Indoctrinate Who?

I haven't yet seen Indoctrinate U, a supposedly Michael Moore-esque but libertarian documentary about leftist university speech codes and such, but efforts to find a general distributor have been abetted, however unintentionally, by a bit of nonsense over at the New York Times, nonsense shown for what it is at The Volokh Conspiracy, FIRE, Power Line and by Evan Coyne Maloney, the filmmaker himself.

Documenting intolerance to non-leftist ideas or the expression thereof on American college campuses isn't far removed from documenting racial bias in the Klan, except of course that the Kluxers acknowledge that they're racists. That's hardly to say that all or even most university faculty members oppose free speech (though many apparently do) or that university administrations are generally intolerant to conservative or libertarian perspectives (though many apparently are) or even that the vocal majority of leftist organizations on most campuses (the various demographically aggrieved or special interest whiners) oppose free speech -- oh, wait a minute, yes it does.

True, most university faculty members are liberals or leftists of one sort or another. The good news here, though, is that many if not most students pay little attention to their professors beyond listening either for confirmation of their preexisting political prejudices or evidence of deviant speech that might fuel their self-righteous indignation. The quest for diversity has university administrations pretty much cowed, for there are few fates worse than getting stuck with a reputation of being a hostile environment to women and minorities. Hence, however approvingly some faculty may look on such nonsense, much of the hothouse political correctness of the schools these days is self-inflicted by students, themselves, with an assist from administrators who care far more about attracting the right demographics for their freshman class than whatever the students experience or learn once there.

I have no idea whether Indoctrinate U is a good film or whether it will succeed in finding a wider audience. I can predict, however, that its attempted showing on college campuses themselves, is certain to result in howls of protest from the usual suspects on those campuses and that they will be utterly oblivious to the irony of it all.