Indoctrinate U

I watched this movie Sunday evening (the trailer for it is embedded below). The basic idea of the movie is as followed: on contemporary university campuses it's not so much freedom-of-speech that exists, as it is freedom of politically correct speech (with "politically correct" more extremely defined on university campuses).

Some of it, I'd agree with, but I also wonder how far this goes. For instance, the school I went to as an undergrad had a student society passing anti-Israeli motions. (What the state of Israel has to do with student life on a North American campus I really don't know). In terms of addressing contemporary politics, I suspect that the arts and humanities are more culpable than the sciences, although the latter aren't exactly exempt. I remember one or two History instructors who tended to share a lot of their (left-wing) political views.

Or, to use another example the movie mentions, a typical university these days has a "woman's centre" but no "men's centre". Taking probably 65% science and 35% humanities as an undergrad, pretty much any science class I took devoted a few minutes into what amounted to a recruitment speech intended to get more women to enroll, whereas none of the humanities classed made any attempts to recruit men even though the gender ratio there was the reverse. (On the other hand, as a TIME article notes, some colleges and university are now beginning to apply "affirmative action" methods in favor of men).

Perhaps this is post-modernism applied. Some research has argued that people unsure of beliefs (AKA post-modern skeptics?) are more close-minded.

It is, of course, interesting to see some of the same sort of stuff exhibited in the media and in organizations like Google. I've mentioned before that Google's employees are lean strongly to the left-wing, with 98% of employee political donations going to the U.S. Democratic Party. A similar story seems to be playing itself out over a recent photoshop job of Michelle Obama as a monkey. That quickly attracted a lot of negative bush, with Google apologizing for the incident and adding things like disclaimers to its website if searching for such a term. Yet numerous photos of the prior president as a monkey are available. I couldn't find any of Laura Bush, but I'd argue that Michelle Obama has been much more politically visible and active than her predecessor.