Persistence of Vision

Throughout the spring and summer of 2007, Maloney did dozens of interviews on syndicated talk radio. He also made numerous television appearances on shows spanning the political spectrum, appearing as a guest on CNN's Glenn Beck Show, CNN Headline News, and the Fox News Channel's Your World with Neil Cavuto. Meanwhile, newspapers and magazines across the country regularly featured Indoctrinate U. The Washington Times ran a detailed story on the film, highlighting MPI's role in ensuring that it got made and promoted. Noting that "it takes a movie to bring across the amazing, campus-wide power of even a single expertly conducted case of P.C. intimidation," National Review Online said that the film has "real power." A glowing review in the Weekly Standard attracted a link from the Drudge Report, one of the Internet's most highly trafficked news sites. The New York Post ran an extended interview with Maloney--and the New York Times published a review that generated vigorous debate about free speech on campus. Profiles of Maloney appeared in the New York Sun, 411Mania.com, Philadelphia's Bulletin, and the Washington Post's Express, while feature articles on MPI founder and Indoctrinate U producer Thor Halvorssen appeared in the New York Times, the Weekly Standard, and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Prominent and immensely positive reviews of Indoctrinate U were published in the Washington Examiner, National Review Online, CBNNews.com, and London's Daily Telegraph, to name a few. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, George Mason University law professor Peter Berkowitz called the film "a riveting documentary about the war on free speech and individual rights waged by university faculty and administrators."

Key to this early publicity were the private previews MPI organized in New York City and Washington, D.C., for journalists and higher education leaders. Attendees were impressed by the film's power, cogency, and eloquence. Carol Iannone, editor of the National Association of Scholars' journal Academic Questions, found the film "shocking--even to someone who knows a lot about political coercion on today's campuses--and also, amazingly, highly entertaining." Observing how it appealed to audiences across the political spectrum, David Hogberg of the American Spectator called Indoctrinate U a "major step forward" for alternative viewpoints in film.

Further private screenings brought Indoctrinate U to select, well-positioned audiences. On July 10, American Civil Rights Institute founder Ward Connerly sponsored a screening at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, a highly successful event that was followed by similar screenings in Washington, D.C., and on Mackinac Island. The film also enjoyed a sold-out, 600-seat screening at a national Republican convention in Michigan.

These initial months of publicity and targeted private screenings set the stage for the films world premiere. On Friday, September 28, Indoctrinate U screened at Washington, D.C.'s prestigious John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The marquee event at the American Film Renaissance Film Festival, the screening, which MPI co-hosted with the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, was a spectacular success. A sold-out crowd of 500 awarded director Evan Coyne Maloney a standing ovation. Cable outlet Home Box Office (HBO) attended the premiere to interview filmmakers and members of the audience for a documentary on the assault on the First Amendment.

The Kennedy Center premiere laid a strong foundation for Indoctrinate U's entrance onto the campus scene, as well as for ensuring the film's continued appeal in theaters across the United States and Canada. Hundreds of local sign-ups and the great energy of the Minnesota Association of Scholars brought Indoctrinate U to the Twin Cities, where it played at Minneapolis-St. Paul's 315-seat Oak Street Cinema from October 26 through November 1. The sold-out opening night screening was followed by a special dinner where Maloney and producer Thor Halvorssen hosted a spirited question-and-answer session; academic lectures and discussion panels were also held throughout the week. Newspaper and radio coverage was strong and complimentary, as was the public response: More than 900 paying customers saw the film over the course of the week.

On November 17, Indoctrinate U screened at the Midwest Junior State of America Convention in Madison, Wisconsin. As one organizer wrote, "the students gathered at our conference were highly motivated, politically active, and aware delegates. Every single viewer was impressed by the thought-provoking issues the film discussed." And, on November 18, nearly 100 people attended a screening at the Cleveland Institute of Art's Cinematheque, a small nonprofit theater adjacent to Case Western Reserve University. "I think this is the only movie I've been at in twenty years which ended with cheers and applause," one audience member wrote.

These reactions tally with those of seasoned Hollywood veterans. At an October 13 event at the home of Patricia Heaton (Everybody Loves Raymond) and David Hunt (24), the film was celebrated and distributed to 200 industry insiders. Glowing reviews followed from Heaton, Kelsey Grammer (Frasier), Gary Sinise (Forrest Gump, CSI: NY), Jon Voight (Midnight Cowboy, Mission Impossible), and David Zucker (Scary Movie, Airplane, The Naked Gun).

Indoctrinate U's impact has been felt in academe as well as Hollywood. Prominent professors such as Stanley Fish have grudgingly acknowledged Indoctrinate U's timeliness and power. "Academics often bridle at the picture of their activities presented by Maloney and other conservative critics, and accuse them of grossly caricaturing and exaggerating what goes on in the classroom," Fish wrote in an October posting at his highly trafficked New York Times blog. "Maybe so, but so long as there are those who confuse advocacy with teaching, and so long as faculty colleagues and university administrators look the other way, the academy invites the criticism it receives in this documentary."

Fish's acknowledgement of the film's timely and powerful message to academe was a perfect preface for Indoctrinate U's nationwide campus tour. Beginning in January 2008, we focused our efforts on responding to the numerous colleges and universities that had contacted us about arranging campus screenings of the film. This was a grassroots effort that depended on students and faculty sponsoring and publicizing screenings. To help them with this vital and difficult work, we created colorful, vibrant promotional kits that included T-shirts, posters, DVDs, a modular press release, biographies of the film's principals, and electronic art assets that could be used to create flyers, web pages, and promotional emails. MPI's campus kits have proven to be invaluable--they are inexpensive and easy to use, and they have enabled motivated sponsors to draw hundreds of students and faculty to their screening events.

On January 29, Indoctrinate U kicked off its campus tour with a hugely successful screening at Duke University. Coordinated by campus groups from across the political spectrum, the highlight of the night was a sparkling discussion session with Maloney and Halvorssen that exemplified the ideal of free exchange that is so vital to the intellectual life of universities. "We promoted the event," the organizers reported, "with an attempt to attract a diverse audience, ethnically, ideologically, and intellectually. We encouraged attendees to prepare to ask tough, penetrating questions during the Q&A. Evan and Thor were fantastic!"

Since then, Indoctrinate U has screened at twenty-seven college and university campuses around the nation. In addition to Duke, the film has played at Louisiana State University at Shreveport (January 29), San Diego State University (February 13), the University of Wisconsin at Madison (February 25), Indiana University School of Law (February 25), Canada's Carleton University (February 28), the College of St. Benedict and St. John's University (March 3), George Washington University (March 3), Denison University (March 18), Wabash College (March 25), Cornell University (March 28), Seton Hall University (March 31), Emerson College (April 1), East Tennessee State University (April 2), Michigan State University (April 3), Bucknell University (April 3), Oberlin College (April 10), the University of Wisconsin--River Falls (April 15 & 16), Ohio State University (April 15), Central Michigan University (April 16), Ohio University (April 21), the University of California at Irvine (April 22), Allegheny College (April 24), Towson University (April 30), Maryville College (May 1), and the University of California at Santa Cruz (May 21). And on June 15, Indoctrinate U enjoyed its Los Angeles premiere with a screening at the University of Southern California's glorious 1,200-seat Bovard Auditorium. Several screenings were attended by Evan Coyne Maloney, producer Thor Halvorssen, or associate producer and MPI board president Frayda Levy. A number of other colleges and universities have contacted us to arrange campus showings of the film, and MPI will continue to facilitate screenings at every campus that expresses interest.

Wherever Indoctrinate U plays, students rave about it. "The Indoctrinate U screening was a great success!" enthused a student at the College of St. Benedict and St. John's University. "I was pleasantly surprised at how funny people thought it was--people were laughing throughout the entire film." An East Tennessee State student agreed. "It was great to have the film at our school, and those in attendance will definitely be looking at their experiences on campus differently in the future," he said. "It was refreshing to realize that there are people out there who realize that exposing the double standard in campus 'diversity' doesn't make you a racist, a white supremacist, a neo-Nazi," wrote a Cornell student. "I can't tell you how many times I have been called a racist on this campus for talking about the same sorts of biased campus policies that appear in your film. Your film was a rare opportunity for validation."

Meanwhile, public and private screenings continue. On April 14, MPI and the Manhattan Institute teamed up to co-host the New York premiere of Indoctrinate U. Held at the 500-seat Directors Guild of America Theater, the premiere thrilled the hundreds who turned out to see it. "The only thing that can be more gratifying to a filmmaker than having a packed house is having the house packed with a lively audience that responds enthusiastically," Maloney said afterward. "It was truly a special night." In the wake of the New York premiere, Maloney appeared on the Fox News channel to discuss the intrusion of politics into the higher education curriculum. In addition, John McWhorter, a former UC Berkeley professor who is now a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, published a hard-hitting op-ed in the New York Sun. "[A] sense of the politics of the nation as intellectually unassailable is so unquestioned in campus culture that it becomes easy to forget the rest of the country thinks differently," McWhorter wrote. "Hopefully the film will bolster efforts to bring faculty representing a wider spectrum of views to college campuses."

As this brief summary shows, Indoctrinate U is having a profound impact on debates about free speech, individual rights, and ideological one-sidedness on our college and university campuses. By revitalizing a conversation that had stagnated beneath reams of print --and particularly by moving that conversation into the arena of film--Indoctrinate U is motivating a new generation to embrace and defend the fundamental principles of academic freedom, free expression, and unfettered intellectual inquiry that are vital to the future of our nation. Now available in DVD and as a digital download, Indoctrinate U will continue to raise awareness and trigger vital debate for the foreseeable future.

Thanks in no small part to this film's kind supporters, our sustained marketing campaign has ensured a bright future for Indoctrinate U. As MPI continues to promote this film--which is playing today at the Los Angeles Lincoln Club--Indoctrinate U's reach is extending beyond North America and into Europe, where academic freedom and free inquiry on campus are also suffering. We are currently in contact with a German organization that would like to show Indoctrinate U in Berlin and Frankfurt, and expect to pursue our campus campaign aggressively throughout the 2008-09 school year.