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Deep Deprogramming: The Baloney of Brainwashing 101
by Sean Shannon

Part III: Bucknell/Speech Codes (26:45-34:01)

(26:45) Spotlight: Greg Lukianoff
Going back out of the camera’s lens, Maloney tells us that things like the Hinkle case are "all in a day’s work" for people like Lukianoff. In fact, Lukianoff gets the lion’s share of the next two minutes of the film, sharing it only with Maloney’s voiceover. Anyway, Lukianoff starts talking about how students are being told they have fewer rights than they do, and that they’re being punished for "tame" forms of speech that are protected. He doesn’t go into any specifics here, but based on how Maloney has shown us only instances of conservative speech being censored on campus, viewers are being led to believe that only conservatives are oppressed at universities from coast to coast, and that is simply not the case; go back to Part I for evidence of liberals being held down on campus. Lukianoff then hypes up FIRE, saying they’ve been involved in hundreds of cases, helped thousands of students, made a bunch of converts, and so on and so on.

Maloney’s voiceover interjects in here again to tell us that a lot of the cases FIRE is involved in involve "speech codes," which Maloney defines as "obscure rules used by university administrators to punish students who express unpopular opinions." That’s a rather strong statement to make, especially when Maloney doesn’t really link the concept of a "speech code" to any of the cases he’s presented thus far. (Remember, Hinkle was ultimately prosecuted for disrupting a meeting, not for violation of any speech laws at Cal Poly.) What’s more interesting here, though, is that pages from speechcodes.org are displayed, and while the URL for the Website isn’t plugged the way FIRE’s was earlier, "speechcodes.org" appears in large print on the pages displayed, that it effectively serves to advertise the Website in much the same way as FIRE’s.

A quick trip to speechcodes.org yields at once both a great deal of information and no information at all. The one thing that jumps right out in front of you, though, is that speechcodes.org is run by the same people that run FIRE. These are not two separate entities; they are one and the same. Anyway, clicking on the United States map at the bottom of the speechcodes.org homepage leads to a list of colleges and universities in the state you clicked on, along with little coloured dots next to them; clicking on the name of a university leads to a page with a listing of documents from that university (mission statements, non-discrimination clauses and the like) with excerpts that supposedly work against free speech on some level, but no direct commentary on how the excerpts are somehow linked to the repression of free speech. Clicking on the "About the Issues" link on the left-hand column and scrolling to the bottom of the resulting page yields some general principles that FIRE thinks universities should adhere to, but how they specifically relate to the documents FIRE provides is never articulated to any degree.

For now, though, let’s return to the coloured dots next to each university on the state-by-state listings. At the top of the About the Issues page there’s an explanation of the dots, with the headings, "Red Light," "Green Light," and "Yellow Light." A school with a Red Light, we are told, has at least one policy that infringes on students’ rights to free speech. A school with a Green Light does not have any such policies, and a school with a Yellow Light has a policy that could go either way. However, those aren’t all the lights; there are also schools that have a "Black Light," and these dots are only explained in a trailing paragraph without a header bellow the Yellow Light description. Schools with Black Lights are private schools that, in FIRE’s estimation, state that they hold some values above free speech, and as such FIRE does not assign them any of the other lights. Not surprisingly, Black Lights seem to be given only to Christian universities, so while speechcodes.org excoriates places like Berkeley and my beloved Antioch, Brigham Young University and the University of Notre Dame both get a free pass. Bob Jones University isn’t even listed on the site.

What’s ironic about this is that at the top of this page, there’s this whole discussion about public versus private schools, in which speechcodes.org claims that while private schools are not required to uphold the First Amendment, they claim to hold the principle of free speech as much as public schools, and so they should be held to the same standards, and that if they don’t "deliver what they promise," they should be held accountable for committing fraud. The "About speechcodes.org" page claims that FIRE will eventually begin filing fraud cases against such private universities. Given what is said later about Black Light schools, it seems safe to say that none of these challenges will go to religious schools. The question that then arises this: Why should religious universities (and in the context of the United States this essentially means Christian universities) be privileged in terms of restricting speech on their campuses? Why should Antioch’s stated commitment to liberal ideals be considered less valid than a Christian university’s commitment to enforce conservative Christian ideology in every aspect of its existence?

To get back to Lukianoff, he gives his own definition of speech codes (which isn’t materially different from what’s been discussed here earlier), and calls them a "scandal." Maloney then says that a recent FIRE survey showed that 89% of the universities they sampled had some kind of speech code, although strangely that survey is available neither on FIRE’s Website or on speechcodes.org. Maloney then pulls about four specific examples of speech codes from the top of the "About speechcodes.org" page and reads them aloud as they’re displayed on the screen. Lukianoff then goes on about how when Christians or conservatives are harassed on campus, these speech codes aren’t enforced, subtly implying that there’s a double standard on campus but without backing his claim up with a single specific case.

Looking more closely at the "About speechcodes.org" page, though, it’s clear that FIRE isn’t so much interested in the here and now as it is in taking things to the utmost extreme, saying that these laws foster a deep sense of self-censorship (oh, you mean forcing people to think about what they say before they say it?), and that this will eventually lead to the government "demand[ing] moral conformity" in its citizens. I’d really like to hear someone from FIRE, in light of that comment, then explain why GLBT people are denied so many civil rights, and why the governments of forty-nine states sanction only a form of marriage proscribed by a handful or religions. (Even more audaciously, the same paragraph concludes, " A nation that does not educate in freedom will not survive in freedom, and will not even know when it has lost it." I’ve got two words for you: PATRIOT Act.)

What Maloney, and FIRE, fail to see is that the issue of free speech is not as clear-cut and simple as they’d like it to be. The fact is that in this country, if you’re a man and you tell your female boss that she has "nice knockers," you’re going to be in pretty deep doo-doo. You’d probably be looking at demotion at best, and you’d more than likely be fired. Many states even have sexual harassment laws that would result in you being sued for damages. I’m sure plenty of conservatives would like to argue that the whole concept of sexual harassment is a load of bunk and everyone should just "let boys be boys," but in the real world saying something sexist, or racist, or homophobic, is a good way to get yourself in a heap of real trouble. Let’s not even touch issues of libel and slander here, because if we do we’ll be here forever. Should not our colleges, then, be obligated to instruct their students in these realities? Say what you will about being forced to take diversity training, but it’s a lot better than being fired from a job.

At this point Lukianoff goes on this whole tangent saying stuff like, "Oh, I’m a liberal, and most of the people who work with FIRE are liberal, and only people who don’t really know much about FIRE would claim we’re conservative." This doesn’t do much to explain why I’ve only found conservative Websites linking to FIRE’s. In fact, the only time I’ve found someone describing FIRE as a liberal group is in a review of Brainwashing 101 on Ain’t It Cool News by a "Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr" which also includes a claim that "neo anti-Semitics have pitched their tent in the Democrat’s camp" and advocates the murder of Michael Moore. All things being equal, those tend to make me place zero value on the review, although a quote from the review was plastered at the top of the academicbias.com homepage the last time I checked it.

Anyway, Lukianoff keeps going on about how the kind of speech that FIRE sees as being targeted on our campuses is stuff that no liberal would want to see censored in "the larger society." Lukianoff then tries to get away with yet another extreme example here, saying that an affirmative action rally at Berkeley would never be shut down. As if, say, a pro-Federal Marriage Amendment rally at Notre Dame would be any less likely to be stopped. Everything I see about Lukianoff makes me want to believe that he is a very smart man who should know better than to keep engaging in the rhetorical fallacy of taking everything to extremes -- one of the hallmarks of current conservative debating strategy (remember all the arguments about how if we let same-sex couples marry, soon we’ll have to legalize interspecies marriage?) -- yet he keeps doing so, and to me that weakens both his argument and the position he argues from.

(29:03) Return to Bucknell
Even if we ignore the weaknesses in how Lukianoff constructs his argument in the previous bit, if Maloney had been able to come forward here with an example of how the speech codes at one college had been used to silence conservative speech while liberal speech was allowed to permeate the campus, then it would lend Lukianoff and Maloney at least a modicum or credibility. Of course, that’s not what happens: instead, we get this whole thing about conservatives talking about speech codes. And, not surprisingly, it’s at Bucknell.

We start with Professor Schneider, Charles Mitchell, and Denise Chaykun (the latter two finally identified in this segment as members of the Bucknell University Conservatives Club) giving their takes on Bucknell’s speech code. Professor Schneider talks about how universities are trying to make sure that speech on campus that would intimidate another student into not speaking is something that universities cannot tolerate. In a very odd moment, Maloney inserts himself on-screen to ask Professor Schneider how "harassment" is defined at Bucknell, to which Professor Schneider replies that anything that is offencive is, by definition, harassment. I mention this as odd because one, apart from the hijinks at Cal Poly (and the opening driving sequence), Maloney stays off-camera throughout the movie; and two, I can’t quite tell because of the somewhat low quality of the MPEG, but it seems like the lighting changes between the shot of Maloney and the shots of Professor Schneider that sandwich it. I can’t explain this, but it definitely throws me off when I’m watching.

Not surprisingly, the conservative students at Bucknell have different takes on the matter. Chaykun says that speech codes mean "you can’t annoy someone." Mitchell goes far beyond that by saying that at Bucknell the speech code is enforced on a "selective" and "partisan" basis, but of course offers up no evidence to support his claim. A new student enters the film at this point, Lina Nandy from Bucknell College Democrats (the "Token Democrat"), to say, "You never know what’s going to be offencive." Mitchell follows up on this by saying that a hundred years ago it was offencive to say that Euro-Americans and African-Americans were the same. (Which explains why slavery was outlawed nearly forty years before then.) I’d like to know what this has to do with anything, except for the fact that it’s conservatives like him who are trying to silence people like me who are saying that same-sex couples deserve the same rights, benefits, and institutions as heterosexual couples. Chaykun then talks about how people are getting paranoid about what they say, and really at this point it couldn’t become more clear that Maloney is playing on gender stereotypes here, portraying Chaykun as the "little harmless girl who’s always getting picked on" by those nasty, nasty liberals. I’m sorry, but stuff like that turns my stomach. Nandy closes this bit up by talking about how how people hesitate when speaking on campus, and wonder if there could be problems after they’ve said something. Gee, getting people to think before they speak; how dare our universities teach students to do that!

We veer off on another tangent here as everyone starts talking about how judicial matters are handled at Bucknell. Professor Schneider and Mitchell go over the specifics which are pretty cut and dry, except when Mitchell says that accused parties are not allowed to have lawyers present at the hearing. Again, as with the Cal Poly case, I do think that not allowing lawyers at these kinds of hearings is wrong, but unless only conservative students aren’t allowed to have lawyers present I don’t see how this fact would relate to the case Maloney is trying to make in this film.

Of course, we veer right into the political here, as Professor Schneider says how students (presumably those convicted of something) are required to undergo sensitivity training. Maloney doesn’t place this quote in any context (as in, students convicted of what are compelled into sensitivity training), but of course uttering the word "sensitivity" to a conservative, let alone suggesting that people should actually have some sensitivity, is a sure-fire way to raise the dander of any hard-right conservative; Maloney’s plainly playing to his target audience here. Mitchell mentions that he himself has been brought up before Bucknell’s judiciary on charges levied by Bucknell’s Dean of Students, although he doesn’t mention just what those charges were. (I think it’s safe to assume that it was speech code related, though.)

(30:36) Speech Codes at Bucknell
We finally get to the heart of this segment of the film here, as Bucknell’s speech codes and its conservatives collide. We open with Nandy stating that people at Bucknell can’t speak out about the speech codes, and says that Bucknell has "essentially instituted a gag rule" about discussing the codes. If that’s the case, then we have cinematic proof before us of three Bucknell students and one Bucknell professor breaking that so-called gag rule, and I thought for sure that we’d have heard by now of all four of them being brought up on charges. Huh. Well, I’m sure FIRE will have something about it on their Website soon.

The centre of all of this is an edition of The Counterweight, the Bucknell University Conservatives Club’s newsletter. (Current and past editions of The Counterweight are available from the Bucknell University Conservatives Club’s Website.) According to Mitchell, an edition of The Counterweight having to do with Bucknell’s speech code (with Eminem on the cover, fittingly enough) caused a problem. Nandy says that Bucknell’s Dean of Students convened a meeting where he invited " the preeminent liberal groups," to which Mitchell adds it was a "secret meeting" and that he and Chaykun were "threatened." Chaykun says that at the meeting various deans and university administrations were yelling at them (presumably the conservative students at the meeting) and that the other students were "angry."

Mitchell and Chaykun get into specifics here, with Mitchell claiming a student threatened to punch him in the face, and Chaykun saying that people were picking on her because of her voice; Maloney plays a really long clip from Chaykun about this, just in case we don’t get it that Denise Chaykun is just this sweet little girl and those mean liberals shouldn’t pick on her and victimize her. Of course I can’t condone threats or name-calling, but I wonder if Maloney or Mitchell or Chaykun would like to follow me around UT’s campus one day and see all the shit I deal with being an openly transgender student, both overtly and behind my back. (When they think I can’t listen.) Whether it’s a liberal student or a conservative student being picked on or threatened, it’s wrong, but it happens; trust me, this kind of infantile behaviour is not confined to either political ideology.

Maloney then asks Mitchell to relate details of an administrator who allegedly threatened him and was still at Bucknell. Mitchell says the administrator said, "[He] was lucky that the other students there were such good kids, or else [he] could have gotten hurt." Unless you flash back to that reference to The Sopranos earlier in the film and really think that the liberals at Bucknell act like some kind of mafia, I don’t see how this administrator’s statement could be directly interpreted as a threat. Nandy chimes in to say that the administrator was "wildly inappropriate" to say something like that.

Finally Mitchell tells us that a Dean Ferraro (Mitchell doesn’t name him as a Dean but Nandy does later) asked him at this meeting if he would publish the same articles on Bucknell’s speech code in The Counterweight again, and Mitchell said he would. After a clip from Nandy saying that Dean Ferraro was "incensed" is cut in (without context, so we don’t know if Dean Ferraro became "incensed" specifically because of Mitchell’s reply), Mitchell says he and the other conservative students were asked to leave, and that Dean Ferraro threatened to call the cops when they didn’t leave right away. Nandy says that Dean Ferraro "clearly" showed that he wasn’t acting "impartial."

Okay, I think it’s time for a little reality check here, as Professor Schneider’s background on this specific incident will enlighten everyone as to the other side of the matter, the side that Maloney clearly has no interest in showing. According to Professor Schneider, the issue of The Counterweight in question offended several students because of its defence of racist speech. The meeting referred to was convened to help students who felt that they were offended deal with their feelings; it was not intended as some sort of "let’s get the conservatives" to-do. The conservative students weren’t invited to this meeting, as well they shouldn’t have been, given that it would be harder for students to come to grips with their emotions with their accusers present; to say otherwise would be like saying a woman who has been raped shouldn’t be able to talk to a counselor without her rapist present. Nevertheless, the conservative students showed up and tried to change the focus of the meeting, and refused to leave when they were asked to do so. Between this and the Hinkle incident, I think Maloney’s trying to insinuate that students have a right to crash any student meeting they so desire. I guess that means that I can go to the next Campus Crusade for Christ meeting at UT and demand that everyone in attendance stop whatever they’re doing and listen to me stump on about how GLBT people deserve the same rights and respect as heterosexuals, and if anyone tries to get me to leave then they’ll be in the wrong.

Anyway, getting back to the film, Mitchell says that right after this incident he had to go through some sort of trial, and that he doesn’t think that this was a coincidence, seeming to insinuate that the charges he was brought up on had nothing to do with the meeting he interrupted. He doesn’t mention what the charges were or who brought them up, so we have pretty much no basis on which to judge whether or not the charges were politically motivated, but Mitchell does mention that the proceedings "went on for months" and that he was "resoundingly acquitted." Oh, and Mitchell adds that FIRE wrote a letter in his defence. Oh, and Mitchell neglects to add that he was an intern for FIRE. (Scroll down about a fifth of the way down the page, or just do a search on "Charles Mitchell" in the document itself. You’ll also find a link to an article Mitchell wrote for the Washington Times later on in the page.)

We close with Chaykun talking about how "bad things" have happened at Bucknell and the school allegedly ignored them. We get a photo of the words "DIE BUCC" chalked outside Bucknell’s Student Union, and Mitchell says nothing was done about it. Chaykun and Mitchell mention that the secretary of the Bucknell University Conservatives Club had a poster on her door defaced with the words "Nazi Party," and Mitchell says that swastikas have been drawn on a lot of the Club’s fliers. You know, Spectrum has a folder full of our fliers that have had nasty things written across them; remind me to scan some of them to put up here at a future date. Oh, and UT never did anything substantive about them. Defacing property is wrong regardless of your political beliefs, okay?

We leave Bucknell with Mitchell and Chaykun describing how a Bucknell student of Asian descent felt that s/he (Mitchell can’t even remember) was being tailed in his/her car and the next day Bucknell put out a campus-wide e-mail warning students to watch out for such activity. Mitchell says that he hopes the student wasn’t being tailed because of his/her ethnicity, but of course he acts like Bucknell acted with all due haste in this matter because it involved a non-Caucasian feeling threatened, but Bucknell wouldn’t take the defacing of property with anti-Bucknell University Conservatives Club slogans as seriously because of some sort of bias. Chaykun and Mitchell try to portray this campus-wide e-mail as being some sort of big move on Bucknell’s part, when anyone who has actually used a university e-mail system knows that it probably took no longer than twenty minutes to write and send an all-campus e-mail. And I agree with Chaykun that Bucknell should send an all-campus e-mail to its students warning them about defacing posters on campus; I only ask that Bucknell sends the same e-mail to everyone at UT as well.

Continue to Part IV: Tennessee/Double Standards