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Deep Deprogramming: The Baloney of Brainwashing 101
by Sean Shannon

Part II: Cal Poly/Steven Hinkle (09:22-26:44)

(09:22) The Background
Now we get to the first of three case studies Maloney gives us of what he considers to be unfair treatment of conservatives on campuses. This case study involves Steven Hinkle, at the time the Vice President of the College Republicans at California Polytechnic State University, and disciplinary action brought against him for posting flyers for an event on campus, and the resulting legal battles that sprang forth from this incident.

Of course we get to go straight to an interview with Hinkle himself, after we’re told that the flyer in question was for an appearance by conservative author C. Mason Weaver. Hinkle explains that the College Republicans asked Weaver to come because they wanted someone who was "dynamic" and wouldn’t be "stiff" or "boring." A preliminary shot of the cover of Weaver’s book revealed the subtitle The New Underground Railroad, a fairly innocuous title, and this must have been a deliberate cinemagraphic choice by Maloney because we now get the main title of Hinkle’s book: It’s OK to Leave the Plantation. Even Hinkle admits that the title is "provocative."

Now, given the history of the treatment African-Americans received in the antebellum South on plantations, it is safe to assume that the word "plantation" is a "charged word" for many people, African-American or otherwise. Through the title of his book and his stated political views, it’s pretty clear that Weaver is trying to equate the philosophies he disagrees with to slave mentality. Hinkle states that the "new underground railroad" Weaver is speaking about is capitalism, although it’s clear that by "capitalism" Hinkle (and Weaver) means conservative laissez-faire economic philosophy. Am I offended by Weaver’s analogy of liberal philosophy to slavery? Yes. Does Weaver’s analogy offend me so much that I think Weaver shouldn’t be allowed to speak on a college campus? No. It’s not that hard, however, to imagine what conservatives’ reactions would be if someone were to post a flyer promoting a speaking event for the homosexual author of a book entitled It’s OK to Leave the Inquisition: The New Salvation for Gays and Lesbians.

That’s just hypothetical, though, and since Maloney deals in concrete examples to show that conservative speech is censored on campus, I should do the same to prove that liberal speech is also censored. One similar example comes to mind from the summer of 2003, when conservative students at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, under the name Committee for a Better Carolina, held a press conference with conservative lawmakers in which they denounced Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, a book incoming UNC freshpeople were assigned to read over that summer. These conservatives smeared the book as "Marxist" (there’s that word again), and a work of "intellectual pornography with no redeeming characteristics," and the heavy involvement of state legislators at the press conference could easily be seen as a scare tactic: "Hey UNC administrators, take the book out of your curriculum or we’ll cut your funding." This controversy erupted a year after right-wingers organized an attack on UNC’s choice of Michael Sells’ Approaching the Qur’áan: the Early Revelations as reading for its 2002 incoming students; conservative talking head Bill O’Reilly even went on his Fox News Channel show and compared assigning students to read Sells’ book to assigning World War II-era students to read Mein Kampf. (Sources: The Progressive, "The Antichrist of North Carolina", 2003.09; The O’Reilly Factor, 2002.07.07)

(10:03) Flyer, Flyer Away
Returning to the Hinkle case, Hinkle then explains that he designed a flyer for the event featuring Weaver’s picture and the title of his book in big type across the top; the flyer is reproduced on the screen for our benefit. Hinkle then begins complaining about how flyers for College Republican events at Cal Poly are torn down quickly while posters for liberal/social justice events stay up. I can sympathize with Hinkle here, because it’s precisely the opposite situation at the University of Toledo; I personally post all the flyers on campus for Spectrum (the university’s GLBT student group, where I currently serve as Webmistress and served as President for nearly eighteen months), and over half of our flyers are town down within twenty-four hours of me posting them; in a week, hardly a single Spectrum flyer remains on campus. Last year I saw numerous flyers for the College Democrats defaced with right-wing banter. Meanwhile, posters for right-wing groups and causes stay up year-round and even longer. As for UT administration’s reaction to this fact ... there hasn’t been one. This isn’t to say that I think Cal Poly College Republicans’ flyers should be torn down, because I don’t, but the phenomenon of students tearing down flyers from groups they dislike isn’t limited to liberal students tearing down conservative flyers.

And this gets to the specific instance which resulted in Cal Poly pursuing disciplinary action against Hinkle, as he went to Cal Poly’s Multicultural Center and posted a flyer for the event there. A student who was in the Multicultural Center at the time told Hinkle that he couldn’t post the flyer there, and that he should leave or she would call the police. The student saw the poster as "hate speech," and said she was offended by it. (Maloney then leads his interview with Hinkle in a way that lets Hinkle sneak in a comment about how he feels offended every day by what his professors say in class.) Hinkle tried to start a dialogue with the student and others there, about the event, but eventually the police were called and a report was filed. Keep in mind that Hinkle tried to start a dialogue for later, because it’s going to be important.

Anyway, according to Hinkle the police report stated that he had been posting "offencive racial material" in the Multicultural Center. As I’ve previously stated, I do not believe that the title of Weaver’s book, nor its inclusion in the College Republicans flyer, constituted the level of hate speech that would necessitate censorship, although I think it’s clear (and Hinkle seems to agree) that it’s easy to see how some people could be offended by it. However, Hinkle (and Cal Poly Professor/College Republicans faculty advisor Laura Freberg, the first "sympathetic voice" we get for Hinkle) make an illogical argument here, insinuating that since It’s OK to Leave the Plantation is the title of Weaver’s book, that it cannot be considered offencive. By that same logic, if I were to post a flyer for a speech given by someone who wrote a book titled Why We Must Torture and Kill All the Conservatives. Book titles, like all other forms of speech, have the potential to rise to a categorical level of hate speech that is not legally protected as free speech.

(12:07) Round One
According to Hinkle, after the police report was filed he was asked to meet with the Director of Judicial Affairs. Hinkle complains that this was during the week of finals, as if any office of judicial affairs should cease operations just because of a week of increased academic workload. (Especially given the increased incidence of illegal alcohol consumption during finals and the weekend before, such a policy would be very dangerous.) Hinkle also notes that he was not informed what charges he had been brought up on, but I find it hard to believe that Hinkle couldn’t have inferred what charges he was facing given that he had the police called on him.

Hinkle then talks about the meeting itself, and how he had his parents drive two and a half hours to Cal Poly to be with him. Hinkle makes a point of how he wasn’t allowed to videotape the proceedings, although I don’t see how this is an issue; in a real court proceeding, none of the involved parties have a right to make any audio or video recording, so why should a judicial hearing at a university be any different? From there, Hinkle says that an issue was made of his being Caucasian and an identifiable member of the Campus Republicans, and then Hinkle conveniently discards the whole Republican issue and says that Cal Poly officials stated that he was somehow prone to offend people because he was a Caucasian male. Never mind that Hinkle was an officer of the Campus Republicans, and never mind that this does not speak to the specific actions Hinkle was charged with. (I must admit, however, to getting a morbid chuckle out of seeing how a conservative reacts when he feels he is a victim of racial profiling.)

We go off on another tangent here, as Hinkle says one of the Judicial Affairs people suggested to Hinkle’s father that Hinkle had been raised in a way that caused him not to respect other peoples’ feelings. Hinkle also says that it was suggested that he see a "psychologist" at Cal Poly (I’m assuming he meant a psychiatrist) to "discuss emotional barriers." This leads Hinkle to spout off that it was insinuated that he had some sort of a disorder because of his conservative beliefs, totally ignoring the fact that it was Hinkle’s actions, not his beliefs, that were at issue. Hinkle claims he was told he should write letters of apology to the people who brought the case up and to make an appointment with a "psychologist," and when Hinkle refused to do so he was brought up on formal charges.

(13:50) Round Two
So now we’ve gotten to where things really started getting big for everyone involved. Honestly, at this point this looks to have been something that just spiraled out of control; on the one hand, I do think that Hinkle had a right to post the flyer for the Weaver event, but at the same time it seems like even Hinkle understands how the flyer could have offended some people. I don’t think that Cal Poly should have stood by and just done nothing about the situation, but going through all this disciplinary stuff feels like real overkill.

Of course, we start this section of the film up with cries of a "witchhunt" targeting Hinkle. After some brief comments from Professor Freberg, we are first introduced to Greg Lukianoff from FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Now, although a search of FIRE’s Website reveals a modicum of cases of liberal ideas being squelched on campus, note that most of their cases involve conservative ideas allegedly being restrained. (Compare that to the more balanced load presented on the ACLU’s Student Rights pages.) Not surprisingly, FIRE is a favourite Website for many on the far-right, linked to by many of the "Recommended Websites" on the Brainwashing 101 Website. Also note that of all the different people and organizations portrayed in the film, FIRE is the only one that gets its URL displayed during the film, except for academicbias.com.

Anyway, Lukianoff furthers the whole notion of Cal Poly trying to find something to charge Hinkle with, "struggling" until they decided to bring him up on charges on disrupting a meeting. Hinkle says he showed up at the Multicultural Center at about 1845, and the meeting was supposed to start at 1900. (Professor Freberg later claims that Hinkle left "a half-hour" before the meeting was supposed to start, though.) One of the great ironies of this whole situation? Hinkle was actually in there while a Bible study group was trying to convene. (Source: Chronicle of Higher Education, "Student sues Cal Poly campus, saying it violated his free-speech rights", 2003.09.26) Hinkle says that he was only in there for "two or three minutes" and then left, but keep in mind that earlier he said that when people in the Multicultural Center took offence at the flyer he was posting, he tried to sit down and talk with the people there about it, and did not leave until after someone had called the police on him. This doesn’t seem like something that would take two or three minutes, and the meeting likely was disrupted when the police came and the person or people who were offended by Hinkle’s poster had to file a report. I still don’t think Hinkle should have been brought up on formal disciplinary charges, but I do think it’s worth looking at the other side of the argument to try to find a clearer picture of what’s going on. After all, Maloney doesn’t seem to have too much energy vested in explaining the other side to you, the viewer.

We get into a lengthy sidebar here about how Hinkle acted (even by his accusers’ measure) professional and polite, and said "please" and "thank you" and all of that. That overlooks the point that people can be polite and pushy at the same time, though. Personally, I’ve run into that behaviour more than I’d care to remember at UT. I have this wonderful Tori Amos t-shirt that I can’t wear on campus anymore because the front of it has, in big white letters against a black background, the words "RECOVERING CHRISTIAN," and whenever I wear the shirt on campus I’ll invariably get some hardcore right-wingers who come up to me, and despite being polite still get on my case about the shirt, even when I try to explain to them who Tori Amos is. (And I apologize, but if I run into someone who has never heard of Tori, then I become distrustful of that person on a matter of general principle.) As for Hinkle’s behaviour, again, it would be nice if we could get words from Hinkle’s accusers here to explain their side of what happened, but we don’t, so for the sake of argument let’s just assume that Hinkle wasn’t being pushy in any way.

Finally we get to the issue of the hearing itself, and here’s where one of the more damning charges against Cal Poly shows up because Hinkle was allowed to have Professor Freberg there to counsel him, but he was not allowed to have legal counsel, and the person presiding over the case, according to Lukianoff, was an attorney. If this is the case, then I think Cal Poly’s judicial affairs system is really messed up, because the right to legal counsel, even if not in a matter of government court, should be a given in matters like this. However, if this is a rule that is applied to all cases, then Hinkle should not be portraying himself -- and Maloney should not be portraying Hinkle -- as having been "singled out" by Cal Poly in this case.

As for the substance of the hearing, Lukianoff says there were "many amazing moments" during the seven hours that the hearing went on, but we only get to hear one of them, either because Lukianoff didn’t elaborate on others or because Maloney cut the others out. The gist of the moment was that Hinkle asked for a definition of "disruption," and the presiding judiciary blew him off. Hinkle has a strong argument here, in that if he’s been accused of an offence, then he should have a clear definition of what that offence is. I don’t know why Hinkle couldn’t get a clear definition of the word, but I do think it speaks to another problem with the student judicial system at Cal Poly. (Although if conservatives want to play those kinds of semantic games, does that mean we can strike the anti-pornography laws because of all that "I know it when I see it" gobbledygook?)

(16:32) Round Three
Anyway, Hinkle was found guilty, and although Cal Poly decided against requiring that Hinkle see a "psychologist," there was still a note on his transcript about him being found guilty of disruption, and he was asked to write a public letter of apology about the transcript that, as Professor Freberg fairly points out, could haunt him later down the line. Hinkle gets really frenzied here, claiming that Cal Poly was trying to "get after" the College Republicans and that he was "abused by leftist administrators." Honestly, I can’t say that I disagree with him (although I haven’t had a chance to hear the other side yet), but throughout the rest of his interview he was unusually calm and collected, and in this small segment he really seems to almost leap out of his chair with rage. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but something doesn’t sit right with this segment.

So at this point Hinkle contacted FIRE, and Lukianoff thought that the case would be resolved quickly and he could get Cal Poly to back down. That didn’t end up happening, though, so FIRE went to the media. The principals here indicate that this incident made national news, although Brainwashing 101 was the first I ever heard of it. (I didn’t have cable when all this was going on, though.) In response to the press coverage, Cal Poly agreed to drop the whole issue of the public apology, but still would not expunge the guilty verdict from Hinkle’s record. At this point Hinkle went to litigation, and FIRE, according to Hinkle, put him in touch with someone from the Center for Individual Rights, a far-right group whose Website documents their attempts to end affirmative action programmes. It’s interesting to note, though, that Lukianoff frames it as putting Hinkle in touch with Carol Sobel, an ACLU cooperating attorney in California. Sobel then filed suit in federal court, and won, apparently quite easily. Not only was Hinkle’s record totally cleared up, but Cal Poly had to pay the $40,000 in legal fees Hinkle had racked up during the whole ordeal. (Funny, I thought conservatives were the ones complaining about the exorbitant financial awards in modern legal cases.)

So everything ends happy for the conservatives, but just to make things clear, Maloney gives us a minute and a half of Hinkle, Professor Freberg and Lukianoff summing everything up, pointing out how Hinkle was unfairly targeted because he was a conservative and such, and how he allegedly could have gotten kicked out of college just for posting a flyer. In this little clipfest, though, Maloney sneaks in quotes from Hinkle about how colleges apparently want "diversity but not diversity of ideas," and that what happened to him "happens on every college campus." Not that Hinkle gives evidence of either of these claims, mind you. Also, Maloney really turns it on with the leading questions here, asking Freberg if Cal Poly reacted the way they did "... because they were opposed to [Hinkle]’s being a white conservative, or were they opposed to Mason Weaver being a black conservative?" (Professor Freberg’s response, predictably enough: "All of the above.")

But of course this isn’t good enough for Maloney, and from here we launch into what is easily the most gratuitous part of the whole film ...

(20:54) Mind if I Intrude?
"And they like calling the cops out there at Cal Poly." That’s the transition we get between that last segment and this one, where the formerly disembodied voice of Evan Coyne Maloney suddenly comes to life on the campus of Cal Poly, as Maloney tries to have his little Michael Moore moment of going on campus and trying to stick it to those mean, meeeeeeeean people at Cal Poly. Just think of Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 9/11 when he stood on that street corner in Washington, D.C. and tried to talk lawmakers into sending their sons and daughter to fight in Iraq. Only, of course, this isn’t a street corner, and instead of trying to grab random people in the streets, Maloney clearly has his sights set on particular people he wishes to confront.

So Maloney -- clad in very casual attire, mind you -- starts walking around the hallways of some building on Cal Poly’s campus asking for an official who can comment on the Hinkle case. A receptionist tells Maloney he needs to go to Public Affairs, and gets him on the phone with someone presumably from that office. When Maloney speaks with this person, though, there are two very important things to note: first, he says he’s been trying for "a number of months" to get hold of someone at Cal Poly, which will become important as this segment progresses. More importantly, though, he mentions that he’s "working on a documentary film" and is looking for someone to comment on the Hinkle case, but he never, not even once says that he’s got a camera with him and he’s already commenced filming. So when the person on the other end of the line agrees to meet him in a lobby, this person has no clue that they’re about to be caught on camera. Real suave there, Maloney.

That person is Teresa Hendrix, who hands Maloney the University’s prepared statement on the Hinkle case. Maloney then has the gall to ask Hendrix to read the statement for the camera, as if he has the right to ask a simple Office Assistant (check on Cal Poly’s directory for Hendrix if you don’t believe me) to act as the official mouthpiece of the University in front of the camera. Anyway, Maloney points out that there’s no apology to Hinkle in the statement, and they put a couple of quotes from the letter on the screen, never showing or reading the full text of the statement. Hey, if Maloney can’t be bothered to read the statement for the camera himself, how can he expect anyone else to? (Maloney even voices over a bit of a hissy-fit about how Hendrix wouldn’t read the statement on-camera.) Anyway, Hendrix tells Maloney that he’s free to shoot video "anywhere on campus," which only raises my suspicion that Hendrix was caught off-guard and wasn’t in a position to be making these kinds of statements.

Maloney, of course, uses Hendrix’s statement to invite himself up to the office of Cal Poly’s president for an interview. He walks right through the door of the office, and we see him knocking on an interior door, apparently without having announced his (or his cameraperson’s) presence to anyone. (That could have been removed in a jump-cut, though.) An older-looking man emerges from the door and says hi, and asks the cameraperson to put the camera down. The cameraperson, of course, does not do so, and keeps right on filming. After the man leads Maloney outside the door to the office (and the cameraperson keeps filming inside the office), Maloney tries to shake the man’s hand. Finally the cameraperson leaves the office (as the man shuts the office door), but of course we’re still filming as Maloney asks the man if he has any comment about how California taxpayers had to pay $40,000 to Hinkle as a result of his whole case. Maloney’s obviously read the Sean Hannity Handbook of Framing Questions numerous times. After another jump cut, Maloney asks the question in the same way again (as opposed to earlier, when he "just wanted someone from the university to comment on the Steven Hinkle case"), and then says the "taxpayer money" was spent to "persecute one of [Cal Poly’s] students politically."

As the man tries to give Hinkle an answer, Maloney actually says, "All you need to do is make a comment: ‘This was wrong.’" So when Maloney doesn’t get an answer he likes, he tries to force words into this man’s mouth. The man says he can get a comment from an officer of the university but that he isn’t prepared to comment himself. (And quite honestly, between the tone Maloney takes with the man, and the cameraperson showing up unannounced in the president’s office, who would be prepared?) After a jump-cut (so we’re not entirely sure of what order all of this came in), the man asks a woman who passes by to call the Public Safety Office. This is what’s called "foreshadowing" in film-speak.

The man points out that Maloney doesn’t have an appointment to see anyone, and Maloney starts complaining about how he couldn’t get an appointment with anyone, despite trying for months. Remember when he made the "months" comment on the phone earlier? By repeating this, Maloney’s clearly trying to portray himself as the victim of bureaucracy here, playing to the experiences we’ve all had about getting the run-around. Hey, it stinks, I’ll admit it, but just because I may try to get someone to talk to me about something for months and not get anywhere, that doesn’t give me the right to bring a cameraperson to someone’s office and start asking anyone nearby loaded questions. I’ve even contacted Cal Poly myself to let them know about this Website and to give them an opportunity to tell their side of the story, but I haven’t heard back from them at all. Does that mean I should go borrow my father’s camera, take the next flight to the west coast and start drilling any Cal Poly administrators I can find for answers? Of course not.

Anyway, the man says that the president isn’t available for comment, to which Maloney replied that he saw the president while he was in the office "just sitting around." Not that we ever saw that, of course. Maloney could have said that the president was clubbing baby seals in his office, and we as watchers of Maloney’s edited film would have no way of disproving this claim. The man tells Maloney to speak to the Director of Public Affairs (officially completing the run-around), and before Maloney leaves he’s very insistent on shaking the man’s hand again, trying to give himself the illusion that he’s this super-nice guy when he was just asking some pretty nasty questions just a short time ago.

So after another quick montage of the encounter with the man, seeming to serve no other purpose than to let Maloney showcase how bad his sense of humour is (Voiceover: "That guy was pretty funny. He was like a character in a movie. I guess now he is a character in a movie!"), we’re reminded that, oh yeah, the guy asked someone to call the Public Safety Office. Maloney then says that someone surprised his cameraperson "from behind," but of course we go to a jump-cut of the thigh of someone, presumably a campus police officer, saying, "You need to leave or you’re going to go to jail." So we follow the camera out of the building, and then to what appears to be a conversation between Maloney and two cops about what Maloney’s doing there. I say "apparently" because a lot of the time we’re looking at two torsos and crotches adorned with belts with typical police gear on them. Either the cameraperson left the camera on but tried to make it look like it was off, or Maloney’s going for some sort of Freudian angle with this whole scene. Anyway, one of the cops tells Maloney that he and his cameraperson need to get off campus and, finally, that’s what happens.

But not before Maloney mentions that on the day he visited campus, Hinkle’s victory in the court case was announced. Given that Maloney already knew about the $40,000 figure given his questions to that one man, I guess that Maloney was expecting Cal Poly to have a fully-articulated response to a court decision that couldn’t have happened more than a few hours earlier in the day. And gee, given that the decision had just been handed down, do you think they could have been unnerved by having Maloney walking around campus with a camera asking such loaded questions to people?

Continue to Part III: Bucknell/Speech Codes