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Get a taste of "Indoctrinate U" on Sunday
ACTA has long worked with filmmaker Evan Coyne Maloney, the director of Indoctrinate U, the forthcoming documentary on campus political correctness. Evan spoke at ACTA's 2005 ATHENA Roundtable, where he showed Brainwashing 201, a documentary short he developed while collecting the footage for Indoctrinate U, and just last summer, he showed a preview of Indoctrinate U to a standing-room-only crowd on Capitol Hill. The feature-length film will be released shortly, and it features ACTA.
Given this long and fruitful relationship, we are especially pleased to see that the world will get its first taste of Indoctrinate U this weekend. Evan will be interviewed, and parts of the film will be shown, this Sunday on Hannity's America, which airs at 9 p.m. on the East Coast. We are sure that the TV audience will love what it sees--and to understand why, simply read this account by Evan of the event we held last summer:
On July 26th, a subcommittee room in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill overflowed with people. The seats went quickly, so some sat on the floor, others stood tip-toe to get a peek, and the rest jammed the entrance, craning their necks through the doorway to look inside. The invitees all work at the House of Representatives, and the event was ACTA's screening of select clips from my upcoming film, Indoctrinate U, which looks at the political environment that prevails on many college campuses.The attendees who already knew ACTA saw a familiar face in the film: that of Anne Neal, the president of ACTA, who was kind enough to travel to New York for an interview last fall. In the interview, Anne discussed the prevalence of politics in the classroom--even classes where politics has nothing to do with the course material--and the pressure that students feel to parrot back professors' political views, lest any dissent cause their grades to suffer.
To say the event was a success would be to redefine that word into mediocrity. I've done my share of events like this, but I was astounded and supremely grateful for the reception that ACTA was able to put together. Getting people away from work in the middle of the day is not an easy task, especially when the workplace is Congress. Nevertheless, ACTA pulled in an eager and enthusiastic crowd who watched the 37-minute preview, ate pizza, and stuck around afterwards to ask questions.
I've been working on this film for nearly three years, and in that time have become very familiar with the players in the academic reform movement. Quite simply, no other group is doing the work ACTA's doing. The research is meticulous and reasoned, and without it, I would not have been able to put together the film I did.
Students and recent graduates can tell you all about the troubled state of academia, but without the work that ACTA has done to document it, my film would be comprised of little more than anecdotes. In the marketplace of ideas, data matters, and ACTA has been instrumental in collecting the evidence that proves the stories covered in Indoctrinate U really are part of a larger pattern that repeats itself all across academia.
Thanks, Evan--and congratulations.
Posted by cmitchell on March 16, 2007 at March 16, 2007 03:01 PM
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