Impoliteness U

by Hal Parker | October 5, 2007 at 5:02 pm

Impoliteness UAccording to the New York Sun (like the Forward, but backwards), Columbia University may not be the bastion of free speech it prides itself to be, unless of course you’re a handsome authoritarian who has sworn death to Israel. Evan Coyne Maloney, the “Michael Moore of the Right” and director of soon to be conservative cult-classic Indoctrinate U (up there with Red Dawn), isn’t happy with the treatment he received from Columbia while making his tendentious documentary. The Sun reports:

“The way I was treated was something out of an East German playbook,” Mr. Mahoney said during an interview yesterday, explaining the footage. “The university said there had to be a handler with me at all times. They wanted to have final content control. After I filmed with one of their handlers, I wouldn’t be allowed to release anything publicly unless they approved it. They said the amount of money to pay was dependent on what our point of view was.”

Other things Columbia took from the “East German playbook” include poisoning Maloney’s DP, throwing Maloney into an inhuman cesspool prison for decades where he faced daily torture, and constructing a massive wall on Broadway dividing Columbia from Barnard. The Sun continues:

In footage posted on the film’s Web site, Mr. Maloney shows a Columbia administrator, filmed only from the neck down, saying that the content of the film needed to be approved so that the university was portrayed in “the best possible light.” He tells Mr. Mahoney that filming on campus costs $1,500 an hour.

Do you feel that? It’s the chilling effect caused by Columbia’s environment of censorship and repression. Yet it wasn’t enough to stop American hero Evan Mahoney, who courageously, “chose not to comply with the university’s rules.”

OK, on the other hand, this is kind of effed-up:

One scene in which he asks students to identify Adolf Hitler, Osama bin Laden, or a Columbia professor as the source of an anti-Semitic description of Israeli Jews was cut from the film but now appears online. In the extra footage, students express shock when they are informed that a chaired professor of Iranian Studies at Columbia, Hamid Dabashi, wrote of Israeli Jews that “the way they talk, walk, the way they greet each other, there is a vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture.”

Yikes. Anyone from Columbia want to explain this?

(noticed via PBC)


 
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  • @Zafar Khan
    Natural Sciences students can be indoctrinated as well. For example, it's almost impossible to get tenure in physics unless you buy into string theory. Despite the fact that it is a theory which can't even be pinned down to one explanation yet, any disagreement results in not getting tenure.
  • byard
  • Princeton '12
    I agree with Zafar Khan. Columbia should be composed solely of Native Americans.
  • Zafar Khan
    Expel all foreign students and foreign born students. Do likewise with foreign faculty.
  • ha
    Columbia invites people from all political spectrums and has professors that hold a wide variety of beliefs. Everyone here seems to be the defender of free speech, but no no, it's different when you invite the President of Iran, it's different when anti-zionist views are applauded. Columbia's biggest problem is the bureaucracy, not antisemitism, hypocrisy, or suppression of conservatism. Is it so hard to believe that Columbia, a prestigious Ivy League school is trying to make sure that which is filmed on campus holds it in a good light? It's called protecting a brand name. It's sad that people have been shoveling crap on Columbia when they get their feelings hurt; oh so sorry that people get their feelings hurt when they are confronted in an academic environment to challenge their previously held notions. So sorry.

    Where are you people when David Horowitz comes to speak? Where are you guys when Dershowitz comes? How about Finkelstein? Very different points of view, and yet, nobody publicizes how Columbia does a great job promoting free speech. All you can do is throw around crap like "left-wing moonbat", you're pathetic.
  • @STEVE
    Columbia University is fucked up. But so are you.
  • STEVE
    Columbia University claims they are America’s best and brightest?

    Did you see the way they applauded Ahmadenijad?

    They are just a bunch of filthy Little Eichmanns.

    Too bad that Cho Seung-hui didn’t go to Columbia University!
  • *redacted*
    I'm a student at [CENSORED] and I don't really feel like there's an environment of [CENSORED] here. I mean, at least I can still post on IvyGate! The truth is, people like to turn things into a big deal, but for the most part there's not a lot of controversy here. It's pretty tame.
  • keggy
    Excellent post. There's no excuse for Columbia's environment of censorship....or its ignorant students.
  • keggy
    Excellent post. There's no excuse for Columbia's environment of censorship....or it's ignorant students.
  • Sasha
    As if we didn't know Columbia's filled with a bunch of close-minded, left-wing moonbats. They're nuts.
  • Zafar Khan
    Free speech on campus is a pointless shibboleth when there's a surfeit of free speech throughout the rest of the society. In any case, it's in the exact sciences where questions of free speech don't loom as large that the Ivys most effectively educate their students and secure their continuing claim to prestige. Students in the exact sciences are absolutely immune to any form of indoctrination. They don't even need to hear both sides.
  • OldWykehamist
    What's his affiliation to Columbia? If he's an outsider, I would think Columbia has as much right to restrict his access to campus just as much as it has the right to welcome a head of state to its campus. The way I see it, that's the point of the the independent university's corporate right to free speech.
  • OldWykehamist
    What's his affiliation to Columbia? If he's an outsider, I would think Columbia has as much right to restrict his access to campus just as much as it has the right to welcome a head of state to its campus. The way I see it, that's the point of the the independent university's corporate right to free speech.
  • Columbia '08
    It says that if you want to say something shocking, something that a lot of people will disagree with, something unpopular, and maybe even wrong, then Columbia is the place to do it.
    Of course the PR department isn't going to bend over backwards to help you make a video slamming the school. Columbia deals with a LOT of shit that other schools don't have to - people criticize us when they want to criticize the upper class, liberals, New Yorkers, Jews, the lower class, immigrants, etc.
    Professors here have a lot of different opinions. Isn't that the opposite of indoctrinating students?

    P.S. The Jewish Theological Seminary, a center of modern conservative Judaism, chose to be affiliated with Columbia. The dean of the engineering school just went back to his alma mater in Jerusalem. There's not too much need to weep for the plight of Judaism at Columbia.
  • ViolentQuaker
    The answer, of course, is that there really IS a campus problem. Whether Maloney's self-righteous histrionics are going to help bring about much-needed change is unclear.
  • columbia '07
    sounds typical and doesn't suprise me. for all bollinger's chat about free speech, most of the administration doesn't actually believe in it and will stop it at all costs. the trick is to bitch to bollinger so that he straightens shit out. but usually, he is uninformed as to what is happening at his university.
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