John K. Wilson, who founded an organization called The Institute for College Freedom (check out their site, if only for the nifty icons on the homepage), accuses me of “biases, distortions, and omissions” in his commentary on Indoctrinate U.
His critique was recently posted at Minding the Campus, which also allowed me a chance to respond. My response also appears below.
I appreciate the thorough and thoughtful analysis of my film Indoctrinate U by John K. Wilson. It is good to be having this discussion about the state of academia, and one of my hopes in making this film was that it would bring this debate to a much wider audience. Academic insiders are already aware of these issues, but the public at large is not.
Mr. Wilson has some strong critiques of my work, and I must say that given his perspective as someone who’s been involved in academic battles himself, I can understand some of his complaints. But where I have a fundamental disagreement is that he makes some rather broad assumptions about why I covered certain things and not others.
In effect, Wilson seems to be criticizing me for not making the film he would like see about academia. What’s worse, without understanding my rationale for choosing the footage I did, he accuses me of making a film with “numerous biases, distortions and omissions.”
If I’m being charged with having a bias, then I plead guilty. Like anyone else, I have my own perspective that colors the way in which I see the world. And when I convey my view of the world (or anything in it) to other people, my communication will by definition be infused with my own biases. There is simply no way around this; any message carries with it something personal, something reflective of its originator.
But I believe being up front and honest with people about my personal perspective is preferable to the hiding behind the cloak of claimed objectivity. In the name of objectivity, media outlets require reporters to be evasive, telling them to refrain from making political contributions or revealing too much about their own views. Of course, acting this way does not mean that a reporter has no opinions; it just means that those opinions are hidden from the public, making it harder to consume a journalist’s work with full awareness of the worldview that influenced the creation of that work.
So, in the interest of full disclosure, it is true that I consider myself a libertarian-style conservative. That is my personal bias.
But Wilson’s implication that I deliberately distorted facts in order to deceive viewers is not only completely without merit, it’s not even supported by Wilson’s own claims.
First, he states that “liberty on campus is far better protected today than it’s ever been.” This is a rather astonishing statement that Wilson makes without citing any evidence at all. If this assertion reflects Mr. Wilson’s own personal view, then it explains his overall take on my film.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which defends students and professors against infringements on their free speech and free thought rights, receives hundreds upon hundreds of reports each year in which those rights have been trampled. And an overwhelming percentage of schools surveyed by FIRE have “speech codes” on the books that can be - and often are - used to punish rather tame speech.
To whatever extent liberty on campus is protected at all, it is usually by people who refuse to be pushed around and through the vigilant action of external groups like FIRE. Go to FIRE’s website and you’ll see new cases cropping up regularly.
Wilson also says, “[Maloney] takes Noel Ignatiev’s theories about whiteness and reduces him to a series of two-second edited clips mangled together, trying to make him look foolish. It only makes Maloney look bad, since he seems unwilling to engage intellectually with a theory he doesn’t like and even appears to suggest that thinkers like Ignatiev should be banished from academia since Maloney is annoyed that such ideas are considered ‘completely legit.”
In no way did I suggest that Professor Ignatiev should be banished from academia. Mr. Wilson should know better than to charge something he knows he can’t back up. In fact, when Professor Ward Churchill came under fire for comments that I personally found quite reprehensible, I publicly argued in favor of his free speech rights, saying that his statements should not cause him to lose tenure. A quick web search would have revealed that fact, but Wilson seems to prefer assuming he knows how I think rather than actually finding out.
It is true that Churchill ultimately lost his job, but his firing was due to the impressive volume of academic fraud he committed. I recognize that this fraud may never have been uncovered if it weren’t for the attention generated by his controversial comments. But that doesn’t prove Churchill was fired for his statements, it just proves that if you’re engaging in wholesale fraud, it would be wise not to call too much attention to yourself.
Wilson’s assumptions about why Professor Ignatiev’s footage was included in the film are also wrong. Ignatiev himself notes that, despite a career of making controversial statements like “my concern is doing away with whiteness,” he “can’t think of any examples where [his statements have] provoked political censorship.”
Well, contrast that with the other people in the film who engaged in much more mild speech, and you’ll understand why Ignatiev’s statements were included: not to criticize his views, but to illustrate the double-standard in academia.
Mr. Wilson’s commentary is rife with similar misunderstandings. The film begins with Professor David Clemens, who describes a (since rescinded) requirement that every course at his school must include discussions of race, class and gender.
Clemens explains that this applied to classes in all subjects - math, physics and even ornamental horticulture - and criticizes the requirement as “an affront to any notion of academic freedom.” The affront is obvious: in effect, the school was saying, “you’re free to teach whatever and however you want, as long as you somehow relate it to race, class and gender politics.” Even classes about plants!
Because of this requirement, professors proposing new classes had to fill out forms indicating how such topics would be brought up in class. This is where Wilson completely misses the point. Instead of addressing the fact that professors were required to inject into their courses political topics that had absolutely nothing to do with the subject matter, Wilson casts it as merely an issue of paperwork, stating, “Actually, it’s only an affront to the rather odd notion that academic freedom protects professors from questionnaires.”
The paperwork wasn’t the issue, the course requirements were. But Wilson’s convenient obtuseness allows him to ignore that point altogether.
Similarly, Wilson misconstrues comments by Professor K C Johnson in which the professor refers to a “purge” in his department at Brooklyn College. Wilson is mistaken in thinking that Professor Johnson’s tenure battle can be reduced to the one issue he cites, which wasn’t the issue I was raising in the first place.
A number of things happened in Professor Johnson’s department over the years, one of which was an attempt to purge students from his classes.
Professor Johnson’s history classes were popular with students, but they were more traditionally-focused than those of his colleagues. Johnson, you see, is another one of those radicals who believes that there are other ways of looking at the world than through the ever- present lens of race, class and gender.
After Johnson’s differences with his colleagues became problematic, people in his department figured out a way to retaliate against Johnson using his students as pawns. If enough students could be removed from Johnson’s classes, his classes could be shut down.
Prerequisite requirements that hadn’t been enforced for years were suddenly being enforced against Professor Johnson’s students - and only Professor Johnson’s students - forcing those students to drop his class and lose the necessary credit for the semester. This political battle among professors ended up putting students in jeopardy of not graduating.
Dan Weininger, one of Professor Johnson’s former students who appears in Indoctrinate U, described this purge in great detail during our interview, but it didn’t make the final cut of the film. Nonetheless, when you look at all the facets of Professor Johnson’s battles at Brooklyn College, you see that the “uncollegiality” charge was just a legal fig-leaf.
Thanks to advice from an attorney within the college, Professor Johnson’s antagonists soon realized that the cleanest way to get rid of him would be to accuse him of uncollegiality, a charge so nebulous that it’s impossible to defend against. Ultimately, it worked, and Professor Johnson was denied tenure.
But the evidence showed that it was Professor Johnson’s critics who acted uncollegially, something the Board of Trustees of the City University of New York clearly recognized. As the controlling entity of Brooklyn College, the Trustees saw the injustice done to Professor Johnson, and took the unusual step of reversing his denial of tenure, an action the Trustees hadn’t taken in decades.
Wilson also talks about the case of Ahmad al-Qoloushi and argues that the paper he submitted to his professor was deficient. That may be; the film made no claims about the quality of his work. But even if he handed in the most poorly-written paper in the history of mankind, it should not result in the professor doing what al-Qoloushi alleges. There are proper academic remedies for poor work, and ordering a student to see a school psychologist under the threat of losing his visa and being thrown out of the country is not one of them.
Later in his commentary, Wilson characterizes protesters at San Francisco State as behaving “peacefully” in an incident shown in the film. Yet, a number of times in this scene, students can be seen throwing objects at recruiters for the Army Corps of Engineers. If this footage looks “peaceful” to Mr. Wilson, then I wonder what his idea of a riot is.
Also, while other protests at SFSU may have led to arrests - San Francisco State is one of the more radical campuses in the country - nobody was arrested during the protest shown in the film. Although, given what is captured on camera, I think a few arrests would have been entirely justified.
Wilson spends the rest of his piece citing anecdotes showing that left- of-center folks sometimes have their rights suppressed in academia. This is undoubtedly true, and it is a point that is explicitly stated in the film.
Wilson claims evidence of a student who was apparently graded poorly because of his viewpoints. We stayed away from delving into grade dispute cases because assigning grades is a subjective process and proving malfeasance on the part of the professor is difficult.
If Wilson’s point with these anecdotes is that liberal students and professors are sometimes mistreated in academia, then he’s right. It happens, and when it does, it isn’t fair, and I don’t like it. But if that’s Wilson’s point, then he’s rebutting an argument I never made.
Ultimately, these counter-anecdotes do nothing to refute my actual argument, which is that there’s an overwhelming double-standard regarding speech on campus, and most often (but not always) right-of- center thinkers are the ones who have their rights curtailed.
The problem with Wilson’s argument is that its intent seems to be to convince the reader that there is no ideological slant in academia. You’d have to ignore an awful lot of evidence—only a tiny subset of which I present in the film - to reach that conclusion. And to ignore the ideological slant that causes the selective application of justice on campus would be to distort the truth in the very way that Wilson accuses me of doing. Pretending that campuses reflect the 50/50 red/blue split of the rest of the country, which is what Wilson seems to want me to do, would be the biggest distortion of all.
Near the end of his piece, Wilson asks, “does Maloney [support] intellectual freedom for all, or does he embrace certain conservatives who want to silence left-wing views they disagree with?” Why Mr. Wilson believes I only favor free speech for folks I agree with is beyond me. The film is quite clear. In fact, Wilson obviously recognizes my support for free speech in the abstract: the film cites (the non-violent aspects of) the 1960s campus free speech movement in a positive light, but Wilson minimizes this, saying “it’s amusing to see conservatives embrace the campus liberatory movements of the 1960s.”
So I find it odd that Wilson ends his piece wondering if I’m actually “supporting intellectual freedom for all” when in his third paragraph, he acknowledges - but mocks as “amusing” - an indication of my support for that very thing. I didn’t think it was at all ambiguous, but perhaps I can be more clear: suppression of ideas and attacks against free thought are tyrannical, and it is something I would oppose regardless of whether the ideas are ones I believe myself. And if campuses were dominated by folks who only agreed with me, the problems in academia would probably be about the same, just with a different set of targets. The real enemy is groupthink, and the tendency to succumb to groupthink is a human failing that’s not limited to any particular point on the political spectrum.
Which is exactly why free speech in the abstract is so important. Even if your favored group is in power now, you should remember that change is the only constant through human history. Every monopoly eventually crumbles, and some day, people who disagree with you will end up with power. So, if only out of pure self-interest, do everything you can to foster and preserve respect for free speech. Because if you sanction an environment in which speech and thought can be punished, you empower censors who may some day use that power against you.
Recently, I worked with FIRE and fellow documentarian Andrew Marcus to produce a video covering the case of Hayden Barnes, a student at Valdosta State University who was expelled for protesting the environmental impact of a planned parking garage on campus. (The video is available here. Also, Hayden’s expulsion has since been overturned, thanks in no small part to FIRE and their work on his behalf.)
Hayden and I come from very different places on the ideological spectrum, but I respect him for not backing down when his rights were violated. I wanted to highlight his fight so that it may inspire others, and I was happy to lend a hand in covering his case precisely because the principle of free speech is so important.
Despite the shaky arguments against my film, I enjoyed reading Wilson’s commentary. And I certainly can’t complain too loudly about someone who says Indoctrinate U “is probably the best documentary ever made about higher education,” that it “deserves a wide showing on college campuses,” or that “[e]very college should show this movie to its administrators, faculty, and students.” I completely agree!
If anything, I’m just disappointed that he so badly misread my message. And as the filmmaker, part of the blame for that must rest with me.
