The good folks over at the New York Times finally got around to http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/education/27education.html?_r=1&oref=s... target=_blank>taking a look at Indoctrinate U in the education section yesterday. As we might have expected, the Times's take on the film was less than flattering--indeed, the author seems to use Evan Coyne Maloney's film as little more than an introductory device to tell us how few restrictions are placed on free speech on campus.
Maloney has done http://brain-terminal.com/posts/2007/06/27/nyt-covers-iu target=_blank>a fine job dismantling the Times piece, which went so far as to praise university administrators for reopening newspapers they'd previously shut-down for what they perceived as objectionable political content:
Oddly, one of the examples cited in the article (but not the film) was the case of a student paper published by Vassar's Moderate, Independent and Conservative Student Alliance. The paper was de-funded and shut down for a year after publishing a piece criticizing the school's funding of special "social centers" for minority and gay students. But because the paper was eventually allowed to start publishing again--the following year--the Vassar case is presented as one in which "[u]ltimately, free speech was respected."
Sorry, but shutting down a paper for a year is not a benign event, and it is certainly not one in which we can say "free speech was respected." If Homeland Security shut down the Times for a year after exposing ways that we track terrorist financing, I'm sure they'd understand my position on this.
I've already written up my own thoughts on the film, so I won't go into it any more here. But it is useful to contrast the treatment this documentary received with that of another controversial flick making the rounds: Sicko. A.O. Scott reviewed the new Michael Moore picture for the Times in a modestly celebratory manner. While Maloney's film is dismissed as "just a pastiche of notorious events," Moore's is praised for making an "argument [that] is illustrated with anecdotes and statistics--terrible stories about Americans denied medical care or forced into bankruptcy to pay for it; grim actuarial data about life expectancy and infant mortality; damning tallies of dollars donated to political campaigns."
Those interested in seeing some other "anecdotes and statistics" that argue America's health care "crisis" is overblown and that socialized medicine is dangerous to your health can check out Free Market Cure, a project brought to us by one of the primary financiers of Indoctrinate U, Stuart Browning.
