Evan Coyne Maloney was struck by the zealous commitment to tolerance and diversity shown by Bucknell University’s administration. However, when the conservative-leaning student newspaper Mr. Maloney edited began to disappear from distribution locations, the Bucknell administration was not concerned. Nothing was done to find the perpetrators.
Nor did campus security take action when Mr. Maloney received two death threats as a result of an opinion piece he wrote that challenged affirmative action by quoting Martin Luther King.
“This kind of thing literally trashes free speech and free thought,” said Mr. Maloney, now 35. “It seemed odd that for all the talk about tolerance and diversity, there was no tolerance for different points of view.”
Mr. Maloney’s undergraduate experiences contributed to his passion for free speech. After graduation, he learned that the problems he encountered at Bucknell were happening at campuses all around the country, but they were not receiving wide attention.
That led Mr. Maloney to spend 2 years researching “Indoctrinate U,” his feature-length documentary about what he calls the “repressive political climate” at America’s colleges and universities. The film features such prestigious schools as Yale, Harvard, Duke, Columbia, Vanderbilt, Stanford and Temple, as well as major state universities including the University of California at Berkeley, Michigan State, Penn State and the University of Tennessee.
On more than one occasion while making the film, campus police escorted Mr. Maloney out of campus buildings after administrators refused to speak on camera. During the making of “Indoctrinate U,” the filmmakers made more than 200 attempts to contact administrators involved in various campus incidents. None of the administrators was willing to speak on camera.
Mr. Maloney says he was astonished by how few administrators were willing to defend their policies.
“One thing that shocked me is that these people know what they’re doing is wrong, and they keep doing it,” he said. “Rather than stop, they just do everything they can to make sure that the public doesn’t find out.”
For Mr. Maloney, directing films is a relatively new endeavor. He was a software developer until the company he worked for went out of business in the collapse of the dot-com bubble. In early 2003, he was looking for other things to do. He noticed that television and press coverage of antiwar protests was very different from what he was seeing in New York.
Mr. Maloney recognized that many of the protesters were Marxists and from other extremist groups. He made a video of interviews with protesters and posted it on his blog, Brain-Terminal.com. The video then made its way to the Fox News Channel.
He then joined forces with Stuart Browning and Blaine Greenberg to form a film production company, On the Fence, that produced two short documentaries, “Brainwashing 101” (2004) and “Brainwashing 201” (2005).
Those early films caught the attention of Thor Halvorssen, founder of the Moving Picture Institute (MPI). “I saw a lot of potential, and I wanted to help [Mr. Maloney] in other ways,” Mr. Halvorssen said.
MPI, founded in 2005, “exists to nurture aspiring filmmakers who care about American freedom,” said Mr. Halvorssen. MPI has generated support and publicity for “Indoctrinate U.”
Already the movie has been praised as “excellent” in the Rocky Mountain News, and gotten noticed by several conservative publications, with National Review’s Stanley Kurtz calling it “fun and powerful” and the Weekly Standard describing it as “free-wheeling.”
“Indoctrinate U” follows Mr. Maloney to different campuses, where he chronicles the stories of students like Steve Hinkle, who was prosecuted for posting flyers for an upcoming College Republicans event at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, Calif.
Because neither campus administrators nor university trustees are protecting individual rights on campus, Mr. Maloney said, someone must. “It’s time for us as taxpayers and as citizens to exercise some oversight on our own,” he said.
His hope is “that by people seeing this film, there will be enough people out there to hold professors and administrators to account,” Mr. Maloney said.
Mr. Halvorssen called the film “a vitally important contribution to higher-education reform” that “shines the light of public exposure on the assault on civil liberties that occurs on a daily basis on American college campuses.”
Conservatives have only recently begun making documentaries, a genre long dominated by liberals. In April, David Horowitz’s Terrorism Awareness Project promoted campus showings of “Obsession,” a 2006 film about the threat of radical Islam. In April, the San Francisco-based Pacific Research Institute released “A Convenient Fiction,” a film starring Stephen Hayward that examines global warming from a skeptical viewpoint.
But while liberal documentaries like Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” and Michael Moore’s “Sicko” garner major studio support, no commercial distributor has picked up “Indoctrinate U.”
In order to demonstrate the potential audience for the film, visitors to the “Indoctrinate-U” Web site (www.indoctrinate-u.com) are asked to enter their names and ZIP codes, producing an online map showing the demand.
Mr. Maloney said he hopes that the response will prove to distributors that there is a large market for a political documentary that addresses issues like free speech on campus.
More than 20,000 visitors to the site have expressed interest in a screening. The interest in “Indoctrinate U” precedes the filmmakers spending even a dime on advertising, which will begin online this week, with print ads due to start later this month.
Because Mr. Maloney thinks the film would be profitable, his goal is to find “one person in Hollywood who is a businessperson and not a political operative.”
He says getting the film into theaters would be major breakthrough. “Hollywood has never distributed a documentary from a different perspective. If this is successful, that will open the door to a lot of different filmmakers.”
But if Hollywood doesn’t respond, Mr. Maloney says he’ll take the film on the road. “One way or another, people will see it,” he said.
“Are we bucking the trend? Absolutely,” Mr. Halvorssen said. “A film like this has never been made, and it has never been distributed theatrically.”
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