Persistence of Vision

NRO contributing editor and Hoover Institute fellow Stanley Kurtz recently attended an invitation-only preview screening of Indoctrinate U, MPI fellow Evan Coyne Maloney's feature-length exposé of ideological bias in American higher education. Writing at The Corner, National Review Online's blog, Kurtz gives the forthcoming documentary a glowing review:

Last week I attended the premiere of Indoctrinate U, Evan Coyne Maloney’s documentary about campus political correctness. It’s a fun and powerful piece of work that deserves a wide audience. The film features plenty of encounters between Maloney and college officials who, after being embarrassed by Maloney’s questions, invariably summon police to have him evicted. These confrontations are entertaining, but the real force of this film flows from Maloney’s recounting of a series of incidents of campus political correctness. I had never heard of any of these cases. Yet each of them is remarkable.

When the war over campus PC broke out in the late eighties, the Left used to dismiss stories like the ones recounted by Maloney as isolated and atypical anecdotes. Twenty years later, organizations like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) have clashed with universities over literally hundreds, probably thousands, of such incidents. And behind every egregious and actionable case of campus political correctness lay many unreported problems.

The end result of this torrent of outrages is that foes of campus PC have grown jaded. That’s where Indoctrinate U comes in. This film hits you in the gut, in a way that no column or blog post can. Seeing the faces of the protagonists in these campus conflicts, and hearing their stories in their own words, makes it seem as if you’re learning about the problems of campus bias and tyranny for the very first time. After the screening, audience members had a chance to question Maloney. I particularly remember a woman who said she was almost too shaking with anger to speak.

I don’t want to give anything away, but I was struck by the scientist who said that her students were able to figure out her politics simply by noting what she did not say. Just by teaching her subject, without adding extraneous leftist political harangues, she had revealed herself to be a closet Republican. You won’t believe what happened when the faculty found out about her politics. But the full horror story is almost less disturbing than the reality of that single observation about silence. Particularly in some of the non-science disciplines, it really has gotten to the point where mere silence on matters political is enough to reveal you as the enemy.

Will Indoctrinate U get seen? I don’t think there’s any doubt that a significant audience for this movie exists. But to overcome their own pressures of political correctness, distributers need to be reminded of that. So to prove that there is in fact an audience for this film, a website has been set up where you can register your interest in seeing Indoctrinate U. There you can also catch a trailer of the film.

What are you waiting for?

Justice Brandeis famously said that "sunlight is the best disinfectant." So it's only appropriate that MPI's eye-opening film about the dark side of environmentalism should be screened at the upcoming State Policy Network Pacific Rim Policy Conference in Honolulu.

Let there be light.

Do our nation's universities value open debate, free inquiry, and intellectual pluralism? The case of Mark Moyar suggests not. Armed with a B.A. summa cum laude in history from Harvard University, a doctorate in history from Cambridge University, a published book, a contract for a second book, and stellar letters of recommendation from some of the world's most distinguished historians, Moyar applied for jobs at colleges and universities across our nation. Five years and more than 150 applications later, he still had not landed a tenure-track job. Ordinarily, schools would be vying with one another to hire a young scholar with such credentials, talent, and promise. So why was Moyar different?

A revisionist historian of the Vietnam War, Moyar uses previously unexamined evidence to argue that the United States was justified in going into Vietnam, that the war was winnable, and that the controversial "domino theory" is a credible one. Presented in his meticulous 542-page book Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (Cambridge University Press, 2006), the first of two volumes on the subject, his reappraisal of Vietnam has earned him considerable praise from academics, journalists, politicians, and war veterans. "I know of no scholar more dedicated to bringing a thorough and accurate portrayal of America's involvement in Vietnam than Mark Moyar," wrote Senator James Webb, who earned a Navy Cross, a Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, and two Purple Hearts during his own service in Vietnam. "Everyone who is interested in a full picture of that oft-misunderstood war should be grateful for his effort."

Unfortunately for Moyar, history departments across the nation were anything but grateful for his alternative perspective on Vietnam. When he applied for jobs, he usually did not receive so much as a preliminary interview. Where he did manage to get an interview, he was passed over in favor of candidates with scholarship on such topics as "The American Film Industry and the Spanish-Speaking Market During the Transition to Sound, 1929-1936," or "Attire, Hygiene, and Discourses of Civilization in Early American-Japanese Relations." At some institutions, the discrimination was more overt. When the history faculty voted on his candidacy at Texas Tech, fifteen out of twenty professors found him "unacceptable." At Texas A&M University, an anonymous faculty assessor opined that his presence "would hurt the reputation of the school." And when he interviewed at the U.S. Air Force War College, a professor told him that he was "full of s**t." So much for scholarly debate.

The story of Moyar's job search points to a systemic problem within academe, which tends to treat certain views (e.g., that Vietnam was an unjust, unwinnable war) as sacrosanct, while dismissing opposing views as unmentionable heresies. Interviewing students, professors, and administrators on campuses across the country, MPI fellow Evan Coyne Maloney explores the damaging effects of this ideological monoculture in his forthcoming feature-length documentary film Indoctrinate U. A scorching exposé of how our nation's colleges and universities use institutional mechanisms to promote certain views while censuring others, Indoctrinate U is a rallying call for reform, a passionate argument in favor of genuine academic freedom and intellectual pluralism. It is essential viewing for academics, trustees, students, parents, taxpayers, and anyone else interested in knowing what our colleges and universities are doing with our minds and our money.

Indoctrinate U does not yet have a distributor, so MPI has organized a campaign to promote the film. We ask only that you visit the film's official website, view the trailer, and sign up to request a screening in your area. The more requests we get, the better the chance that Indoctrinate U will come to your town or city soon.

Through a series of colorful, dramatic campaigns, environmental groups have long demanded that mining companies be held accountable for their allegedly destructive actions at ecologically sensitive sites around the world. The mining companies themselves have mostly stayed silent, at most disputing their detractors' claims through blandly professional public relations statements. But Peter McCready, editor of Mining Environmental Magazine, notes that by turning the lens of accountability back onto the environmentalists, MPI's co-produced documentary Mine Your Own Business has changed the terms of engagement. After Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney's revelatory film, environmentalists no longer have a monopoly on criticism, the mining companies have become emboldened, and a healthy debate is fostering between the two sides:

THE backlash against NGOs and the environmentalist movement has notched up a gear. The release of the 'Mine Your Own Business', a pro-mining piece of propaganda or a rebuttal of anti-mining claims and inaccuracies, depending on your view point, and the subsequent furore has galvanised both sides of the debate.

Calls are now being made from within the industry for miners to 'step up to the plate' and to fight back publically. The good work done by NGOs and the environmental lobby has been commended, but some miners are saying that the industry is shying away from speaking out against detractors because it is deemed to be unprofessional on their part.

It is argued that the NGOs and environmentalists criticise the industry for its lack of transparency and yet these same organisations seem to lack transparency themselves.

Speaking at this year's Prospectors and Developers Association in Toronto, Phelim McAleer (the director of 'Mine Your Own Business') said these organisations have a set of political beliefs, and should be treated with the same scepticism as other organisations or businesses are treated or expect to be treated.

Delegates at the conference said NGOs such as Greenpeace are now big businesses themselves, with directors on salaries of several hundred thousand dollars a year. The question to them should not just be where do they get their money, and who backs them, but how is their money spent and who gives them the moral or elected authority to do what they do. After all, these are the same questions they pose to the mining industry.

"I have no problem with someone being anti-mining or anti-capitalist, but they should be honest about these beliefs and not bring them to the table under the guise of environmentalism," commented Mr McAleer.

Read McCready's full article here. If you would like to view Mine Your Own Business, contact MPI to order a copy on DVD.

MPI exists to bring the ideal of liberty to the silver screen--and, in so doing, to fill a gap in the American cinematic diet. As MPI's mission statement puts it, "MPI is founded on the premise that film, more effectively than any other medium, can bring the idea of freedom to life. It is our mission to ensure that film becomes a center of genuinely democratic art in the coming years. Our goal is to guarantee that film’s unique capacity to give shape to abstract principles—to make them move and breathe—is used to support and promote liberty."

Few have noticed the hole in American film where freedom should be. But there are occasional astute exception, and the Atlantic Monthly's Clive Crook is one of them. Here's an excerpt from his inspiring and groundbreaking March 2006 piece, "Capitalism: The Movie":

Seen a movie lately? Watched television or read a newspaper? The culture that speaks to Americans, and hence to the Western world, radiates suspicion of free enterprise--cordial and restrained, as a rule, but dubious nonetheless. Yes, the system does work, says this culture, and there appears to be no alternative. But what a shame this is, it continues, because capitalism rewards our worst and most selfish instincts. "Greed is good" may stock the shelves, but is somewhat less than inspiring.

Popular culture understands that the market economy creates material prosperity, albeit for some more than others. It seeks out and worships business celebrities. But at the same time it sees the system as spiritually--and politically--corrupting. As viewed from Hollywood, workers are usually downtrodden, bosses are usually grasping, consumers are usually gulled, and shadowy global finance is always calling the geopolitical shots. We manage to prosper, most of us, but this system of ours is not very noble.

What is most striking, so far as the movies' treatment of capitalism goes, is not the hostility of films whose main purpose is actually to indict corporate wickedness (Wall Street, Erin Brockovich, A Civil Action, The Insider, The Constant Gardener, and so forth). It is the idea of routine, reckless corporate immorality--maintained as though this premise were inoffensive, uncontroversial, and hardly worthy of comment--that drives movies whose principal interest lies elsewhere, whether in the human drama of contemporary geopolitics (Syriana, to cite a recent instance), knockabout comedy (Fun with Dick & Jane), children’s fantasy (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), star-crossed romance (In Good Company), or, classically, in some dystopian near or distant future (Alien, The Terminator, Blade Runner, Robocop, and many others).

The point is not that such movies, or the culture more generally, argue that capitalism is evil. Just the opposite: it is that they so often merely assume, innocently and expecting to arouse no skepticism, that capitalism is evil.

Our sincere thanks to the Atlantic for making it possible for us to provide a free link to our readers.

Washington is getting the message that Mine Your Own Business is a must-see film for anyone interested in environmental policy, global development, and world poverty. MPI's special invitation-only Capitol Hill screening on April 10 met with such rave reviews that three more D.C. screenings will be held later this month to meet the demand.

On May 30, the House Natural Resources Committee will host a screening of the film for Capitol Hill staffers. Later that day, the Heritage Foundation, Ethics & Public Policy Center, and Institute on Religion and Democracy will co-host a screening at the Heritage Foundation. This one will be open to the public, and is expected to draw a considerable crowd. On May 31, Cato's Center for Global Liberty & Prosperity will host yet another screening for an audience of international policy experts.

This is one snowball that won't melt.

Tonight, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., MPI is hosting a special screening of Indoctrinate U.

So far, the film's website has received over 150,000 visitors, and more than 10,000 people have signed up for screenings in their area. Make sure you are one of them.

Mining executive Richard Ness addresses the media after his trial

How do you feel when irresponsible journalism lands your father in jail, and then in court? Eric Ness knows all too well. In September 2004, Indonesian police arrested his father and five other executives of the Newmont Mining Corporation, tossed them in jail alongside terrorists who had attacked the country's Australian embassy, and detained them for 32 days without arraignment. The authorities eventually released five of the men, but charged Richard Ness, president director of Newmont's Indonesian division, with knowingly polluting Buyat Bay near the company's mine in North Sulwawesi.

The arrests and charges followed a New York Times exposé by journalist Jane Perlez, who documented instances of skin tumors, rashes, headaches, breathing difficulties, and birth defects among Buyat Bay villagers, contending that these symptoms stemmed from the mercury- and arsenic-laden mine tailings Newmont had dumped off the coast. As the New York Times ran a scorching series of articles by Perlez, international environmental organizations rallied to condemn Newmont and demand that Ness serve a prison sentence of at least 10 years.

While Ness underwent his 21-month trial, one of the longest criminal proceedings in Indonesian legal history, Perlez received the Overseas Press Club of America's 2004 Whitman Bassow Award for the year's best reporting on international environmental issues. The organization's award website credits her with exposing the "environmental hell created in Indonesia by the world's largest gold mining company," and proudly declares that her articles on the issue "forced the government to take legal action against Newmont."

Perlez's reporting may have garnered her acclaim and stature in her profession, but legal scrutiny exposed umpteen distortions and fabrications in her award-winning articles. As Ness's trial unfolded, many of the prosecution's key witnesses recanted their statements. Doctors testified that local villagers' ailments, caused largely by poor sanitation and malnutrition, were no different from those found elsewhere in Indonesia. Scientific analyses by the World Health Organization and other groups showed that Buyat Bay's waters were cleaner and safer than those of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Ness, who stated in his opening testimony that "I am seated before this court defending myself of a crime that never occurred," was finally vindicated in April 2007 when a judge dismissed all charges against him.

Eric Ness has meticulously tracked his father's needless ordeal on his blog. Now, he has excoriated the Overseas Press Club of America for lauding the fraudulent reporting that caused his family two and a half years of unconscionable stress and pain. He wonders why the group has made no move to rescind Perlez's prestigious award. And he asks why the New York Times has not retracted the specious claims that put six innocent men behind bars for 32 days.

MPI fellows Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney are no strangers to this conflicted nexus among mining companies, environmental organizations, and the media. Former journalists themselves, they know well the dangers of biased, agenda-driven reporting, and they have made an eye-opening documentary film, Mine Your Own Business, to redress the balance. See the post below for details of forthcoming screenings in Washington, D.C. If you can't attend any of the screenings, contact MPI to purchase a copy on DVD.

At Roger Williams University in Rhode Island, all students must take a course called "Science, Technology, and Society." One of twelve core courses required for graduation, this spring's version of the course is making headlines for presenting controversial material as if it were not controversial at all. When professors teaching the lab portion of the course assigned Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, some students objected that the film should be balanced by competing views.

One wrote to the dean. "With the issue of global warming being such a highly politicized topic, with the scientific community unsure if global warming is man-induced or part of the natural cycle of the earth, do you think that it is intellectually honest to only show the alarmist viewpoint?" the student asked. "If the movie is still shown, what plans are there to incorporate the ideas of leading global warming skeptics into class discussion?"

The response was revealing. "I only recently saw 'An Inconvenient Truth' and have to think that it's an ideal subject for a Core lab ... because the point of Core is to inform students of scientific principles and help them make decisions on issues with a scientific basis in their everyday lives," the dean responded in an email. "After an initial and heated debate, scientists no longer question whether the atmosphere is being warmed due to human activities and instead are increasingly impressed with the speed and impact of the process ... I repeat: there is no doubt that we're warming the earth and that a continuation of our activities will lead to profound changes. ... Penguins, polar bears and your unborn children have no vote in this. They must live with decisions we make today. ... As educators, we're charged to encourage your intellectual growth. ... That can (actually, will) be uncomfortable at times, and we're also here to help you deal with that discomfort. It's truly what makes being a human such a joy, privilege and challenge."

When word got out that the dean had effectively dismissed the student's reasonable request that Roger Williams offer a balanced presentation of a controversial issue in its required science course, criticism was intense--and justified. Caught in the act of trying to pass indoctrination off as education, the university was behaving in precisely the manner outlined in Evan Coyne Maloney's Indoctrinate U. To the university's great credit, it has responded well to criticism, and is exploring ways to make next year's course more intellectually sound.

Steve Milloy has the details, along with some important points about the educational value of debating the issues:

An RWU spokesman told me that the backlash against the required viewing of Gore's movie prompted Dean Hughes to "explore alternatives" to teaching global warming. The spokesman said that one alternative includes the presentation this fall of the counter-alarmism movie, "The Great Global Warming Swindle," a Channel 4 (U.K.) documentary that is best described as must-see global warming TV.

As the chastened Dean Hughes learned, while many people have made up their minds about global warming, many others have not. Further, there is evidence that, when presented with both sides of the debate, many believers end up changing their mindset from alarmism to skepticism about the alleged climate crisis.

Last March, the prestigious New York debating society Intelligence Squared sponsored a debate on global warming.

On the alarmist side of the debate were the Union of Concerned Scientists Brenda Ekwurzel, NASA climate modeler Gavin Schmidt and University of California oceanographer Richard C. J. Somerville.

The skeptical view of global warming alarmism was presented by Massachusetts Institute of Technology meteorologist Richard S. Lindzen, University of London bio-geographer Philip Stott, and "State of Fear" author Michael Crichton, who is also a Harvard-trained physician and an instructor at Cambridge University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

A pre-debate poll indicated that, by 2-to-1 (57 percent to 29 percent, with 14 percent undecided), the audience believed that manmade global warming was a crisis. But in the post-debate poll, the audience reversed its pre-debate views--the ranks of the skeptics swelled to 46 percent, the believers plummeted to 42 percent and the undecided declined slightly to 12 percent.

That's the power of debate.

It follows that schools, if they choose to teach the global warming controversy at all, ought to be teaching both sides of the controversy, not just Al Gore’s alarmism.

Evan Coyne Maloney asks uncomfortable questions at Foothill College.

At HumanEvents.com, news producer Ericka Andersen reviews Indoctrinate U, MPI fellow Evan Coyne Maloney's eye-opening new documentary film about ideological bias in American higher education. A recent graduate of Indiana University, Andersen reveals that her English professors regularly used class time to lead discussions of the Iraq war. But only after watching Maloney's film did she realize how professors all over the country routinely engage in this kind of gratuitous politicking:

The war in Iraq was a regular hot topic in English class when I was in school. But why -- when it had no relevance to writing analyses, breaking down prose, or fine-tuning style? When I heard about an unapologetic independent film production that uncovered illegitimate classroom agendas at public universities, I knew my school (Indiana University) was part of a larger problem.

"I've been learning in geography class that gender is socially constructed," said a student from the University of Tennessee in the revealing documentary. "Indoctrinate U" exposes the liberally biased agenda of professors and administrators whose practices are like the Wizard of Oz -- behind a curtain no one has dared to lift until now.

The film illustrates how American universities inject political dialogue into every subject from physics to 19th Century literature, according to students interviewed at schools from across the country: that is not the education their tuition was supposed to pay for. 

The controversial documentary follows award-winning filmmaker Evan Coyne Maloney onto college campuses that "routinely compel students to check their First Amendment rights at the door."

Equipped with a solitary microphone and portable video camera, Maloney takes on Bucknell, Yale, and Columbia among others, highlighting previously unchallenged, repressive patterns of oppression that stalk the halls of academia. His encounters with students and staff provide humorous footage that illuminates the lack of political balance in the heart of diversity centers, women's studies programs and freedom of speech policies.

Maloney spent more than two years compiling evidence, chronicling specific stories from large universities like Duke and smaller schools like Indian River Community College -- each in the grip of  a rhetoric of "tolerance" that, in truth, creates an overwhelming intolerance.

California Polytechnic State University student Steve Hinkle was accused of hate speech and subject to an 18-month legal trial over a flyer he posted that included the name of a book: "It's Okay to Leave the Plantation." The book was by black author Mason Weaver, the scheduled speaker of an event put on by the College Republicans.

Some students were offended by the flyer, posted in the multi-cultural center. Maloney captured the essence of his thesis when he quickly cut to Weaver himself asking, "Who cares if you're offended? Why is it against the law now to be offended?"

Maloney confidently knocks on the doors of university presidents and waits patiently for officials to return from long lunch breaks. Stocked with simple questions about the biased and oppressive practices investigation uncovered, most of his queries went unanswered.

A significant portion of the film focuses on affirmative action practices, highlighting violence and anger towards those students and professors who oppose them, the turmoil labeled an "all-out political war."

Michigan State student Lydia Brodeur, a white woman from a mixed family, was targeted by a professor for her letter to the editor opposing affirmative action. "In the name of diversity, universities are judging people on their skin color -- they do this invoking the name of Martin Luther King, but is this what he wanted, is this the dream that he had?"
 
Maloney's respectful inquiries about specific incidents of censorship, speech codes and other tyrannical behavior left him in the hands of campus police again and again -- his own free rights denied as he explored the topic.

FIRE (The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) routinely spotlights the same aspects of university policy tackled in the film. FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said the film was important because, "Your average…mainstream Democrat doesn't necessarily believe this is really happening…I didn't really understand it was really happening [before he was involved in FIRE]."

In an interview on "Hannity's America," Maloney said, "We're hoping to show that -- for all the rhetoric used in the admissions brochures -- colleges really are stepping on the idea of free thought and…people are being punished simply for expressing views."

In uncomfortable hallways with skeptical secretaries and camera-weary students, the questions you're not supposed to ask were posed. Statistics show that professors are seven times more likely to be Democrats than Republicans and one Bucknell professor said, "Anything intimidating which is going to poison the college environment can't be allowed…if you're offended by it -- that's implicitly considered harassment."

Maloney's confident exploration of the leftist indoctrination invading our nation's universities is an important message for everyone. The products of these institutions shape our nation's future. The film has not yet been picked up by a commercial distributor but you can visit the web site to sign up for a private screening. The more support and interest in this film, the better chance it has at finding a mainstream outlet. 

The website Andersen mentions is here. Please visit it today and sign up to bring Indoctrinate U to your town or city this fall.

The Weekly Standard has good things to say about Indoctrinate U:

"We were looking for specific cases that were fairly well-documented that would show different examples of people having their free speech or free thought rights trampled on campus," Maloney says.

There was no shortage of topics. The free-wheeling film first documents the rise of the "campus free speech movement" in the 1960s and '70s, then cuts to examples of modern-day conservatives being shouted down and otherwise intimidated on college campuses. Ward Connerly is verbally assaulted for daring to disagree with campus orthodoxy on the issue of affirmative action and black professors like John McWhorter, formerly of UC-Berkeley, Carol Swain of Vanderbilt University's Law School, and Temple's Lewis Gordon all express their dismay with the current state of the academy, and the suppression of intellectual diversity therein.

From there, Maloney looks at the deprivations some conservative students have faced. He highlights the Kafka-esque nightmare faced by Steve Hinkle, a student at California Polytechnic, who the school attempted to sanction for placing a flier in the university's multicultural center announcing a speech by conservative African-American author, Mason Weaver.

Maloney points out the intimidation tactics used against ROTC recruiters on campus, including a students protest designed to shut down a college job fair the Army Corps of Engineers is attending. The litany goes on and on, with conservative student publications stolen and professors told "we never would have hired you if we knew you were a Republican." Daniel Pipes sums it up best noting, "Going to a university today in the United States is like joining a church--you have to be a believer, you have to have the right set of views, or you're excluded."

The documentary combines relatively shocking footage (one professor excitedly tells the camera "whiteness is a form of racial oppression . . . treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity") with snappy editing to create a documentary that bounces quickly from subject to subject. It's not a perfect production--Indoctrinate U tends to bog down a little when Maloney tries to ambush subjects who haven't replied to multiple requests for interviews. But these segments illustrate an important point: Rather than face a rational discussion with someone who disagrees with them, many academics simply call the cops. (Maloney even had the police called on him at his alma mater, Bucknell.)

Maloney is now looking for a way to distribute his film, which is an expensive proposition. "Your first set of prints will probably run you $20,000 to $25,000, and every set after that will be $2,000 to $3,000," Maloney says. It is virtually impossible for an independent filmmaker to shoulder that cost and convince theaters to run the films. If Indoctrinate U is going to be shown at your local art house theater, it will have to be picked up by a mini-major distributor, such as Lion's Gate, or New Line.

In order to generate interest from a studio, the film's producers have been trying to stir up excitement at the grassroots level. "At our website, indoctrinateu.com, people can punch in their zip codes and when they do that, it puts a pin on a Google map. We've got thousands and thousands of pins on there now, and over 10,000 localities around the country where people have expressed interest in the film. That's a bankable asset," Maloney says. "We can go to distributors and say 'Look, we haven't spent a dime on promoting this film yet, and we've already had tens of thousands of people sign up saying they'd see this near them if it was shown there." Browning adds, "The idea is to show the demand for a film like this and show there's a ready made audience. That's the hope."

Maloney believes that his documentary has the potential to be a commercial success and hopes someone in Los Angeles takes notice. "I've gotta figure that there's at least one person in Hollywood who recognizes that there's a huge potential audience for this, and that if they think like a business person, and not like a political operative, we could very easily get mainstream distribution."

Failing that, Maloney plans to take his film directly to the people: "We've got this database of people who've already expressed an interest in seeing the film, and there's other ways of getting it to them, from DVD sales, to the iTunes movie store. One way or another, people are going to get to see this film. The only question is, 'Is Hollywood going to demonstrate that they're really nonpartisan, and do business with folks like us?'

Film is the future of free inquiry in this country--and the stakeholders in policy debate know it.

Michael Moore's new film about health care has premiered at Cannes, and has received a guardedly positive assessment from a New York Times reviewer who recognizes that Moore must be understood as a "radical partisan" and notes that while Sicko is slick, it doesn't quite convince: "It’s difficult to share his enthusiasm about [Cuba]’s apparently terrific health care given its history of human-rights abuses."

Former Tennessee senator and possible presidential candidate Fred Thompson has responded to Moore's challenge to debate health care with a hard-hitting viral video response--one that in turn refers Moore and other viewers to the work of a filmmaker who was jailed and tortured by Fidel Castro for expressing dissenting views.

The shape of this building debate is instructive. It's not just that Moore and Thompson differ on health care, but that both understand film as the medium through which debate most readily and accessibly takes place in our heavily wired (and increasingly wireless) age. With that in mind, there's another figure who should be added to this mix: MPI fellow Stuart Browning, whose short films on health care tell a very different story than the one Moore offers in Sicko. A full understanding of the issues surrounding single-payer health care systems requires a rounded grasp of the facts, and a broader understanding of the story than Moore allows. Browning's films help make that possible. Check out A Short Course in Brain Surgery and Two Women. And, if you have more time, be sure to see Dead Meat as well. There is more coming soon from Browning. Stay tuned.

MPI fellow Evan Coyne Maloney appeared live on C-SPAN's Washington Journal last Saturday morning to talk about Indoctrinate U, his forthcoming documentary film about academe's political biases. Articulate, urbane, and convincing, the New Yorker discussed his work at length, and then fielded questions from professors, students, and members of the public who phoned in to participate. The wide-ranging, vigorous discussion covered free speech, anti-military protests, affirmative action, universities' public accountability, and much more.

"I think there's such a liberal bias on campus, particularly here at Ivy League schools," commented a Yale chemistry professor. "If you support liberal ideas, your thoughts and your expression are allowed, but if you have any kind of conservatism, you're labeled as a racist, you're labeled as a right-winger. Personally, I'm an independent and I listen to both viewpoints, but I don't see much of the conservative viewpoint being discussed on the Yale campus. It's very closed-minded here."

"All ideas should be open. We should be able to exchange our ideas and agree to disagree," remarked a UMass Amherst graduate student who publicly opposes plans by students and faculty to disrupt the graduation ceremony where former White House chief of staff Andrew Card will receive an honorary degree this Friday. But now that her colleagues and professors know her views, she fears that her academic future hangs in the balance. "I'm just hoping that my career is not ruined when I go to look for a job in academia, although I believe that [my opposition to the protests] has caused a problem. But I just couldn't keep silent."

To watch Maloney's 32-minute-long appearance, go to this page, scroll down to the May 19 edition, and select his segment. RealPlayer is required to view the clip. You can also visit the official Indoctrinate U website to see the film's trailer and to request a screening in your town or city.

MPI specializes in ensuring that undiscovered directors who have something meaningful to say about freedom get a chance to say it. And so we were delighted to see that Fox's latest reality show is similarly invested in giving indie filmmakers a chance to break into the exclusive world of Hollywood. On the Lot is a highly leveraged production: Backed by Steven Spielberg and Mark Burnett and featuring Carrie Fisher (Star Wars, Postcards From the Edge), Garry Marshall (Pretty Woman, Happy Days, Mork and Mindy), and Brett Ratner (Red Dragon, X-Men: The Last Stand) as judges, On the Lot will spend thirteen weeks winnowing fifty independent filmmakers (chosen from 12,000 entrants) down to one winner whose prize will include a $1 million development deal with DreamWorks.

Last night's premiere--which was given a plum spot following the season finale of American Idol--was promising. Following the typical reality format, in which contestants are posed a series of rapid fire challenges that test their professional mettle, On the Lot first assigned the contestants to develop a film pitch from a pre-determined, deliberately cheesy log line ("a young priest falls in love with the woman of his dreams just before he is to be ordained," "a mouse plans his escape from the pharmaceutical company where he is a lab animal," and so on). Contestants were given 12 hours to come up with their pitch -- beginning at 9 PM. A fifteen hour day of listening to pitches ensued, during which advisory gems were delivered. Garry Marshall told one jittery filmmaker that nerves do not play in this business: "It costs about $100,000 a day to make a movie. No one is going to want to give that kind of money to a nervous man." Carrie Fisher advised another not to use his belt as a prop when delivering pitches: "I was worried the pants were going to come off." Around midnight, the judges eliminated the worst of the bunch and issued the second challenge: Contestants were to assemble in groups of threes to make a 2.5-minute short film on a pre-assigned topic--and they would have 24 hours to do it.

The imposed sleeplessness was a bit contrived, and added unnecessary difficulty to a competition that should center on drawing the best work from directors, not on seeing who can do without REM cycles the longest. But otherwise, the premiere was interesting and entertaining in the way good reality shows centered on professionalism generally are: The prize is real and meaningful and life-changing, the people taking part are talented and determined, and the judges take no prisoners, issuing witheringly honest criticism as needed, and freely delivering praise when it is earned. At least one reviewer objects to the show on those grounds, seeing the show's adherence to formula as a flaw. But, as Top Chef, Project Runway, The Apprentice, and America's Next Top Model have proven, that formula exists for a reason. It produces taut, exciting competition that is heightened by the fact that what motivates the judges and contestants is not competition per se, but the pursuit of excellence.

May the best director win.

Writing at NRO, Stanley Kurtz observes that Indoctrinate U is poised to reframe the debate about campus culture:

[People] of good will don't quite know what to make of the many highly publicized "anecdotes" about campus P.C. Are these merely isolated incidents, or symptoms of a pervasive problem? One of the virtues of Indoctrinate U, Evan Coyne Maloney's powerful new documentary, is that it helps us answer the "isolated anecdote" argument--both intellectually, and at a gut level.

Indoctrinate U explores the Kafkaesque nightmares that befall students and professors who run up against the P.C. behemoth: A woman with two brothers--one an adopted Guatemalan orphan--writes a letter to her school paper saying she wouldn't want to see one brother favored over the other because of skin color. A professor questions the fairness of a panel on which all seven speakers favor reparations for slavery. A representative of the College Republicans posts a flier at the campus multi-cultural center advertising a lecture by a conservative black speaker. A student writes a column complaining that the school's "issues committee" invites only left-leaning speakers to campus. A professor is accidentally revealed to be a Republican. A student from Kuwait writes an essay praising the role of the United States in world affairs. Everyone knows that such actions fly in the face of campus orthodoxy, yet few will be prepared for the enormity of the punishment these nonconformists face.

What you can't help but see--and feel--after watching Indoctrinate U is that these incredibly disproportionate public ordeals send out powerful messages to anyone on campus unwilling to toe the college's political line.

At one level, Maloney overcomes the "isolated anecdote" charge by graphically conveying the results of various studies of campus political bias. Over the past few years, these empirical studies have shifted the balance in our public debate over campus political correctness, and Maloney does a great job of bringing it all across visually. Yet the real power of this film lies in those "nightmare" cases. By showing the faces and bringing us the words of the individuals involved--and by describing the battles themselves in some detail--Maloney allows us to see that many P.C. "anecdotes" are anything but isolated.

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