Click to skip right to Indoctrinate U’s deleted scene.
Indoctrinate U is a wonderful documentary film about the injection of politics into higher education. If you haven’t seen it, pop over to their site and grab a copy.
All this talk about Ayers The Scholar brought up memories of a scene in I-U that didn’t survive edits - and that scene is about “Terrorist Professors”:
A man named Bill Ayers has been in the news lately as Senator Barack Obama’s connections to the 1960s-era domestic terrorist have become an issue in the presidential campaign. It reminded us of a segment cut from an earlier edit of Indoctrinate U.
In this deleted scene, we told the story of how 1960s campus radicals morphed into today’s academics. Three of those radicals were Ayers, his now-wife Bernardine Dohrn, and Mark Rudd. Together, they led the Weather Underground, a group committed to the violent overthrow the U.S. Government.
To bring about their hoped-for communist utopia, the Weathermen bombed dozens of targets around the country including the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon and military recruiting stations. In executing their various attacks, the Weathermen killed a few of their own and also murdered a security guard while robbing an armored car. They targeted the families of judges, celebrated the Manson murders, and through legal technicalities, most of them avoided jail.
Decades later, they’re still unapologetic. In an interview published on September 11th, 2001, Ayers told The New York Times, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.”
What does all of this have to do with higher education? Watch the video to find out.
If you’d rather read than watch, you can peep these other posts:
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Chris Abraham 10.12.08 at 10:17 pm
I hope everyone opts out from propagandist, insidious, and indoctrinating Universities because that will mean my future kids will some day be able to get into the Ivy Leagues.
Matthew K. Tabor 10.13.08 at 1:15 am
I don’t know of a university system that is indoctrinating, or even politicized, in its entirety. The challenge for modern and future students is to find the professors at their institutions who don’t indoctrinate, who take scholarship/teaching seriously, and who are committed to education. Opting out of a school is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Having said that, some colleges/universities make non-politicized education an easier task for students than others. I prefer institutions where a student doesn’t have to work too hard to avoid the useless professors.