With all the fuss about Campus Watch, another academic watchdog web site seems to have crept in beneath the campus thought police's trusty radar. NoIndoctrination.Org is a new site expressly devoted to cataloguing instances of bias on campus. Here's the site's mission statement, and here is the text from the front page:

Universities in a free society should be places where open minds can flourish and examine ideas from a variety of reasoned perspectives. In recent years, however, sociopolitical agendas often drive the discourse - supplanting, suppressing, and ultimately excluding alternative views. NoIndoctrination.org provides a forum to publicize students' reports about college and university courses and programs that in their opinion contain severe bias or amount to indoctrination.

If you believe you have experienced courses or orientation programs that advance one-sided social or political ideologies, denigrate alternative views, or create an intimidating atmosphere for expressing diverse opinions, please post your experiences here (and, if possible, send corroborating material). The information we gather will help us in our mission to promote open inquiry in academia.

When Campus Watch announced that it would be keeping dossiers on professors who have had a large role in the corruption of Middle East studies, and when it dared to encourage students to report any Middle East-related heinousness on their campuses, academics cried long and loud that their academic freedom was being chilled by a McCarthyite attempt to "spy" on them and to "stalk" them. Meanwhile, NoIndoctrination.org has been quietly logging extensive reports on professors who run courses that are, to the student reporter's mind, unconscionably biased and doctrinaire. It's a young site, and there isn't much on it yet. But what is there is pretty interesting.

Here's a description of freshman orientation at UC San Diego:

During this day-long mandatory "freshperson" (yes, that was a term used) orientation for Warren College at UCSD in Sept. 2000, students were required to attend various sessions and activities. Only one of these was related to academics - the planning of our course schedules. The afternoon and evening were devoted to games, role-playing, and other "sensitivity" programs. Most notable was a session in which the organizer would name a "victim" group (e.g., those from low-income families, those who had been racially discriminated against, those who were or were good friends with homosexuals, etc.) and the students who fit that category would stand until the next group was called. This served only to intimidate and embarrass those not standing, especially since the activity must have lasted for 30 or so rounds and each group was kept standing for about a minute. The organizer then decided to talk some - about how those who had stood up had more to deal with than others, about how no one has the right to be concerned about privacy if he/she has a homosexual roommate, etc. Rather than merely telling us to be respectful towards other people, those running the orientation went beyond and made this an exercise in thought reform. It was not a very promising start to one's first year of college.

I'm collecting anecdotes about thought reform at freshman orientation. This story is depressingly familiar. So is the following account of a freshmen writing course, also at UCSD:

Although we did discuss both sides of the reading materials on controversial subjects, most of the time the TA seemed to make it quite clear what her view was. Many times she also did not hide her belief that we should hold the same views. There were only 15 people in the class, so intimidation was often easy to achieve. On one occasion, she polled us on our views on the use of racial preferences and quotas for university admissions. Those who opposed (myself and another) were then asked pointed and intimidating questions about our own stance. This was after the TA told us her own views. Then we had a "discussion" where she basically had the other students tell us why our ideas were wrong. At the end of the course, she showed us a video (not on the syllabus) on racism and after that we had another "discussion" where she made sweeping generalizations about racists (who are apparently always white) and their pervasion of all aspects of society.

The reader for the course consisted of 5 essays. The first was an essay which practically accused all whites as being racist. The next two essays were responses which essentially agreed with the first essay and added further arguments. The fourth was, however, a response (incidentally written by an African-American) challenging the original author in a civil and academic fashion. The fifth and final essay was a response by the original author to the author of the unfavorable response. It was essentially a personal attack that basically accused the man of being a traitor to his race. One of the essays also indicated that Asians are "proto-whites" (used as a degrading term) because they apparently do not experience racism from whites in the same way that other races do.

This course is required of all students in Warren College at UCSD. It is intended to be a course on writing, but the only time the TA taught us anything about writing was when many of the students complained that they wanted to learn how to write better.

Also a depressingly typical statement about what goes on in "freshman writing" courses across the country. Interestingly, the writing director at UCSD is Linda Brodkey, a composition specialist who left UT Austin after a failed, highly publicized attempt to politicize the freshman comp curriculum there. She found greener pastures, apparently, at UCSD.

NoIndoctrination.org is very far from the sleek, high profile site Daniel Pipes created in Campus Watch. From the look of it, it is very much a shoestring operation. But it's worth watching.