ACTA's Must-Reads
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Indoctrinate U on the air
Last Saturday, Evan Coyne Maloney appeared on C-Span to discuss his new film, Indoctrinate U. The segment is 32 minutes long, and features some very sharp commentary--from Maloney and callers alike--on the state of free speech and free inquiry on American campuses. It's well worth a listen, not least because Maloney is such an exceptional spokesman for the importance of intellectual diversity in academia.
Indoctrinate U documents case after case of students and faculty members whose academic careers were damaged when they expressed views that differed from institutional orthodoxy. In Maloney's words, "Basically we want to try to show the American public that there is really an attack on free speech and free thought on campus." Usually, Maloney notes, it's the conservative or libertarian professor or student who runs into trouble for "expressing political views that in the rest of society are fairly mainstream." But the point, he stresses repeatedly, is not that one view is right and one view wrong, nor is it that one view deserves to replace the other. The point, he observes, "goes far beyond any sort of ideological bias and it goes toward one of the founding principles of this country. Should people have the right to express their ideas freely? One would think that on a college campus that would be the prime value. But it turns out that that's oftentimes one of the last values under consideration."
Throughout the show, Maloney was consistent in his message, which transcends partisan politics to focus on what kind of environment higher education should be for everyone: "Academia wouldn't be better off if everyone agreed with me," he stated. "My issue is: Are the people in the ideological minority on campus able to express their views without having their academic careers ended? I think that if everyone did agree with me on campus the problem would be the same, just with another set of victims. I'm not interested in making academia look like me ideologically. I am just hoping academia will recognize that there is a value to multiple perspectives."
Despite more than 200 attempts to contact higher education administrators at schools where students' or faculty members' expressive freedoms had been curtailed, not one agreed to appear on camera. "That's appalling," Maloney said. "A lot of these schools are public schools and they should be accountable to the taxpayers. But I think in a lot of cases they are accountable to nobody so they refused to speak to us. If taxpayers are going to be forcibly required to fund these universities then these universities should be accountable to the taxpayers. As far as I can tell, the university is the only institution that receives that amount of public money that feels like they have absolutely zero accountability to anyone."
When asked whether Indoctrinate U poses any solutions to the problem it outlines, Maloney indicated that this is a job for others: "I don't get into how to effect change on campus," he said. "My point is that in helping people understand the problem, other people might come up with solutions for how to deal with it."
But while Maloney does not offer solutions, his film features organizations that do. ACTA is one of them. ACTA president Anne D. Neal appears in the film, where she discusses how a recent ACTA-sponsored student survey found that nearly half the students polled felt considerable political pressure in the classroom. It's also worth nothing that ACTA's 2005 study, Intellectual Diversity: A Time for Action, amounts to a blueprint for addressing many of the issues Maloney raises in his film. The booklet charts the problems posed by speech codes, one-sided speaker schedules, politicized hiring and promotion practices, and a classroom culture often indifferent to scholarly standards. It also offers recommendations for change that are cost-effective and that respect the academic freedom of faculties as well as the institutional autonomy of individual schools. ACTA has also been a strong advocate of accountability, urging colleges and universities to report annually on the steps they are taking to ensure intellectual diversity on campus.
Maloney's message thus dovetails with ACTA's. Both see a pressing problem on our campuses, and both take a nonpartisan, temperate approach to ensuring that the problem is properly understood and effectively addressed.
Indeed, Maloney's concluding words might well be ACTA's own: "I think we all have to recognize as humans that we have these frailties, and one of the frailties is groupthink and the fact that when we get into large communities we tend not to like when people come in and challenge the dominant views. That's why I think it is important to respect free speech because that happens regardless of ideology. The problem would be just the same on campus if the roles on campus were reversed. ... I hope we can look beyond the ideological battles that go on and really embrace the notion of free speech and free thought because on a college campus that's what it should be all about."
Posted by acta online on May 24, 2007 at May 24, 2007 12:04 PM
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Comments
What a self-important windbag this guy Maloney is! No administrators agree to appear in his film -- sounds smart to me, it would be like generals agreeing to appear in a Michael Moore film -- and Maloney spouts about how the universities supposedly think they're not accountable to the taxpayers. As if somebody has appointed Maloney to represent the taxpayers!
At the place I work, there is no way the president would agree to appear in a film like this. But if the legislature asks him to make an appearance, he's off to the state capitol in a flash. I'm not a fan of the U. president, but that's accountability.
Posted by: Mike at May 26, 2007 01:58 PM
I wonder if the film discusses the conservative orthodoxy that has a stranglehold on nearly all economics teaching, both in the US and in Europe. This, from an article in *The Nation*, about the struggle of "heterodox economists":
"In 2000 the economics graduate students at the École Normale Supérieure staged a mutiny, signing a manifesto that objected to the 'autistic' economics they were being taught. 'Too often,' the students wrote, 'the lectures leave no place for reflection. Out of all the approaches to economic questions that exist, generally only one is presented to us. This approach is supposed to explain everything by means of a purely axiomatic process, as if this were THE economic truth. We do not accept this dogmatism.'
"The rebellion spread across Europe and gave rise to a fairly vibrant Post-Autistic Economics movement in places like England and Germany. But in the United States, the Post-Autistic movement never caught fire, and dissident economists remain clustered in a handful of locations: the University of Utah; UMass, Amherst; the University of Missouri, Kansas City; The New School; Notre Dame; and in a few professional associations and journals. 'We're between 5 and 10 percent in the academy,' Frederic Lee, who edits the Heterodox Economics Newsletter, tells me. 'That might be generous. It's not very much, but it would be like saying Jews only constitute 5 percent of Europe. Yeah, sure, after you slaughter 'em. The issue isn't that you're small--the issue is that you're there at all.'
"The chief complaint of heterodox economists is that the social hierarchy of the profession prevents their ideas from getting the hearing they deserve. Thomas Palley, a dissident economist who received his PhD from Yale and once worked for the AFL-CIO, says that many heterodox ideas 'can't be rejected on scientific grounds. They meet all the tests of the profession--they don't meet tastes of the profession. So then you have to answer where the tastes come from.'"
Posted by: Linval Thompson at May 31, 2007 08:52 AM