University of Toledo I pass by the ROTC building on the way to and from my car every day, and about once a week I see students in their camouflage fatigues walking around campus. They even bring a climbing wall out in front of the Student Union as a recruiting tool. I could get into a discussion of how conservatives’ cuts in higher education have forced many students into ROTC programmes as the only way to afford rising tuition payments, but I’ll save that diatribe for another forum.

Anyway, the stock footage ends with a big fanfare and a fade to black, and there’s still no immediate clue as to why warfare got dragged into a film purported to be about higher education. As Maloney intones, "My, how times have changed," however, it’s easy to tell that the connection will be made soon enough.

(01:27) September 11, All Over Again
The first images after the fadeout, sure enough, are of anti-war protests in the wake of September 11, interspliced with pictures of the Pentagon and World Trade Centre towers smoldering. Over this, a couple of quotes from liberal professors are projected, which I’ll return to shortly. However, it’s impossible to overlook how Maloney attempts to make a connection between World War II and September 11, as if both events were of equal magnitude. Adolf Hitler killed tens of millions of Jews, Gypsies and GLBT people (among others), and the death toll from the battles of the war, from soldiers to the innocent targets of bombings, numbered into the millions as well. September 11 was a horrible day in the history of America, and the people behind the attacks should be captured and brought to justice, but Maloney, as many neo-cons do, tries to imply that September 11 was as important an event in world history as World War II, in order to justify the exorbitant defence spending and fear-mongering done by President Bush and his administration.

Maloney isn’t the first conservative to try to juxtapose the reactions of universities to World War II and September 11, though. In fact, Maloney’s colleague at On The Fence Films LLC, Stuart E. Browning, mentions this idea in an article on AcademicBias.com by quoting from Pat Buchanan’s recent book The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization:

"In the days after Pearl Harbor, the enlistment lines at navy, army, and marine recruiting stations wound around the block. College boys were as well represented in those lines as farm boys. But in the days after the slaughter at the World Trade Center - before a single U.S. soldier had gone into combat or one cruise missile had been fired at the terrorists' base camps - the antiwar rallies had begun on American campuses." (p. 84)

Buchanan states some facts here but leaves out an important context for this contradiction. Between World War II and September 11, the United States went to war in Vietnam, a war that was started on false pretenses and which continued to be fought long after it was clear that it served no real purpose except to help some politicians save face with their constituents and pump money into the businesses that stood to profit the most from America’s increased demand for weaponry. The Vietnam War made evident, for the first time, the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned about in his farewell speech. (That was a Democrat who started a war under false pretenses and a Republican who warned about the ties between our military and American industry, for those of you scoring at home. If you’re not ... try flowers.)

In the wake of the Vietnam War, America learned that not every war it fought would necessarily be for noble goals, and that it had to question and hold accountable its elected officials for choosing to use military force. After the initial shock of September 11, many of us feared that President Bush would use the opportunity afforded him by the attacks to wage shady wars. (We were correct, by the way.) As conscious participants in American democracy, many college students exercised their First Amendment rights to speak out against what they thought was, or would be, morally inexcusable actions on the part of President Bush, his administration, and members of Congress. Others took it upon themselves to declare that people who opposed military action were unpatriotic and un-American; this was a charge almost always made by conservatives at liberals. Both sides had rights to their opinions and to voice them, but the "un-American" charges were a transparent attempt to exclude anti-war voices from the national dialogue under false pretenses.

To drive home the point of just how much "liberals hate America," Maloney selects quotes from professors on the extreme left to display during this montage. From Prof. Nicholas DeGenova of Columbia: "The only true heroes are those who find ways to defeat the U.S. military." And from Prof. Richard Berthold of the University of New Mexico: "Anybody who blows up the Pentagon gets my vote." In all honesty, these quotes go beyond the pale by my standards, and I can’t defend either of them. (Berthold later apologized for his remarks and was disciplined by UNM.) However, to imply that only left-wingers were having these extreme reactions in the wake of September 11 is false. There were many professors who said at that time that the United States should, as Ann Coulter wrote in her infamous 2001.09.13 column, "... invade [the attackers’] countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." There were professors who said that we should bomb them all and let a higher power sort it all out.

The thing is, no one really reported on the people, including professors, who advocated a total carpet-bombing of the Middle East in the days after September 11. To this day, those who advocate that the United States either overtake by military force or simply destroy Middle Eastern countries seem to get a free pass from our media, whereas voices critical of the United States’ military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan are underrepresented in mainstream media, and scourged by the emergent right-wing media elite.

Even as a member of the far left, I’ll admit that my first reaction to the events of September 11 was one of vengeance; I wanted blood in exchange for the blood of innocent Americans who died on that day. The thing is, I moved past that and realized that further violence would only beget more violence, and that we had a venal President who could, and likely would, co-opt any military excursions for his own political gain and the financial gain of his big-business friends. This is what led me, and others, to react against the feverish jingoism that dominated America -- and its campuses -- in the days after September 11.

(02:04) The Wake
Continuing the thread of thought started with the quotes from liberal professors, Maloney’s voiceover starts up again here (he stayed silent during the last segment for dramatic effect), enumerating examples of what he believes to be unjust actions by liberal academia:

• Lehigh University removed the American flags from their buses and told employees that displaying the flag was not allowed. (Maloney makes an inexcusable grammar flub here, referring to the incident in both past and present tense in the same sentence.)
• Students living in dorms at Central Michigan University were forced to remove American flags from their dorms.
• Arizona State University removed an American flag from a cafeteria for fear that it would offend foreign students.
• At the College of the Holy Cross, a secretary was forced to remove an American flag she had put on her desk in memory of Todd Beamer, a friend of hers who died on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania on September 11.

These incidents have been well-documented, but Maloney does not always provide all the details of each case. For example, the incident at the College of the Holy Cross was the reaction of one Sociology professor, not from the institution as a whole. Also, Maloney only defines the school as "Holy Cross" in the voiceover, not mentioning it is the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. (There is also Holy Cross College in Indiana and Our Lady of Holy Cross College in Louisiana.) There is also an argument to be made that displaying the American flag was not necessarily in the best interests of the colleges. (For example, after September 11 a large number of people were scared that additional terrorists were already embedded in America ready to attack, and that posting the American flag on something was as good as painting a bull’s-eye on it in case there were further terrorist attacks) However, the important thing is that we begin to see both from here and the earlier pull-quotes the first big tenet of conservatives’ attacks on academia: Cast as bright a light on conservatives being silenced on campuses as possible, and ignore when the liberals get silenced. The end result of this is always an unbalanced picture that tilts in conservatives’ favour, and conservatives then deceitfully portray this picture as the status quo, without being challenged by the mainstream media. Attacks on conservatives are grossly over-exaggerated, and attacks on liberals are ignored or treated as lies.

Liberals getting shut up on campus? Impossible, you say? No, contrary to what conservatives would have you think, liberals can just as easily fall prey to silencing and scare tactics at universities as conservatives. Just as a brief overview, a quick Google search brought back news on the following incidents in the aftermath of September 11:

• At Merced College in California, a humanities professor was putting together a panel discussion on whether or not American military action prior to September 11 might have contributed to the attacks of that day, signing up speakers from both sides of the issue to debate the merits of their side. A campus foundation that had promised a $1,000 donation to fund the event later withdrew that money after people in the community, including former military offers, pressured the school. (Source: CCA Advocate, Vol. 37 No. 2)
• A library assistant at the University of California at Los Angeles, Jonnie Hargis, was suspended from his job for responding to an e-mail sent out by a co-worker the day after September 11, which quoted from Gordon Sinclair’s 1973 Speech entitled, "America: the Good Neighbour." In his response, Jonnie criticized United States policy towards Israel, asking, "So, who are the ‘terrorists’ anyway?" Hargis was disciplined for violating a UCLA library policy prohibiting the sending of unsolicited e-mails across the library’s mailing lists which contain "political, religious, or patriotic messages," a policy Hargis was not aware of even though he’d been working in the library for twenty-two years. The co-worker who sent the original message was not disciplined for the original e-mail she sent to the same list. (Source: The Daily Bruin, "YRL Employee Punished for Political Mass E-mail", 2001.10.04)
• Stephen K. Jones, as a required part of his pursuit of a Master of Arts in Teaching degree at the University of Maine in Orono, undertook a twelve-week student-teaching internship at Old Town High School. In his tenth-grade world history class, he taught a section on Islam that did not make any value judgments about any religions or attempt to promote one religion as being "better" than the other. After several complaints from parents that Jones was attempting to convert their children into Islam, Jones’ advisor informed him that he would no longer be able to teach there; later, the Dean of the College of Education and Human Development at UMO not only informed Jones that he would not be considered for any further teaching internships, but told him that he’d been kicked out of the Master of Arts in Teaching programme entirely. (Source: The Progressive, "Student Teacher Canned for Teaching Islam", 2002.03.23)
• The State Department, by request of the Department of Homeland Security, revoked a Visa issued to Tariq Ramadan, a prominent Muslim scholar who had been hired to teach a course on Islamic Ethics at Notre Dame. Ramadan has no provable ties to terror organizations and his techniques focus on forcing all the different groups involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- including Americans -- to re-examine long-held stereotypes about each other. Even Notre Dame’s Jewish Law Students Society wrote a letter in disagreement with the State Department’s actions. (Source: South Bend Tribune: "Jewish ND Students Speak Out", 2004.08.28)

These are only four of the many examples of left-wing ideas and speech being shut up in academia; there were many more I could have elaborated on, but I chose to stick with four since Maloney mentions four incidents in this part of the voiceover. Doubtlessly Maloney could have made mention of many more incidents on his part as well. (For a good look at what happened to rights and freedoms on American campuses in the wake of September 11 -- including censorship of both anti-war and pro-war voices and ideas -- read John K. Wilson’s "The State of Academic Freedom, 2001-2002: A Report" at http://www.collegefreedom.org/report2002.htm.)

I concede that the four incidents that Maloney mentions in his voiceover did, indeed, happen. However, I refuse to accept the implicit charge made by Maloney in this segment that only conservative speech and ideas were censored on college campuses in this time frame (or prior to September 11, for that matter).

This is a tactic that is not only used repeatedly by Maloney throughout Brainwashing 101, but by many conservatives on the subject of bias in academia: Treating whatever instances of censorship of right-wing ideas they can find as the norm, while ignoring or dismissing examples of left-wing ideas being censored. Conservatives will invariably attempt to frame the debate by saying something to the effect of, "You admit that these things happen, and that proves that there is a liberal bias in academia." By framing things in that way, though, conservatives preemptively attempt to prevent people from being able to tell the other side of the story, the side that proves that biases in academia cut both ways.

(2:59) Titles and "Disturbing Things"
With the phrase, "How did our schools get this way? Was my old school like this?" Maloney’s voiceover takes us into the title sequence. Unimaginatively, this consists of a series of shots of Maloney driving his tidy little car across highways and through working-class neighbourhoods. There are two things to note here: one, in a forty-six minute film this sequence, where nothing happens, takes up over a minute, or over 2% of the film. (The sparse credits in this sequence certainly could have been better integrated into the film.) Secondly, and I hate to ruin this for any of you who may not have seen the film all the way through, but Maloney credits himself with all the incidental music and, well, let’s just say I think it would be in his best interest to contract out the music for the full-length film to someone else. Seriously.

At this point we get a montage of quotes from people at Bucknell, and this is the key sequence in the film where Maloney tries to set a tone for what the current climate in academia is like. Before even getting to the substance of what is said here, though, it’s important to note just how Maloney manipulates the visuals of this segment to his benefit. The three people in this montage are filmed in ways to suggest things to the viewer; Charles Mitchell, the young male conservative student, is filmed while sitting in a chair with an American flag-like blanket draped over the top; Denise Chaykun, the young female conservative student, is filmed sitting next to a huge stuffed Hello Kitty, all the more notable because we find out later that Chaykun was a target of ridicule by some people; and Geoffrey Schneider, a Professor of Economics, is filmed in his office with just books and journals in the background. Maloney is letting his visuals do the talking here, without having to say what his cinematography implies: "Look, Mr. Mitchell is a fine, upstanding young citizen who isn’t afraid to show his love for his country! And Miss Chaykun is a sweet little girl who can question liberal ideologies while still being adorable! But that baaaaaaaaad Professor Schneider just sits in his office all day surrounded by books, disconnected from the real world in his little ivory tower!" I could understand one or even two of these shots being mere coincidence, but for all three of them to happen in the same short time frame leads me to suspect that Maloney deliberately posed at least one of his interview subjects so as to portray the people he wants to be heroes in a positive manner, and to knock the people he disagrees with.

Since the montage can be grouped into a few set themes, let’s examine each theme, what is said in them, and how Maloney portrays them:

(4:40) Unconscious Bigotry
Mitchell opens the montage by saying that the claim that "America is a racist, sexist, homophobic and bigoted country" carries a lot of weight as Bucknell. Well, let’s see: this country continues to fight a drug war that disproportionately sends non-Caucasians to prison while Caucasians get sent to treatment centres. Women continue to earn less than eighty cents for every dollar that men make for the same time and quality of work. National and statewide movements persist in attempting to codify that heterosexuals’ love for each other is worth more than that of non-heterosexuals. And despite the guiding hand of affirmative action -- that programme most neo-cons would love to put on the chopping block at the first available opportunity -- these inequalities still exist. Of course, conservatives would like you to believe that everyone is born with the same abilities to succeed in life, but the data simply do not bear that claim out.

Maloney’s main focus in this segment, though, is on Professor Schneider’s use of the phrase "unconsciously racist," a favourite target of right-wing critics of academia. Of course, you never hear a conservative try to explain this term, nor do the radio and television talking heads tend to allow people who use the term to explain what it means. (I, myself, choose not to use the term because of its confrontational aspects, but I believe those very aspects make it a good phrase to use in certain situations.) Since I don’t have a conservative in my ear telling me to shut up right now, I’ll go ahead and demonstrate just one example of "unconscious racism", and to really tick the right-wingers off I’ll even use the example of a noted feminist: Betty Friedan.

Friedan wrote the book The Feminine Mystique, which was pretty much the seminal book of the "Second Wave" of feminism of the 1960s. In the book, Friedan tries to explain what she refers to as "The Problem That Has No Name": The fact that American women of the time seemed to be doing better than ever, with loving husbands and families, more money thanks to the post-World War II economic recovery, and more leisure time thanks to the conveniences of recent household inventions, but in spite of all of this were still miserable. Friedan’s pursuit of the cause of this problem, and the ways it could be remedied, was the driving force behind most of the feminist thought of her generation.

However, an interesting thing happened. African-American women started making their voices heard, saying that the portrait Friedan was painting of the "American woman" did not represent them at all. They pointed to women whose husbands had left them to raise children alone, who had to work multiple jobs just to put food on their table, who didn’t have the time to tutor their children to do better in their underperforming schools, whose younger children had to wear the hand-me-downs from their older siblings because there was no money for new clothes. For these women, their problem wasn’t some sense of ennui from modern life; it was bare survival.

In this way, The Feminine Mystique could be seen as "unconsciously racist" because it presented the problems of Caucasian women as being the norm, and did not really address the problems of African-American women. It could also be seen as unconsciously classist because it only presents the problems of middle-class and upper-class women, and as unconsciously heterosexist because it doesn’t address lesbian couples at all. As I said, I wouldn’t use those terms to describe those problems with the text, but the people who would make those claims would not dare to say that Friedan was some kind of bad person for having written her book. The point people who use "unconscious" rhetoric are trying to make is that we all have a tendency to want to project our own experiences as being typical of our gender, or ethnicity, or sexual preference, or what have you, when they often are not. I may have experience as a Wiccan, but does my middle-class background prevent me from being able to explain the problems working-class and lower-class Wiccans face? If not, am I really in a position to make sweeping claims of the difficulties Wiccans face in American society?

When it comes down to it, the examination of racism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of bigotry in our universities is intended as an exploration of how these forces -- which certainly existed in our nation at an earlier point, if not now (to a lesser, less obvious degree) -- may impact our lives, both in public and in private. Conservatives bristle at this notion, and claim that these forms of bigotry don’t exist in our society at the institutional level. (Except for some conservatives who would claim that homophobia is sanctioned by Biblical law.) If you remember back to the start of this film, though, Maloney trumpeted that colleges traditional gave students the tools for critical thinking. Isn’t teaching students how to examine the lingering effects of bigotry in this country a way to teach them to think critically? Or should that whole concept just be thrown out of the dorm window because it’s not a line of argument that conservatives like?

(5:04) MARX MARX MARX MARX MARX ... oh, and Economics
At this point Chaykun disappears from the debate, as Mitchell and Professor Schneider talk about economics. Of course, instead of trying to give viewers some informed overview of the study of economics, we instead get about a minute and a half of sound bites where Karl Marx, socialism and communism take up the majority of the talk. If Maloney had given people the background that Professor Schneider teaches on political economy, which anyone who had a moment of time could look up for themselves on Bucknell’s Website (or if you can’t be bothered to do a little searching, here’s the page), then perhaps it would be clear why Professor Schneider speaks so much about Marxist, feminist political and black political economics.

However, Maloney uses the opportunity afforded by this discussion to savage socialism. Or, rather, he has Mitchell do it for him. (After all, if Maloney came right out and said this, he could be held accountable.) Near the beginning of the discussion on economics, Mitchell sneaks in one of conservatism’s Big Lies, as he says, "You never hear about the evils of communism. You never hear about the piles of bodies." Conservatives have been throwing this argument around since long before I was born, and they’ll probably be using it long after I’m gone. The premise is simple: point to the body counts of Stalin and Lenin’s campaigns of murder against their own people (usually inflated beyond Hitler’s bodycount to insinuate that socialism is worse than Nazism), then insinuate that because Stalin and Lenin both professed Marxist ideas that all socialism -- not just Bolshevism or communism -- is, for lack of a better word, evil. (In his essay "The 1960’s Radicals are Now in Charge of the Universities" on academicbias.com, Maloney’s colleague Stuart Browning goes so far as to say that universities " ... indoctrinate students with political views that are hostile to the American form of government, its economic system, culture, and history ..." All these years after Ronald Reagan allegedly "won the Cold War," and conservatives still play the Red Scare card.)

This argument, as popular as it is in some circles, is very deeply flawed. Unlike most people on the right-wing, I’ve actually read Marx, and I can’t find any instances of Marx accepting the Machiavellian notion of mass-murdering all your political opponents. Marx advocated violence, but only in terms of a repressed people rising up against an oppressive government -- and if conservatives want to reject that concept, then they’d better explain why we Americans still aren’t singing "God Save the Queen" like we were before 1776. Stalin and Lenin each killed thousands upon thousands of their own countrypeople, and I would never dare to defend them for doing so. However, their actions were the actions of despots, and had no basis in Marxist thought. By conservatives’ logic, we should then look at all the people killed in the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition and other such events of history, and strike the Bible and all Christian thought from our universities and American discourse because some people who happened to be in a position of power and were Christian used that power to advocate mass murder. It’s a flawed argument.

Stylistically, there are a couple of big things to note here: firstly, while Professor Schneider talks a lot about Marxist, feminist political and black political economics, and says that they should be taught because that’s where a lot of the "cutting-edge" work is being done in economics these days, the parts of his interview where he talks about how pro-capitalist economists such as Adam Smith and John Keynes make up the vast majority of what is taught in economics classes, and that Marx is only considered in one course, are conveniently omitted. (That’s the problem with trying to misrepresent peoples’ views in a documentary like this these days; all it takes is one e-mail to the person in question to clear things up. Oh, and you should also know that Maloney originally used a lot of the footage from the Bucknell interviews in an anti-Bucknell Website that caused many Bucknell donors, after watching the distortions in the film, to stop donating to Bucknell.)

Most importantly, though, look at the sample size Maloney gives us for this argument: one student and one professor. Even assuming that Professor Schneider is a full-blown socialist, he’s only one of fifteen faculty members in the Economics Department at Bucknell, and to generalize on the whole of the Economics Deparment -- and indeed all of academia -- based solely on Professor Schneider’s beliefs is deceptive. And while Mitchell may never have been assigned Friedman, Hayek or Mises in the classes he’d taken to that point at Bucknell as he complains about (although Friedman is required reading for economics majors according to Professor Schneider, and Hayek and Mises are taken up in some classes), I doubt that he’d taken classes from all fifteen professors, even though he is an economics major. (As for Mitchell’s complaint that he’s only met one person on campus who has read Hayek, Professor Schneider suggests he try talking to the economics and social science professors at Bucknell, most of whom have read Hayek.) Trying to substantiate an argument about the whole of academia based on the experiences of one student and one professor in one department of one university is intellectually dishonest at best.

(6:47) Voices in the Dark
There isn’t a very clear cut-off point between where the Marx-bashing ends and things return to a more general discussion of the political tone in academia today, but it’s around here that the issue of Marxism drops off. Chaykun finally makes another appearance here, first by saying that there are lots of courses on gender and sexuality issues at Bucknell, without ever really saying why that’s such a bad thing. However, after a jump-cut, Chaykun then says that, "You can’t just take regular history or sociology." Well, I don’t even go to Bucknell, and it took me about half a minute of poking through Bucknell’s Website to find evidence to disprove the second half of Chaykun’s statement:

100. Introduction to Sociology (I and II; 3, 0)
The concepts and methods sociologists use to investigate human groups. Focuses on the study of social organization, its variety and development.
-- From Bucknell University’s Course Catalog, Sociology and Anthropology listings

So much for the idea of there being no course on "general sociology". As for history, I’d like to know how "general history" could possibly be covered; even when I was in high school we needed two different year-long courses to cover history: one year for American history, one year for world history. However, a look at Bucknell University’s history courses reveals that the vast majority of the courses offered have to do with American history. I counted a total of five courses in African-American history, one in African history and a scant one in women’s history. Granted, I have no firsthand experience of how these courses are being taught, but Chaykun’s claim as to the range of courses being offered is provably false, and leads me to wonder if Maloney even bothered to fact-check her statement.

Turning back to Mitchell now, he next makes the charge that courses that aren’t supposed to be political often get turned political by overzealous professors. He only cites a secondhand example, though, of a professor in an engineering course who took forty-five minutes to talk about the motives of President Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan, pointing out the possibility that Bush invaded, at least in part, so that he could get an oil pipeline built across the country. Firstly, Mitchell implies here that the engineering class, and a number of classes in general, are not political, which I would strongly dispute. There is always a political element in every sphere of human action, regardless of whether or not people are conscious of it (or, in the case of some conservatives, try to disavow it). Science may seem like a cut-and-dry, memorize-and-repeat field of study, but the debate on stem cell research clearly adds a large political and ethical dimension to science, and it’s one that science majors should be exposed to in their studies. Likewise, there’s a strong case to be made that by exploring the issue of the Afghani oil pipeline, the professor in question could have led students to consider the ethical issues of engineering: "If you are asked to design something as part of your job that goes against your political or moral beliefs, should you design it or should you refuse to?" Secondly, the professor sustaining a tangent like that for forty-five minutes feels like an overexaggeration, and if Mitchell is aghast that a professor could go off on a political tangent of any length during a class, then I’d like to know who his professors are and how they got tenure. Honestly if I go through a semester’s worth of a class and there isn’t a political tangent during class discussion at some point, then I try not to have a class with that professor again. And I’ve had professors from both the left and the right go off on these tangents, and they don’t bother me. These kinds of tangents happen.

At this point in the clipfest there isn’t the focus on a single topic as there was earlier, but spliced in the middle of quotes from Mitchell and Professor Schneider (including Mitchell saying that "it’s not every class ... [but] it’s way too often," presumably talking about perceived attempts at faculty to force liberal ideology on students, but never defining how often is "too often"), is one notable line of discussion from Chaykun. Picking up on Mitchell’s discussion of the engineering class, Chaykun argues that because professors are in a position to be assigning grades and such, students who disagree with their professors’ ideologies cannot voice disagreement with them out of fear of retribution. First of all, any university worth its accreditations has a codified process for dealing with retaliatory grading for any reason -- usually by allowing the student to appeal his or her case first to the chairperson of the department, then to the dean of the school, then to the school as a whole. This isn’t to say that retaliatory grading doesn’t happen, but there are built-in systems to prevent most of it from happening. More importantly, though, the entire purpose of a university is to teach students to think critically -- you know, like Maloney said at the start of the film -- and for that to happen, students have to take the initiative in participating in class. Here we see one of the more brazen of the hypocrisies of conservatives’ attacks on academia: on the one hand they argue that right-wing arguments are being shut down and their voices are being silenced on campus, but at the same time they say they can’t speak for fear of grade retaliation. They claim censorship but admit to not saying anything out of a specious fear of retaliation; how can you claim to have been censored when you haven’t even tried to say anything?

The final theme of this bit of "setting the tone" gets to the general idea of what Mitchell calls a "full flowering of ideas" on campus. Mitchell says it’s "breathtaking" how one-sided things can be at Bucknell, but to this point it should be noted that Maloney has only used three people from one university to try to paint a picture of how things are at all universities in America. Oh, and the two students Maloney features in this introduction? The chyrons (on-screen graphics) label them as “Students” in this part of the film, but later in the film the chyrons identify them as being members of the Bucknell University Conservatives Club. So the example Maloney has set out in this whole segment consists of the viewpoints of two conservative students (not identified as members of the university’s conservative student organization to provide a veneer of neutrality on their part) and one professor who teaches Marxist economic theory. Who exactly is being one-sided here?

One bit worth noting in here, though, is Mitchell’s claims that in the past, universities never housed any particular ideology. Which totally ignores the fact that the American university system was originally founded to bring young men into the priesthood. Or is Christianity not an ideology? Even after the American university system was reformed based on the German model about one hundred years ago (before which you had to go to Europe to get a Doctorate in English -- you couldn’t even get a Ph.D. on English in America), the struggle to get universities to admit women and people of colour was long and hard-fought, and the fight to get them treated as equals continues to this day. (It was only in 2000 that Bob Jones University allowed interracial dating on its campus. (Source: CNN.com, "Bob Jones University Ends its Ban on Interracial Dating" 2000.03.04).) Anyone who has researched colleges to any extent knows that there are universities that have had, and continue to have, liberal bends (Antioch College, University of California at Berkeley, Oberlin College), and those that have conservative bends (University of Chicago, Brigham Young University, the academies of the US Armed Forces). And there are colleges that fall somewhere in the middle. Mitchell’s notion that universities never used to profess philosophies is simply not supported by the historical record.

Continue to Part II: Cal Poly/Steven Hinkle