Caught on Tape

Evan Coyne Maloney experienced academic biases in higher education first hand as a student at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. At the time, he thought the bias problem might be limited just to Bucknell.

That was until he read Illiberal Education by Dinesh D’Souza and heard about how students at other colleges faced similar situations of academic bias in the classroom. Now, 11 years after Maloney graduated from Bucknell, he is educating others on the problem of academic bias through a series of video documentaries that have received critical acclaim.

Maloney’s video documentary series on higher education is entitled “Brainwashing.” There have been two installments “Brainwashing 101,” and “Brainwashing 201: The Second Semester.” “Brainwashing 201” recently won Best Short Film at the Liberty Film Festival in October.

In an interview with Carolina Journal, Maloney said that he has been interested in higher education issues since he was an undergraduate.

“I’m a news junkie,” Maloney said. “I would always follow the different scandals that occur in higher education.”

His successes have caused some to call him a conservative version of Michael Moore. Maloney said he understands the marketing value of that line, which has been used by the media in previous articles about his work.

“I do respect the quality of work that Michael Moore does,” Maloney said. “I don’t want to be seen in necessarily in the same light as him. He occupies his own space and I think he should be left alone in his own space.”

In “Brainwashing 101,” Maloney opens with a look at what higher education was in America several years and decades ago. Maloney, who narrates the film, discusses how colleges and universities were built on the same traditions and philosophies in which the United States was formed. Then, the video focuses on higher education today by showing controversial quotations from various professors.

“Anybody who blows up the Pentagon gets my vote,” University of New Mexico professor Richard Berthold said in the moments following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. That’s one of the quotations that flash across the screen.

After several like it, Maloney asks, “How did our campuses get this way?”

“It’s my perception that the environment in higher education has become more hostile to free speech,” Maloney said in the interview.

Maloney said he believes higher education has always had elements of bias because academia generally attracts professors who have a liberal ideology. He also said that recent publicity of controversies in higher education is helping to show that there is a problem.

One of the reasons for more publicity of cases of academic bias, Maloney said, is because of changes in the media environment. The creation of cable news networks and the Internet allows more opportunities to publicize bias in academia, he said.

“Now you get people, like me, who just follow the news as a matter of course,” Maloney says. “We hear more stories than we when we were at school.”

Maloney said that he usually focuses on disputes involving bias that have gone into litigation, although not all of his cases have actually gone to court.

“You are much more able to say with surety what’s going on when there are depositions,” Maloney said. “In some cases it’s not possible” to depend on legal cases.

The goal in each documentary for Maloney is to present both sides of a situation and let viewers decide for themselves what to think. He said he has had difficulty in getting some professors and university officials to speak to him on camera.

“That’s the problem we face most acutely,” Maloney said. “We don’t have enough of the perspective of other people.

“I would love to include [the academics’] perspective. If you’re willing to give it, I’m willing to put it on film.”

Maloney said his work is not intended to force academia to have a perfect balance between the number of conservative and liberal professors on campus. He said he just wants conservatives to be treated fairly.

“I don’t think there has to be a 50-50 balance or a perfectly representative balance,” Maloney said. “It won’t bother me if there were more liberals than conservatives as long as the conservatives are treated fairly.”

As for the rest of his career, Maloney is unsure how much longer he wants to focus on higher education.

“I don’t think this is an issue I want to spend my entire career looking at,” Maloney said. “There are so many people who have made careers on this issue and understand every nuance of higher education more so than I ever will.”

Courtesy of The John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy