Indoctrinate U - Film Content

Film Content

Throughout much of the documentary, the filmmakers use humor to highlight what is shown to be the irony of selective protection of freedom of speech, the likes of which is apparently abundant in universities across the United States, according to the film. Maloney argues that while students involved with the "campus free speech movement" of the 1960s nobly and successfully defended the rights of students to think and express and freely share ideas, somewhere along the way, their message devolved into one that allows only their viewpoints to be heard - an ironic turn in which many of the oppressed students of the 1960s now find themselves as the oppressive administrators of the present day.

The film documents how minority critics of controversial policies such as affirmative action, like political activist and former University of California Regent Ward Connerly, are routinely shouted off stage or otherwise have their views marginalized, seemingly without real consideration - often simply by likening them to Nazis or clansmen to delegitimize them entirely; or how students at Cal State San Bernardino and at other schools across the nation trying to illustrate the inherent racism of affirmative action by holding "affirmative action bake sales" are ironically reprimanded for expressing "hate speech".

Clips of anti-military protests at UC Santa Cruz and San Francisco State University, at one point show how protestors demanded that recruiters from the Army Corps of Engineers leave the school's career fair, with such fervor that it led the cancellation of the entire event. Also shown is the treatment of conservative students at the University of Tennessee and Cal Poly, the latter of whom was reprimanded and incurred over $40,000 of legal fees having his record cleared of the charges levied against him by the university for posting "racially-offensive material" around campus - announcements for a speech hosted by the College Republicans Club (of which he was a member) for guest speaker and African-American political commentator C. Mason Weaver, because of the title of his book, It's OK to Leave the Plantation. A later court order required that the student's record be expunged and his legal fees paid.

Also included are the racial and ethnic politics at the University of Michigan and Yale, teaching at Duke and Columbia; interviews with David French and Greg Lukianoff, (then respectively president and director of legal and public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), Glenn Reynolds, Daniel Pipes, Carol Miller Swain, and others.