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Deep Deprogramming: The Baloney of Brainwashing 101
by Sean Shannon

Part IV: Tennessee/Double Standards (34:02-46:20)

(34:02) Dumb, Dumb, Dumb
We’re finally at the last major segment of the film, and it’s here where Maloney makes the most convincing of his attempts to show a double standard when it comes to universities enforcing their rules on liberal and conservative students. Unfortunately, once again Maloney doesn’t provide enough information to allow viewers to make a fully informed judgment on the facts and opinions he presents, and to make matters worse he really engages in a couple of cinematic moments of pique here that really make it hard for me to take him and his arguments seriously.

The campus Maloney targets for this segment is the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, and before beginning on the analysis of this segment it should be worth noting that in previous segments Maloney at least tried to present at least a pretense of giving people opposed to his conclusions equal time to respond; Bucknell had Professor Schneider (and to a different degree Lina Nandy), and Cal Poly had the nameless university official Maloney pinned down in the Office of the President. (Who really didn’t say anything in direct defence of Cal Poly’s side in the Hinkle case, but at least he provided a "face" for Cal Poly administration.) Maloney not only provides no face for any potential opposition at Tennessee, but he also tries to get away with the same trick he uses in the opening of the film, putting students with political affiliations on tape and labeling them as "[Name of University] Student" without disclosing their affiliations to conservative campus groups, trying to pass them off as "normal everyday students." Looking up information on these students, though, isn’t too difficult, and I might as well save you the not-so-hard work.

So after an opening voiceover by Maloney warning people at Tennessee to be careful about their choices of Halloween costume, Adrienne Royer (former Director of Communications, University of Tennessee College Republicans) sets the scene of some time before Halloween, with "everyone" dressed up in costumes for some kind of party. John Brown (Vice President, University of Tennessee College Republicans) explains that five members of a fraternity (Kappa Sigma) decided to go as the Jackson Five. Royer explains that they’re five guys from Jackson, Tennessee -- hence the name -- plus they were already known by the "Jackson Five" nickname on campus. Erich Mecherle says little of note, and then Chris Lewis finally lets us know the big deal: these frat guys decided to make blackface part of their costumes.

Now, Maloney can’t even help but say later that choosing to don blackface was a "poor choice," and he quotes other "students" basically saying that this was just a stupid move on the part of these frat guys. I mean, when even the Friars Club has to apologize for Ted Danson doing a blackface bit at one of its roasts, you know that the whole blackface thing is just one of those things that is far beyond the pale, on the same level as the n-word as something you just don’t touch. Can anyone -- Maloney, the conservative students at Tennessee, the frat guys -- blame people for being offended by such a display? Still, Maloney has the temerity to include Mecherle in here saying, "I don’t think they were doing anything to, you know, degrade black people."

Of course, actions have consequences, as Brown says that the Monday after the party the frat boys were reprimanded, and Royer says the University "suspended the entire fraternity." Hearing this, one could easily think that every member of the fraternity was individually suspended from classes or even being on campus, but the reality was far gentler: the fraternity merely lost its status as a registered student organization at Tennessee, prohibiting it from participating in stuff like Homecoming events. Oh, and the suspension wasn’t a direct action by the university, either; it was the result of the national office of Kappa Sigma suspending the fraternity themselves. (Source: Public statement, University of Tennessee Vice President and Provost Loren W. Crabtree, 2002.11.01)

The dissembling starts up right away, though, as Lewis says that the party the frat boys attended wasn’t on campus, trying to create an illusion that the university was trying to ban off-campus behaviour. Of course, no one mentions that the frat boys were walking around on campus in blackface. (Source: Knoxville News-Sentinel (article archived online by FIRE), "UT Frat Suspended Over Incident: Complaints about blackface episode bring action", 2002.10.31) Brown said the matter was dealt with by Tennessee administration "pretty harshly," and Mecherle has the gall to say that if three African-Americans had dressed up as the Bee Gees no one would have minded, totally ignoring that "whiteface" does not have anything even remotely resembling the historical baggage that blackface does.

We then come to another of those wholly awkward moments in the film, where Maloney airs parts of the trailer from the recent movie White Chicks, in which two African-American police officers (two of the Wayans brothers) go undercover as Caucasian females. I have no idea why Maloney would insert scenes from that movie here, as it bears no logical relation to anything that’s come before. Like the references to The Sopranos earlier in the film, it seems to be a pop culture reference inserted simply for the purpose of trying to up the film’s "cool" factor. Maloney adds a voiceover implying that the administration at Tennessee has "no sense of humour," even though he subtly acknowledges earlier that the frat boys wearing blackface was wrong.

The pop culture references then extend as a University of Tennessee professor, Glenn Reynolds, says that left-wing college administrators are the "Dean Wormers of the 21st century," referencing, of course, Animal House. In the chyron for this short clip, however, Maloney only identifies Reynolds as being a "University of Tennessee Professor." Maloney neglects to mention that Reynolds is the man behind Instapundit, the ravenous right-wing blog recently voted best blog by rightwingnews.com. As with the selection of students in this section, Maloney leaves out important details of the people he interviews, trying to pass them off as having no vested ideological interest in the proceedings when reality is quite far from that.

Anyway, this bit closes with Maloney putting a newspaper headline about Kappa Sigma’s suspension and a quote from the statement by Provost Crabtree, and does a voiceover about the suspension being a "pretty harsh" punishment. Maloney never mentions that all the fraternities and sororities at Tennessee took part in a workshop to address a similar issue that happened at another university, so Kappa Sigma should have known better. (Source: Knoxville News-Sentinel (article archived online by FIRE), "UT Frat Suspended Over Incident: Complaints about blackface episode bring action", 2002.10.31) This was something the fraternity had been previously warned about, not an "oopsie" moment, and if the fraternity disregarded the warnings from the workshop and went ahead with such an offensive display anyway, I’d say the punishment they received was just.

(35:44) Those Horrible Committees
From the previous segment, Maloney segues to an image of a man with a long beard wearing a turban -- Tennessee student Sukhmani Singh Khalsa -- and Maloney’s voiceover explaining that through e-mail Khalsa had been called a "raghead terrorist" and suggestions had been made that he should be shot in the face. Mecherle, Brown, and another student (later identified as Bethany Stover, though never identified as Vols for Bush Chair, University of Tennessee College Republicans) all say that nothing was done. Through voiceover and quotes from Tennessee administrators, Maloney makes the obvious link between what happened to Kappa Sigma and what happened involving Khalsa.

Stover explains that Khalsa is an "outspoken conservative" and that he writes a lot for the campus paper, but of course Khalsa elaborates by saying that he writes "in defence of the United States" and states his opinion that America is criticized more on campuses than anywhere else in American culture. Remember what Maloney said earlier about colleges fostering critical thinking? Wouldn’t it then follow that in order to learn more about America, students and professors need to be critical of America? Or, as many conservatives would argue, is America (or at least their narrow-minded fundamentalist view of America) beyond criticism for some unarticulated reason? Brown says that "they," whoever they are, aren’t "sympathetic" to Khalsa because of his ideology.

Mecherle comes right out and says that he thinks Tennessee administrators did nothing to punish the person/people who went after Khalsa because he’s a conservative. Stover reiterates this belief, and Khalsa says that the administration at Tennessee selectively enforces hate speech laws depending on who was the victim of a given instance of hate speech.

Before going any further with the critique, though, we do need to take a step back here. Anyone watching the film must have been unnerved by the word "raghead" when Maloney first uttered it, and for good reason. As much as some people on the left-wing might not like to admit it, conservatives do not have a monopoly on stupidity. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve met at UT who have claimed to be full supporters of the GLBT community, then turn around and two or three sentences say something like, "Man, that’s so gay." Whoever referred to Khalsa as a raghead and a terrorist clearly needs some diversity training, stat, and anyone who makes a death threat to another student -- especially after what happened in Columbine -- needs at the least some serious counseling, and likely a great deal of disciplinary action. Anyone who is smart enough to get into college should know that you just don’t do that kind of crap.

Anyway, Maloney finally gives us some background information on this case. In an editorial for Tennessee’s student newspaper, The Daily Beacon, Khalsa was critical of the university’s Issues Committee, which arranges to bring speakers to campus. (Presumably on a campus-wide basis; I doubt that individual student organizations at Tennessee are prohibited from bringing speakers to campus with their own funds.) Lewis says that the people on the Committee usually lean to the "far left." Khalsa, as always, one-ups Lewis by talking about how parents are likely unaware that "their" money that they pay to Tennessee (what about all the students paying their own way through loans and such?) is going to bring in speakers who say "the United States is the equivalent of the Nazi Party. Literally." Of course, Khalsa fails to mention any speaker who actually said anything resembling that remark, but hey, anyone who dares to question the greatness of America must hate it and want to destroy the country, right?

Just for fun, I went to the Issues Committee’s Website to see what kind of far-left talking heads they were bringing in to teach the students about the horrors of capitalism, and the evils of the Bush Administration, and why Osama bin Ladin is the greatest hero of our time? Just as one snapshot, here’s some of the people the Issues Committee recently brought to Tennessee’s campus:

• Daniel Flynn, author of Why the Left Hates America: Exposing the Lies that have Obscured our Nation’s Greatness
• Tucker Carlson, conservative talking head and Crossfire’s "From the Right"
• Victor Davis Hanson, National Review columnist
• Drew Pinksy, Loveline co-host
• Robert Stutman, former DEA official

Of course there were some liberals in there (Steve Hager of High Times fame and journalist Sy Hersh for a couple), but on the whole the list of speakers seems fairly balanced, and if anything seems to be taking a very strong right-wing tilt lately. But who am I to let facts like these get in the way of Maloney’s argument? Back to the film.

Mecherle says the Issues Committee gets an "insane" amount of money that Khalsa approximates at $100,000. Lewis mentions how they get all of this money from the students – from student activities fees, which would also go towards the budgets of student groups like, say, the College Republicans -- and pretty much all the students here talk about how the people already on the Issues Committee decide on who future members will be, so if the Committee has a liberal slant now, it will likely have a liberal slant in the future, and Tennessee graduates from decades ago voiced the same complaints. There are a couple of big holes in this argument: one, we aren’t given any information on the political makeup of Tennessee’s students, so if students there are mostly liberal, it would only be logical that the makeup of the committee would lean that way. Secondly, groups and committees such as these almost always determine future members through consensus of the current members. Are the students are/or Maloney actually suggesting here that all of these things should be open to popular vote of the students, and if so, would the members of the College Republicans be willing to open their own leadership positions up to such a vote?

So Khalsa writes an editorial critical of the alleged liberal bias of the Issues Committee, as Mecherle reminds us, and Lewis and Stover get into how Khalsa was the first to do something like this and the Issues Committee was kind of caught off-guard. Brown says that Khalsa was probably pretty "unpopular" with Tennessee administrators because of the editorial, and at this point we manage to launch into what is possibly the absolute worst segment of the film, as Maloney takes an old educational short film from the 1940s entitled Are You Popular? and proceeds to overdub it in one of the worst attempts at comedy I have ever seen. Maloney tries to play on another pop culture reference here by playing on these old films (think of the shorts before the movies on Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and even the recent Flash animation "Posting and You", but instead of being subtle with his message -- the key to any good political humour -- Maloney tries to beat viewers over the head with it with lines such as, "Otherwise he’d know that only stupid people are conservative." On top of that, there are three big signs of sloppy filmmaking here:

• During the dialogue sequence, Maloney clearly loops clips of the speakers forwards and backwards instead of using longer shots or cut-shots.
• The final chyron, "Conformity: The key to popularity" has a clearly digital "old film" motion attached to it which doesn’t even come close to lining up to the motion of the film itself.
• And most annoying of all, Maloney is obviously speaking both roles in the dialogue and makes seemingly no effort to try to use two different voices. Seriously, would it have been that much trouble to get someone else from On The Fence Films, or one of their family members, to do one (or the other) of the voices? Not only would it have made the piece somewhat less lame, but it would give someone other than Maloney a bit of the spotlight, and an easy credit at the end of the film.

(39:12) The Threat
Ahem, so we go back to Mecherle who explains that a friend of Khalsa’s, another conservative (Mecherle says the "token conservative"), was on the Issues Committee for a while but left because he felt like he couldn’t get things done. Lewis then identifies himself as that friend. Both mention that Lewis was left on the e-mail list for the Issues Committee, and kept getting the e-mails that went through the list. This included the e-mails that started going around after Khalsa’s article was published. Royer, Mecherle, and Lewis all mention that the responses to Khalsa’s article on the e-mail list were profane and insulted Khalsa’s religion, but of course we immediately turn to the clincher, as Lewis quotes one of the e-mails as saying, "The next time you see one of these ragheads, shoot ‘em right in the fucking face." Lewis follows this up, however, by saying that the whole Issues Committee wanted to go after Khalsa, and by putting these two quotes next to each other there’s an implication that the whole Issues Committee wanted to physically assault Khalsa, which is more than likely a huge overstatement. There was a cut between the two statements, though, so maybe Lewis didn’t say those things so close to each other and Maloney is just engaging in some creative editing to make that implication.

Anyway, Royer then mentions how hard it must be for Khalsa because he wears a turban and has a long beard, and people must automatically assume that he has certain views. Mecherle adds that people must mistakenly think Khalsa’s a Muslim and that they don’t know much about Sikhs. Um, so all Muslims are supposed to be liberals? Well, that’s wrong, because Muslims, just like Christians and Jews and members of all the religions out there, come in all political stripes, from far-left to far-right. By launching into this polemic about how other people have stereotypes of people based on their physical appearance, Royer and Mecherle clearly show their own stereotypes, and they make it hard for me to take their opinions seriously when they engage in dumb stuff like this. Royer follows this up by saying that Khalsa’s background would have been celebrated on campus if he weren’t a conservative, but that the University chose to target him because of his political views, and of course she offers no evidence to support this claim.

We go back to Lewis here, and he says that he felt he needed to show Khalsa what had been going on in the Issues Committee e-mail list, and we go to Khalsa as he uses the phrase, "Stuff that would put the Spanish Inquisition to shame," but Maloney cuts off the earlier part of the sentence so we have no idea of how that sentence was used; was it a direct quote from one of the Issues Committee e-mails, a description by Lewis of the things contained in the e-mails, or something else? Khalsa then repeats the "shoot ‘em in the face" line, as that was clearly the most intimidating of the e-mails he received.

We then go to Professor Michael Fitzgerald (Faculty Advisor, University of Tennessee College Republicans, again not identified by Maloney as such), who says he told Khalsa to take the threat seriously, and to take the matter to the Dean of Students as suggested in Tennessee’s student handbook. Fitzgerald invokes Columbine when he adds that he thought Khalsa was right to take the e-mail as a direct threat against him. Royer then adds that the faculty advisor of the Issues Committee hadn’t done anything to stop the anti-Khalsa e-mails from going out on the e-mail list, and Mecherle tacks on that the advisor later issued a statement that the student who sent the threat was "upset" and that everyone’s said stupid things. Professor Fitzgerald mentions the obvious about how in a post-Columbine world all these things need to be taken seriously.

First off, let me say that I can’t condone in any way someone using racial slurs or saying the kind of statements about shooting people that this (unnamed) student said. However, as far as Tennessee’s involvement with this case goes, I have a bit of personal experience that I believe I need to share here. About a couple of years, someone at UT (Toledo, not Tennessee) went online and threatened to take a hammer to my face. Of course I took the threat seriously and went to UT’s student judiciary in the hopes of getting something done about it. However, I was informed that because the threat did not technically take place on campus -- even though I first read the threat on a UT computer -- UT couldn’t do anything about it. The law is still catching up with how to handle cyberspace stuff, sad to say, and perhaps Tennessee was caught it the same situation. I have to ask, however, if Tennessee wouldn’t do anything about the threats made against Khalsa, why didn’t he go to Knoxville police? Even if they technically couldn’t have taken any action against the student who made the threat, they could at least gone to the student’s apartment/dorm room and put some real fear into him/her. (That would have been the next step in my own situation, if it weren’t for the fact that things got resolved before they got to that point.)

Getting back to the film here, Maloney, ever the one to use leading questions, then "asks" Khalsa if it’s okay to issue death threats against conservatives on Tennessee’s campus, and Khalsa replies, "I guess." After a brief clip from a Tennessee promotional video, Maloney goes back to voiceover, saying that at first Tennessee allegedly ignored the threat against Khalsa, but that they had a different reaction when students started collecting signatures to protest how Tennessee was handling things. Stover talks about how she saw the university wasn’t likely to do anything about the Khalsa situation, and Royer talks about how the petition drive was started. Lewis then says that a member of the administration called the campus police on the petitioners and told the police to take the names of the people staffing the petition table and then to get them to disperse. Royer and Stover talk about the police coming, but nobody ever bothers to mention if the table was set up per Tennessee’s guidelines. On most college campuses you can’t just set up a table for something wherever you want; you need to get permission to use the campus’ facilities, and if Royer and Stover and whoever else was behind the petition drive had the proper paperwork filled out, you’d think that they’d mention that.

Lewis then says that a professor at Tennessee that he considered a friend and mentor came to him and said that "word had come down" that Lewis needed to stop the petition drive or else his standing at Tennessee, both within the Political Science department and as a student, would be threatened. Khalsa added that the faculty advisor for the Issues Committee posted a comment in the school paper saying that she was sorry that the e-mails became public, not that the threat was made. Finally, we learn from Lewis that the Dean of Students at Tennessee did have a meeting with the student who made the threat, but that it was felt that the student didn’t substantially violate the university’s bylaws. Professor Fitzgerald of course implies hypocrisy from an alleged left-wing administration at Tennessee, but says he’s more concerned with the threat of violence made against Khalsa.

We conclude with Maloney confirming with Lewis that the student who made the threat never received any punishment for his actions (or at least any formal disciplinary action), and of course Royer and Brown tie this back to the Kappa Sigma example earlier and try to imply a double standard. Lewis is much less subtle and uses the phrase "double standard" himself in his comment on the whole mess. Khalsa directly says there is a double standard at Tennessee, but not before saying (as if we needed to be told) that he doesn’t believe in political correctness or speech codes. Maloney asks Khalsa if this experience at Tennessee changed his opinion of the university, and predictably Khalsa says it confirmed his earlier opinion, and after a brief interjection from Stover we get Khalsa making one last claim about the university being a "dogmatic leftist institution."

(44:39) Maloney’s Thrilling Conclusion ... or, in its Absence, Mine
So after nearly forty-five minutes of the film, we get to the end and you’d think that Maloney would come up with this huge conclusion tying together the three episodes he’s shown and trying to come up with at least some sort of conclusion, however erroneous it might be, about political expression on college campuses. Instead, we just fade to black from Khalsa’s last statement and get a nearly two-minute credit sequence using Maloney’s music and this weird background effect that really doesn’t translate well to video compression. The credits promise "Classes Begin 2005," and they even try to get cutesy by including the following statement in the credits: "No university administrators were harmed during the production of this film." (Actually, if you look carefully the end of this statement flashes on the screen briefly as the message about academicbias.com flashes out; was this an error on the part of Maloney’s video editing software?) Maybe Maloney and company rushed to get the film done for the American Film Renaissance Festival and didn’t have the time to think up and tack on a conclusion; I can’t claim that with any degree of certainty, though.

I, however, do have a conclusion to make. First of all, we need to take a close look at Maloney’s claim and whether or not he has successfully made it. The best way to boil down what is trying to get at in Brainwashing 101 is that there is a definite, measurable bias on American college and university campuses in favour of liberals and against conservatives. However, Maloney can’t even get this right. He provides three examples of what he believes to be conservatives being oppressed on campus. Even if we agree that in all the cases Maloney has proven his case, he has still not proven bias. If all anyone were able to find were examples of conservatives being oppressed, then that would be a different story, but when someone can point to just as many cases of liberals being oppressed on campus (just look up the reports on collegefreedom.org referenced in Part I of this article), then bias has not been proven by any stretch.

If anyone wants to find bias, however, one needs only look as far as Maloney’s own rendering of this film. Maloney takes a look at three universities where he believes liberal administrators/faculty/students have targeted conservative students, and how many people does he have provide any sort of rebuttal to the charges made by the conservative students? Professor Schneider at Bucknell is the only person given any substantial camera time to defend liberal thought, and even at that his interview is so heavily edited that much of the meaning of what he says is stripped out of the film. The administrators Maloney runs into at Cal Poly never even get a chance to identify their political beliefs, and seem to serve mostly as on-camera bogeymen for Maloney’s conservative audience to boo at. No one from the other side of the Khalsa incident at Tennessee is given a chance to respond. Worse yet, several times during the film Maloney identifies interviewees as simply a "student" or "professor" of wherever they attend and hides the fact that he is interviewing members of the university’s right-wing student organizations, creating the false impression that they are just "everyday people" troubled by the alleged deep liberal bias in the universities.

Finally, if you’ll remember back to the beginning of the film, Maloney bemoaned in a voiceover how our universities were once a place where students were trained to engage in critical thinking. Yet Brainwashing 101 is a prime example of how conservatives don’t want people to think critically. Not only does the film present a grossly one-sided and nonobjective view of what is happening on university campuses across the country, and not only does it fail to disclose the political biases of many of the people interviewed, but it also actively plays off of conservative rhetoric. The film laments that radical liberal professors actively try to squelch conservative ideas in their classes (without ever citing a single example), but plays on right-wing red scare tactics to imply that Marxist ideas are wholly inappropriate for discussion in American classrooms. Much is made of so-called "speech codes" to bring back memories of Dinesh D’Souza’s writings on college campuses and political correctness in the early 1990s. And on multiple occasions, we are led to believe that conservatives have a right to interrupt any meeting they choose to in order to make others listen to their opinions. Critical thinking means exposing people to all the sides of an issue, and not only does Brainwashing 101 only allow one side of its subject matter a real opportunity to speak and be understood, but through its frequent use of conservative tropes the film encourages its target right-wing audience to assume that everything they’ve been told about American universities being havens for radical liberal thought is correct.

Let us be clear on one point: certainly there are cases at American campuses and universities where conservative students and faculty have been targeted by other students or faculty or administration based solely on their political beliefs, and these cannot be condoned by any well-intentioned person. However, liberal students and faculty have also been victimized by conservative students and faculty and administrators, a fact which Maloney never addresses in his film. Until such time as anyone can produce substantive evidence to the contrary, there is no provable "liberal bias" in American universities as a whole. If Maloney and the other people behind Brainwashing 101 want to open an honest dialogue about the suppression of speech of all political bents on our campuses, I’m sure that many people would like to contribute to that debate. As it is, however, Brainwashing 101 fails to rise above the level of rank conservative propaganda, and it seems unlikely to me that Maloney is interested in doing anything more than trying to force American universities to become institutions of indoctrination into conservative thought. Perhaps the full-length feature Maloney plans to release in 2005 will provide a fairer view of academia, but I for one am not holding my breath.

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