November 03, 2008

Indoctrinate U

From Evan Coyne Maloney to Jeff Goldstein.

Am I mistaken, or was there a time when universities promoted . . . actual thought?

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June 16, 2008

The L.A. Premiere of Indoctrinate U Was Last Night.

It was interesting to see the final cut of a movie that I've been watching digests and rough cuts of for years.

Evan Coyne Maloney of On the Fence Films, Brain Terminal blog, and Moving Picture Institute is one of the most talented young conservative filmmakers around; he cut his teeth covering lefty protests of Bush, the Iraq War, and any number of other causes. The "guerilla filmmaker" side of his work is especially effective, since he's able to ask reasonably questions with perfect deadpan, and allow those he's questioning to betray their . . . less-than-rigorous thought processes . . . without so much as cracking a smile.

Indoctrinate U, however, is a much more sophisticated work. Like Ben Stein's Expelled, it has to do with freedom of thought and speech in the academy. Unlike Stein's work, however, it doesn't promote—or even allude to—any kind of religious point of view. Nor does it vilify Darwin (much as Darwin's eugenics probably deserve vilifying).

The problem on college campuses has to do with several phenomena:

1) The overwhelming majority of college professors are leftists, or liberal Democrats;

2) These professors tend to inject their beliefs into classroom discussions, no matter how unrelated they may be to the subject they are putatively teaching;

3) Students are afraid to disagree with these teachers, because many professors are so convinced that "no reasonably person would disagree with me on a political notion" that students are in fear for their grades if they speak up, or write essays from an "unpopular" point of view (that is, a centrist or center-right one).

4) Students are getting cheated of hearing dissenting views on nearly any subject that might have a political component or application.

My favorite moment may in fact be when Maloney's father, a 1960s campus leftist and free-speech proponent, comes on camera to grimace a little and say, "I taught him to think for himself, so I shouldn't get too upset when he does it." Honest man.

I honestly hope every academician sees Indoctrinate U, so he or she can do some soul-searching about whether they are on the side of a uni-dimensional teaching style and draconian speech codes, or whether they welcome dissenting points of view in their students (or even, shocking as it might sound, in their fellow faculty members).

Finally, no blog post on Indoctrinate U would be complete without mentioning the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a bi-partisan (left-leaning, actually) organization that thinks students ought to be able to express themselves in reasonable ways. F.I.R.E. is out to upset the totalitarian applecart, and more power to them.

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April 29, 2008

Advice to Young Ladies.

And young men, for that matter: know why you're going to college. Are you looking for an education, or job-training? If the latter, what kind of job are you looking for?—and are the classes you're taking relevant to it in any way, shape, or form?

If college truly is about job-training, it is indeed a terrible idea, most of the time. But what if education is more than that?

I don't have any answers: I found the Emperor to be a nudist, but an awfully well-built one. Great to date, yet I didn't wind up marrying him. Some people go to college and never come back. That's okay, too.

Try to get a handle on your motives. And do, please, figure out where the money is going to come from.

For what it's worth, the world is full of illiterate former English majors, and that makes me wistful. On the other hand, math and science are the subjects that you kind of have to learn from people who know 'em: anyone can just read literature or history.

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April 15, 2008

Too Much Discussion

. . . going on in universities. A lot of this conflict could be avoided if we simply made the professors use semaphore, and required that students who participate in class discussions do so in the form of haiku.

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February 20, 2008

More on Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

Good morning, David!

Here's the pivotal quote from Jonathan Rauch in that book of his I got from a Virginia Postrel bibliography, and cannot stop pimping, Kindly Inquisitors:

It is quite useless to pretend that it is "fair," in the sense of evenhanded, to kick someone's beliefs out of the canon if they do not happen to be deemed science by the intellectual establishment. If we on the Darwinian side of the question are going to insist on preferential treatment for our way of looking at the world (and we should), and if in the process we are going to cause pain and outrage to people who do not see the world our way, then we had better have an awfully good reason—a much better reason than "because we're right and you're wrong and that's that." If we do not, then shame on us.

In point of fact, David, I probably come closer to your view of science than I do to Ben Stein's in No Intelligence Allowed. But that isn't quite the point: this isn't about what you think, or what I think. This is about what one may and may not say in the Academy without being called a nut. It is about protecting the system of rational inquiry. It's about reminding ourselves that "the solution for the problem of bad speech is more speech." And the solution for the problem of bad research is more research. Bad papers, more papers.

All I'm asking for is tolerance, rather than the narrow-mindedness that insists that we abstain from mentioning the possibility of God's existence in a university classroom.

More is at stake, by the way, than the definition of science: there is the issue of intellectual diversity in American Universities. This is the problem Evan Coyne Maloney has been calling attention to with his documentary Indoctrinate U. If your problem with "Intelligent Design" has to do with its not being science, are you equally consistent with respect to professors in other academic disciplines sticking to their own areas of expertise?

Because many of your colleages are not, and have no problem with teaching left-wing politcs from the podium. I trust you aren't among them, but it is a real concern for those of us who don't like to see the Ivory Tower getting too narrow at the top.

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February 19, 2008

Okay, David.

I'm working on the long answer to your post. But here's the short one: we can solve this very easily.

We get two intellectually juicy Jewish guys into a mud pit—let's say, you and Ben Stein.

Then we get another intellectually juicy Jewish guy in there as referee—let's say, Jonathan Rauch. To give you a slight edge over Stein, he's an athiest, and a staunch believer in traditional evolutionary biology.

And then we see what happens in the contest between Scientific Orthodoxy and Free Speech Informed by Faith.

Rauch will adjudicate it fairly. Really: He has honest eyes.


No? Fair enough. You'll get a real answer once I've gathered my thoughts, and/or whittled my real post down to novella length.

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February 17, 2008

Might I Suggest . . .

that the college kids "lawyer up" before the next mass shooting in a supposedly "gun-free" zone, rather than afterward?

Whom am I supposed to root for, here? Must I really suggest that if you're crazy enough to want to leave the planet—and take a few others with you in a blaze of ingloriousness—that you select an institution with a large "endowment"?

I wonder what would happen if one of these hugely-endowed universities got shot up. Like Harvard, with a $35 billion endowment. Man, if the lawyers didnÂ’t start setting the folding tables up outside the student union like the credit card companies do every September, IÂ’d lose all respect for their sleaziness.

The lawyers', or the universities'? Or both? Neither has a monopoly on sleaziness.

Via Insty, who's riffing off of Jay Tea at Wizbang.

I'd really like to see the laws against carry on campus challenged—before they lead to more loss of life.

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