BRITTANY YEAROUT
Perspectives Editor
An open market for ideas, critical thinking, tolerance and free speech, is supposed to be the mainstay of American universities. However, as director Evan Coyne Maloney’s upcoming film, “Indoctrinate U,” highlights, the truth is becoming just the opposite.
By revealing specific instances in public and private colleges, Maloney proves that some universities are actively preventing free speech by rendering a whole range of ideas out of the accepted realm of discourse.
In “Indoctrinate U,” a woman at Michigan State wrote an editorial about affirmative action and while in class her professor, not knowing she was attendance, read the article in front of 200 people and started bashing her as a racist and a bigot.
“She was slammed by the professor in class, a class that had absolutely nothing to do with affirmative action,” Maloney said. “And it was Michigan State University where effectively tax payers are having to underwrite political advertising.”
“Indoctrinate U,” at its core, is about whether or not higher education should allow for expression of a range of ideas and freedom of speech to students and professors. In his film, which premieres in Washington, D.C., Sept. 28, Maloney visits dozens of campuses to document cases where there is not an open environment for free thinking and diverse opinions.
“Our Education. Their Politics,” is the motto for Maloney’s film. And, as he shows, this indoctrinating and politicking does not only take place at public universities.
At Harvard, for example, a professor told Maloney in an interview about the importance of African-American studies. This professor teaches his students that “whiteness is simply an oppressive social category” and “there can be no white race without the phenomenon of white supremacy.” “Blackness” he added, “is an identity.”
The film also discovers universities use speech codes to prevent freedom of speech.
More than 90 percent of colleges, both public and private, abide by restrictive speech codes and only about 9 percent of schools in the United States fully allow free speech, according to The Foundation for Individuals Rights and Education (Fire), an organization that defends and sustains students’ rights at America’s colleges and universities.
“We surveyed over 330 schools and found that an overwhelming majority of them explicitly prohibit speech that, outside the borders of campus, is protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” Emily Guidry, the attorney and Media Director for Fire, wrote in an e-mail.
Fire rated Pepperdine University as a “red light,” meaning it has at least one policy that clearly and directly restricts freedom of speech. Although I can’t speak for every student, and based on most of my classes I don’t think that this is a huge problem at Pepperdine, however, there have been some cases.
Maloney said the question is: Does Pepperdine University make it clear to students during the admissions process as to what particular ideology or traditions are upheld. If the school is honest, then nothing is wrong, because the prospective student effectively knows what type of environment in which they will be learning.
“Part of the problem is that in the admissions process all the glossy brochures talk about the pursuit of intellectual enrichment and being able to engage in intellectual discourse,” Maloney said. “But then the students get to school and find out they can’t actually do that.”
Maloney discovered that when students fight back they usually prevail because a lot of the transgressions on campus simply cannot stand public scrutiny. The point is that while the classroom shouldn’t be used as a podium from which professors can exploit their position to press personal politics on students, there should be an environment for both sides of any issue to be presented without restriction, fear of being humiliated or worse. The teacher should have the right to make his or her values clear when pertinent, but so too should the student, especially when contradicting the professor or the class.
09-13-2007