The documentary covers Gov. Scott Walker’s attack on unions and tenure.
In early August, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (no relation) floated the idea of replacing college professors with screenings of educational documentaries. The nation mocked his buffoonery, not seeing this for what it is: an accidental exposure of the GOP’s long game.
Though he would add comic relief, Johnson does not appear in Starving the Beast, Steve Mims’ new documentary about efforts to overhaul state universities in Texas, North Carolina, Virginia, Louisiana and Wisconsin. The Republicans want to run educational institutions like for-profit businesses, where research and the dispensing of knowledge are demoted — if not expelled.
Starving the Beast, which premiered at this spring’s Wisconsin Film Festival, is a horror-show that could be lumped in with Hostel and Saw as torture porn. But unfortunately, it’s not fictional. The film, which opens at Sundance Cinemas on Sept. 16, documents a barrage of collegiate defeats perpetrated by people who don’t understand why anyone would want to study anything as useless — which is to say, not monetarily enriching — as English or history.
If you love education, watching this onslaught of losses is as painful as watching a nerd get slapped for 94 minutes. Starving the Beast offers few victories for higher ed, and when it does, it’s usually universities meekly thanking lawmakers for a minor adjustment to otherwise massive cuts. Happily, the film employs impishly delightful Democratic operative James Carville to champion public universities.
Mims also allows some of the villains to state their case, including Jake Sandefer, who wrote Seven Breakthrough Solutions, published by the conservative think tank Texas Public Policy Foundation, which underpins the anti-intellectual crusade. Universities to Sandefer are like Dalmatians to Cruella de Vil: things to be gutted. The film also relates how Gov. Scott Walker fought successfully to weaken the UW System, gut the Wisconsin Idea and remove tenure protections.
If Sen. Johnson’s (seriously, no relation) videos-as-professor plan is ever put into place — and this movie makes this entirely unreasonable plan seem reasonably within the GOP’s grasp — the first documentary on the new UW’s syllabus should be Starving the Beast.
But why wait? Show it to the students now, while the UW as we know it is still salvageable.
UW educational researcher Noel Radomski, who appears in Starving the Beast, will be on hand for Q & A sessions after the 6:45 screenings at Sundance on Sept. 16 and 17.
