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Presence and Absence: How Maloney and Browning Spin the Debate on academicbias.com
by Sean Shannon

As I attempted to illustrate numerous times in my critique of Brainwashing 101, "Deep Deprogramming," Evan Coyne Maloney and the other people behind the film repeatedly spin and distort the facts behind the cases and stories they present in a way that makes it hard to treat the film as more than rank right-wing propaganda. However, Brainwashing 101 is just one offering from Maloney and the people at On The Fence Films. In the months since Brainwashing 101 debuted, the film's official Website at academicbias.com has been updated repeatedly with new content. Although the most active part of the Website is a section linking to articles on other Websites, some of the new content is from Maloney and Stuart Browning, and this content provides excellent examples of the types of spinning prevalent in Brainwashing 101.

We Need Footage.

In an attempt to avoid the travel and other costs associated with having to travel to tens or even hundreds of college campuses to shoot footage for the upcoming expanded version of Brainwashing 101, Maloney and company hit upon a great idea: have others shoot the footage for them. Hence, the "DV Squad" section of academicbias.com was born. In order to provide incentive for students and others to go out there and roll tape at their university, the people who shoot the best footage (as selected by On The Fence Films) can win prizes from Apple. It's cost-efficient for the producers of the film, and for people who buy into Maloney's argument it provides them with an easy way to feel like they're "part of the movement."

However, the way On The Fence Films goes about explaining the kind of footage they're looking for reiterates the same rhetorical problems that plagued Brainwashing 101. The section describing what kind of footage they're looking for reads like a blueprint for how to get footage to construct the same flawed arguments prevalent in the film.

After a brief explanation that footage will probably have to be shot outside of classrooms because professors won't like having cameras in their classrooms, the page lists the kind of places ideal for shooting footage, including political rallies and "information booths." (I think by this they're referring to the booths student organizations set up as activities fairs and the like.) So that's no problem, you can just go to the next anti-abortion rally on campus, or the next booth the Campus Bible Fellowship sets up and shoot some footage for Maloney and company, right?

Not quite. Right after that, the page lists the kinds of speech they're looking for in submitted footage. It comes as little surprise that the kinds of opinions and expressions On The Fence Films wants filmed is the expression of ideas that anyone to the left of Arlen Specter would hold. Some of the examples listed are ludicrous, some are silly, and some are downright insulting, to wit:

• They ask for footage of speech "portraying American society as institutionally racist, sexist, or 'homophobic'." Yes, they actually put homophobic in quotes, as a snide way of saying that discrimination against gays, lesbians, bisexuals and the transgendered is somehow less valid than discrimination against different races or genders. As with the Red Scare Card shown so often in the references to socialism in Brainwashing 101, here we can see the people at On The Fence Films deliberately pandering to conservatives and their fears about Us Darn Queers.
• There is also a request for footage of speech that "advocates confiscation of private wealth or nationalization of corporate property." Here's the Red Scare Card in full bloom, and they actually play it again in the very next bullet point, where they say they want footage that "attacks American Capitalism" or "describes Socialism as an ideal socio-economic system." By the vague language of the previous point, though, there could be a rally on campus to advocate a 0.25% raise in the local sales tax to pay for additional police forces, and this would be seen as ideal fodder for the full-length Brainwashing 101.
• They also ask for footage of displays "... accompanied by the display of foreign flags such as that of the Palestinian Authority ..." Gee, so when my friends from the International Student Union set up a booth and hang up the flags of their home countries, I guess I should tear them down and tell them they're in America, gosh darn it, and they should get with the programme!

(Oh, and an aside from the graduate student in English here: Note the repeated error in the first bullet point "...denigrates America, it's history, culture, economic system, military or it's political leadership." It's is "it is," not the possessive form of "it." That's its. Can we be entirely sure that the people behind that Website even went to college?)

Here we see that Maloney and company will likely employ the same strategy they used in Brainwashing 101 that they'll use in the full-length documentary: they will show lots of footage of left-wing students and student organizations in an attempt to somehow "prove" their argument that right-wing speech and right-wing students are systematically surpressed on college campuses. The glaring problem of this strategy is that the existence of left-wing speech on campuses -- no matter how radical, loud, or even stupid it is -- is in no way evidence that right-wing speech doesn't exist. That would be akin to me telling you that the Detroit Tigers won their last game, and as "proof" showing you the statistics for the bottom half of every inning. If the visiting team never gets a chance to bat, how can they be expected to win the game?

It's not that hard to imagine what a segment shot from this footage will look like. We'll get long, lingering shots of a campus GLBT student group at a student activities fair -- oh, look at those rainbow flags and pink and black triangles! Look at all those men and how effeminate they're acting! Look at the women with the short hair and muscular bare arms! (The target) Audiences will be up in arms! "How dare those nasty colleges let those homosexuals just prance around like that!" Meanwhile, if the camera just panned a little to the right, we'd be looking at this college's chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ, and see all the people there professing and celebrating their devotion to Jesus Christ just as much as the people in the GLBT group were celebrating their sexuality. Students from both sides of the political spectrum, expressing their opinions openly and freely. That's how it's supposed to be. However, when you just show a few minutes of GLBT student groups and anti-war rallies and gatherings of the Campus Greens, and don't show any footage of college Christian and conservative groups, you silently give the impression that the left-wing speech on campus is the only speech on campus. It's a simple, but highly effective, manipulation.

Now, if someone were to pan over to that Campus Crusade for Christ booth and film other students harrassing the students there because of their Christianity and university officials doing nothing about it, or film administrators telling the group that they couldn't be at the fair while allowing booths from left-wing student organizations to keep running, that would be a different story. That would be something that no fair-minded person, whether liberal or conservative or in-between, could tolerate seeing. That would actually be germane to the argument Maloney and company proffer about right-wing speech and students being targeted on campus. That's not the kind of footage they ask for on academicbias.com, though.

Things Change With Time. Get Over It.

Stuart Browning was the Executive Producer of Brainwashing 101, and from the title of his article on Brainwashing 101 -- "The 1960s Radicals are Now in Charge of the Universities" -- it seems like Browning is even more conservative than Maloney. The text of the article bears this out to a great degree. Unlike Maloney, who at least seems to make some effort to focus on the alleged silencing of right-wing voices on campus, Browning tends to focus more on just discussing the left-wing voices on campus. At best, Browning is engaging in the same logical fallacy that plagues some parts of Brainwashing 101 and much of Maloney's writing: trying to argue that right-wing voices are being censored by pointing to the presence of left-wing voices on campus. At worst, Browning shows a reflexive intolerance towards the presence of any liberal ideas, students, or professors on college campuses.

After opening his article with a paragraph bemoaning how most people simply don't know how much American universities have become institutions of liberal indoctrination, Browning then provides a few bullet points to try to prove his statement. Despite the fact that Browning generally fails to back up his claims with even the smallest of concrete evidence, his points are still worth mentioning here if only because Browning's arguments are fairly representative of the stock arguments you'll get from right-wingers about the "liberal bias" in academia, and can be used to show the counter-arguments to those arguments.

Browning first goes after how professors -- "especially in the humanities" (I'd really like to know which humanities he's referring to here) -- try to indoctrinate their students in a political worldview that is, in his words, hostile to America and its facets. It's not hard to read between the lines here to see that Browning is opening right up with the Red Scare card again, obliquely referencing Marxist thought here and counting on his (target) audience to make the connection between Marxist thoughts and those godless commie bastards. As I've written before, though, Marxist thought extends far beyond politics and economics, and goes to issues of philosophy and critical thought. It is entirely possible for an English professor to ask his or her students for a Marxist reading of, say, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream -- analyzing both how the socio-economic classes of the characters in the play affect their interactions, and also how different classes of readers read the play -- and for the professor to still believe in capitalism, America, and even the Republican Party. Of course, it's just far easier for Browning to play the Red Scare card, and count on his target audience bristling at the slightest mention of Marxist thought in our universities.

The next bullet point goes into two points: first, the increase of programmes dedicated to historically disenfranchised groups, and second, how these programmes have affected the traditional academic canon. Browning actually has the cajones to refer to historically disenfranchised groups as "victim groups" (quotations his), as if women, ethnic minorities and non-heterosexuals haven't been historically the targets of open discrimination (how long ago was it when women and African-Americans couldn't vote in this country?), and are not still the targets of both societal and legal discrimination. (How much money does a woman make in an hour for the same amount of work that a man does? Even with affirmative action programmes, how underrepresented are minority-owned businesses in non-governmental contract bidding? In how many states are unions between same-sex couples not given all the same rights and privileges as heterosexual unions?) Following this, Browning then tries to praise the "Western Canon," saying it is "thought to consist of the best that has been thought" without providing any evidence for that claim, and then saying how it is under attack because people other than "dead white males" (his words, not mine) are being added to the canon. Here Browning engages in a form of extreme conservatism, essentially arguing that the ideal canon for students is not open to change under any circumstances, except perhaps by the influences of other white men. If a university is to train its students to be the best and the brightest citizens of the future, it only makes sense that it teach its students a canon that brings in the best work of all people, regardless of their gender, nationality, or political thought. Browning seems to prefer that the canon stay unchanged from what was taught fifty years ago; either that, or he's arguing that only white men can think the best, and if he seriously intends to make that point then any respect I may have had for him just went out the door.

So-called "speech codes" are the target of the final bullet point, as Browning reiterates the main point from Brainwashing 101, calling the codes "draconian," pointing out how speech is allegedly being censored at public, taxpayer-funded institutions, and claiming that invariably it's people who aren't members of the historically disenfranchised groups who get targeted by these codes. Browning tries to frame the argument in his terms by saying that the codes exist to make sure students don't feel offended, trying to make the codes sound frivilous, when in fact the codes exist to ensure that students can learn in an environment of relative safety. Certainly there have been instances where some universities have punished speech that was relatively innocuous, but of course Browning doesn't provide a single example of this, and even the examples showcased in Brainwashing 101 proved to be relatively weak. As for the point of public universities being taxpayer-funded, how much government money still goes towards institutions that openly discriminate against certain groups such as the Boy Scouts of America or various radical right-wing churches? Try joining one of those places and argue for the legalization of same-sex marriage, and see how far you get.

If there's one glaring error that all of Browning's bullet points share, it is this: in Brainwashing 101, Maloney and Browning try to frame the whole issue of conservative voices being censored on campus as being antithetical to the notion of critical thinking, the type of thinking that universities are supposed to instill in its students. However, critical thinking requires looking at problems from all perspectives, whether they be traditional perspectives passed on through centuries of the dominant European Christian patriarchy, or other modes of thought such as Marxism or feminism. Critical thinking means looking not only to the poems of Donne and Keats for insight on the human condition, but also to the poems of Angelou and Dickinson. Critical thinking means looking not only to the raw financial numbers to determine whether or not allowing Shell to drill for oil in Nigeria is a good idea, but also to the environmental and societal changes Shell's drilling has brought to the country so far. Critical thinking means not only looking at how the "profit motive" encourages the development and new and innovative profits, but also how unfettered capitalism can result in a permanently disenfranchised lower class. Above all, critical thinking means not dismissing any perspective for some pedantic reason. Browning, even more than Maloney in Brainwashing 101, seems to advocate critical thinking, but at the same time dismisses any perspectives that don't fall into his conservative worldview as being "hostile to America." That's not advocating fairness in academia; that's advocating that universities become institutions of conservative indoctrination.

After the bullet points, Browning goes into a fair amount of autobiographical detail about the making of Brainwashing 101, then talks about how sometimes stories of academic censorship get into the press, but then get quickly forgotten about. He then finally gets to the point he first made with the title of his article, about how the people who grew up in the social revolutions of the 1960s are the people who are the professors and administration at the universities today. This point is a rather obvious one, and fairly irrelevant to boot. When these modern-day professors were going to college themselves, their professors were steeped in the cultural conservatism of post-World War II America. As time passes, the people of past generations, as they assume their positions as elders in society, will take on positions of power. Historically this wasn't so much of a problem for conservatives because people tended to adopt more conservative views as they got older, but now that decades of American social and religious conservatism have made their flaws more evident, there is a much stronger strain of liberalism in today's elders. As times change, the people change with them. This should not be news to Browning or his readers.

At the conclusion of the article, Browning references the Pat Buchanan quote I already tore up in "Deep Deprogramming," but then he concludes with the following line: "Generations of students educated to regard their own country, culture and civilization as institutionally racist, sexist, 'homophobic', exploitative and genocidal will not rush to defend it." (Again with the quotes around homophobic as if to deny that homophobia even exists.) Here Browning gets into the "institutional" argument, again without reference to a specific case of anyone arguing that America is "institutionally" anything. Of course, the whole reference to "rush[ing] to defend" America goes back to the Buchanan quote, implying that America needs all the young soldiers it can get right now on the so-called "War on Terror." I don't have any evidence one way or the other, but students who are trained that, for all that America does right, it still does some wrong -- not providing enough opportunities for lower-class people to significantly raise their socio-economic standing, not providing enough of a security blanket for people who lose their jobs for whatever reason, not doing enough to keep corporate hyper-capitalistic greed in check, not acting like a good citizen within the world community, among other things -- may not rush to join the armed forces and lay down their lives for America. But you know what they will do? They'll vote. They'll write letters to newspapers when a conservative columnist tries to argue a really stupid point. They'll work on local political campaigns to get more liberal-minded people in office. More than anything, though, they'll work to make America a better place for everyone, and not just the historically privileged. Maybe it's not as heroic as strapping on a rifle and being shot at by whomever, but it is just as noble.

Politicking and Electioneering

The final article I'll be looking at is Maloney's "Stop Classroom Politicking," an article that once again serves to help On The Fence Films gain material for the full-length Brainwashing 101 by asking current university students to send Maloney and company details of when and where professors allegedly use their positions in the classroom to push political messages on students. Although Maloney doesn't come right out and say it, I think it's safe to assume that Maloney only wants to hear about liberal professors doing such things, although given how self-selective Maloney's audience tends to be I don't think this will be much of a problem for him.

The gist of Maloney's argument harkens back to material I read on FIRE's Website while preparing "Deep Deprogramming." As Maloney states at the start of this article, he believes that when professors engage in political speech during class time are taking time away from the education that students (or their parents or guardians or whomever) are paying for. Maloney even goes so far as to call such activity "fraud." Interestingly, Maloney asserts that, "Outside the classroom, professors have the same rights to free speech as anyone else," but yet as we just covered, he asks students to film professors outside of their classes. By this line of reasoning, if we go back to the theoretical GLBT booth at a student fair from earlier, if a professor were to assist the students working at this booth, Maloney would not have a problem with it at all. Yet somehow I get the feeling that if someone were to film such a scene and ship it to Maloney, he would deliberately focus on the professor's presence at the booth.

The inherent problem with Maloney's argument is that he's assuming that a class is going to be one hundred percent "learn this, this, and this," and everyone who has ever been in any college class -- even a high school class -- knows that any class that works like that is always far too draining. Students can't keep up with it, and the professor/teacher usually can't keep up that pace either. In a given hour of time, really no more than fifty-four minutes, or ninety percent, can be all-out productive; there is always going to be an element of "down-time" in class where students and professors alike go off on an unrelated tangent just to help clear their minds. The same thing happens at work with "water-cooler time" and the like. Believe me, if I could buy into Maloney's argument for a second, I know of one of my undergraduate English professors I'd like to sue for droning on and on about all of her cats during class time. (I wonder if FIRE would help me with that?) In the end, though, it was just downtime, albeit particularly dreadful downtime.

I'm not saying that professors don't use class time to talk politics with students, sometimes politics that have no direct bearing on the course itself. (More on that point later.) It's happened to me before, and it's happened on both ends of the spectrum; I've had liberal professors saying stuff that I agreed with, and I've had conservative professors say stuff that I disagreed with. In both cases, however, my reaction, and the reaction of the rest of the students, was pretty much the same: tuning out the professor. Believe me, college students are a lot better at identifying downtime than anyone realizes, and we can sense when it's time to put our pencils down, lean back in our chairs, look the professor in the eye and be thinking the whole time s/he is talking politics about something else entirely, whether other classes or the party coming up that Friday or whatever.

Getting back to Maloney's article here, Maloney once again engages in a line of reasoning first found in Brainwashing 101 that shows Maloney's own lack of critical thinking skills. In discussing the use of political discussions in class, Maloney says, "Obviously, one would expect politics to be discussed in a political science class, and it wouldn't be out of line in a philosophy class, either ... [b]ut is politics appropriate in a math class? What about English? Or physics, biology or engineering?" Maloney clearly fails to grasp that there is a political dimension in every field of study, not just those fields of study that involve themselves directly in politics. To demonstrate Maloney's fallacy, let me just list a few hypothetical situations here and ask some questions that should illuminate my own point:

• In an English class that is reading George Orwell's 1984, would it be inappropriate to bring up the connection between the "war without end" the countries in the novel are fighting to keep their citizens docile, and the endless, unwinnable "War on Terror" the current administration is promoting?
• In a biology class that is focusing on human organs and life cycles, would a discussion on stem cell research be considered "too political?"
• In a physics class -- a nuclear physics class -- would discussion about the potential harm nuclear weapons could cause if they were to fall into the wrong hands be unrelated to the subject matter? (Or only if we exclude Republicans from "the wrong hands?"
• In a music history course, would a professor be out of line for discussing how Republican lawmakers are actively trying to bring about the death of public broadcasting?

What Maloney fails to realize -- both directly in this assertion of his, and I believe throughout the whole body of his work on academia, including Brainwashing 101 -- is that politics are far more ubiquitous than he realizes, and that teaching in and of itself is a political action. Professors who do not question the status quo of both their university and their world -- you know, the ones that have been teaching the exact same course for the past twenty years without changing the material one damn bit -- fail to engage in the very critical thinking skills that they are supposed to foster in their students. Dinesh D'Souza and his ilk would argue that teaching without any overtly political subtext is "value-free" and thus an ideal mode of teaching, but making that decision is in itself a political act, stating that the uncritical method of teaching -- a method developed by and for the wealthy Caucasian male elite, that works overtly to make sure that only those who come from power can gain access to power -- is the best environment for all students to learn in.

(For further reading on this point, I would point people to the work of Critical Teachers such as Chuck Knoblauch, Lil Brannon, and Ira Shor, all of whom speak on this subject far more eloquently than I could ever hope to.)

Interestingly enough, this article of Maloney's was first published around October of 2004, with weeks to go before the Presidential election. As I'm sure we all recall, this last election cycle was so hotly contested that there was no way to avoid talk of it. I couldn't walk anywhere on campus without being bombarded by messages from both sides, and given that most students wanted to talk about the election, I don't think it was inappropriate for politics to seep their way into class discussions even more than usual. (If anything, with a professor there to act as a pseudo-moderator classroom discussions tended to be more civilized and productive than the ones found in the food courts.) I had two different professors for my Fall 2004 classes, and one never touched on politics at all (except the internal politics of English departments which had little to do with "real-world" politics) while the other did speak against President Bush's Iraq policies, but given that one of her sons is stationed in Iraq right now I think this was understandable on her part, and she certainly never told any of us, overtly or otherwise, how to vote. Still, you think Maloney got a lot of material by timing the publication of this article at just the right time?

(Since I'm sure many of you are wondering who I voted for, I'll just come out and say it here: David Cobb, the Green Party candidate. Those of you, Republican or Democrat, who want to tell me how wrong my vote was, kindly shut the hell up.)

Parting Thoughts

For the most part, Maloney seems to be relying on links from other right-wing Websites devoted to academia -- Websites like Tongue Tied and Critical Mass -- to provide talking points for academicbias.com. To be honest, some of the stuff I read on those Websites about conservative students and professors being targeted by liberal professors and administrators bothers me. However, you wonder why Maloney never goes to, say, advocate.com and posts about all the places where students aren't being allowed to form GLBT student groups. Or why he never discusses when liberal students aren't allowed to espouse left-wing thinking in classes run by conservative professors. When it comes down to it, Maloney seems to be so caught up in the whole "institutions of liberal indoctrination" right-wing soundbite that he can't give his subject matter a fair treatment. As with Brainwashing 101, the articles on academicbias.com read far more like conservative propaganda than a fair-handed treatment of the problems in academia.

Perhaps it's because I am in training to teach in college myself, but after a while all of these arguments about how universities are just these tools to make young minds into these radical liberals just seem to run into each other. It's the Big Lie all over again: tell people a lie enough times, and even if they know it's a lie they'll start believing it. We've seen Republican lawmakers do it for the past ten years, we're seeing it in the US "news" media, and On The Fence Films seems to be making itself into another cog of the far right's media machine. Believe me, I have had intelligent discussions with right-wingers (all of them libertarians, not surprisingly) about the problems with academia on both sides, I know it's possible. With the way Maloney and Browning twist the debate with Brainwashing 101 and the articles on their Website, though, I don't think they're the right people to be having that argument with.