As John notes below, I attended the premiere of Evan Coyne Maloney's Indoctrinate U in Minneapolis last night. (In the video clip Evan discusses the film with Sean Hannity.) The Minneapolis debut was only the film's second public showing; it premiered in Washington a few weeks ago before a raucous crowd at the Kennedy Center. In Minneapolis the film continues with showings at the Oak Street Cinema (the old Campus Theater) through next Thursday. The theater was also packed with a responsive crowd last night, a large part of which stuck around after the screening to hear from Evan and film producer Thor Halvorssen. I haven't seen such a big crowd in that theater since "Putney Swope" opened there in 1969.

Several University of Minnesota students were in the audience and testified to the accuracy of the film's depiction of university life. In a recent New York Times column Stanley Fish (wrongly, in my view) pooh-poohed the film's portrayal of the university, but he also smartly captured Evan's genius:

At least as an on-camera presence, Maloney is polite, unflappable and relentless. He borrows some techniques from Michael Moore, but rather than resembling a giant donut, Maloney has the lean boyish looks that could earn him a role in “Oceans 14″ alongside Brad Pitt and Matt Damon. So when he ambles into a university office in search of an administrator who will explain why there is no Men’s Resource Center at a university where The Women’s Resource Center flourishes, a viewer is likely to ask, Why won’t they even talk to that nice young man? (Of course it’s a set-up; Maloney knows in advance that no one who works for a large institution is going to start talking to a film crew that just wanders in, and he’s counting on it.) [Fish is slightly misleading here; Maloney gets some illuminating interviews -- and provokes illuminating nervousness -- using the patented ambush method.]

“Indoctrinate U”’s thesis is contained in its title. You may think that universities are places where ideas are explored and evaluated in a spirit of objective inquiry. But in fact, Maloney tells us, they are places of indoctrination where a left-leaning faculty teaches every subject, including chemistry and horticulture, through the prism of race, class and gender; where minorities and women are taught that they are victims of oppression; where admissions policies are racially gerrymandered; where identity-based programs reproduce the patterns of segregation that the left supposedly abhors; where students and faculty who speak against the prevailing orthodoxy are ostracized, disciplined and subjected to sensitivity training; where conservative speakers like Ward Connerly are shouted down; where radical speakers like Ward Churchill are welcomed; where speech codes mandate speech that offends no one; where the faculty preaches diversity but is itself starkly homogeneous with respect to political affiliation; where professors regularly use the classroom as a platform for their political views; where students parrot back the views they know their instructors to hold; where course reading lists are heavy on radical texts and light on texts celebrating the Western tradition; where the American flag is held in suspicion; where military recruiting personnel are either treated rudely or barred from campus; where the default assumption is that anything the United States and Israel do is evil.

Telling the utterly outrageous stories that make up the film -- for example, the infuriating story of Cal Poly student Steven Hinkle who was persecuted for posting fliers promoting the on-campus appearance of the black author of It's OK To Leave the Plantation -- Evan generates the emotional immediacy peculiar to the film medium. By contrast with Michael Moore, however, Evan generates the emotion with true stories. Particularly in this respect, "Maloney is the un-Michael Moore." This is a funny, humane, and powerful film. If there is any justice in the world, with Evan Maloney's screen debut a star is born.

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