Have you seen any good movies lately? On the campus of Michigan Technological University, a lot of students have. The film board at this mid-size engineering college brings in popular films a few months after their initial release and shows them for the students every Friday and Saturday evening.

Students pay their two bucks and pack into a couple of the largest auditoriums on campus to see their choice of two movies shown simultaneously at both 7 and 9:30p.m. — usually an action movie and a comedy. They even get treated to a Warner Bros. cartoon before the feature presentation.

In 1993, a few of the films shown were: “The Firm,” “Cliffhanger,” “The Lion King,” “In the Line of Fire,” “Son in Law,” “So I Married an Ax Murderer,” “Sleepless in Seattle,” Cool Runnings, “The Program” and “Demolition Man.” Candy and pop sales are very respectable.

The Michigan Tech Film Board is wildly successful and easily outdraws the local commercial theaters in town on the weekend. A good time is had by all.

Compare that to the film board at ISU, and indeed the film boards at many universities around the country and the contrast is obvious. The choice of films by these film boards is not customer-driven like the films selected at Michigan Tech. Movies are not chosen based on whether students will flock to them for some simple entertainment.

Often, an easily predictable political focus or message sent by the films seems to decide which motion pictures end up shown in the union. Three past films at ISU were: “A Handmaids Tale,” “The Last Supper” and “The Last Temptation of Christ.”

A “Handmaids Tale” is a movie depicting a dystopic future where hypocritical Christian evangelicals rule the world. “The Last Supper” is about a group of lively, liberal grad students who invite over some nasty conservatives for dinner and poison them.

“The Last Temptation of Christ” is a probably the only movie of these three of which most students have actually heard. However, I’m statistically pretty safe in guessing most students haven’t seen it or plan to see it. Despite the immense free publicity surrounding the controversy over the film’s revisionist depiction of Jesus Christ, the movie was a huge flop and never even made back enough money to cover the cost in advertising it, much less to produce it.

The word of mouth spread that this was a dog of a movie. Respected film critic Michael Medved was quoted at the time as saying that the most interesting thing about “The Last Temptation of Christ” was the controversy — not the movie itself — and the missing audience confirmed this view.

All this makes it a curious selection for a movie to entertain the student body. Another curious selection is the movie “10 Days that Shook the World,” which the ISU Student Union Board plans to show this October. This film is a gushingly sympathetic account of the October 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia. A revolution that led to increased poverty and oppression for hundreds of millions of people.

Given the systematic failure of the communist system of government around the world, and the present near-starvation in North Korea because of communism, is an “up with communism” film set to be a smash hit with ISU students?

The case of politicized university film boards bringing unpopular movies to campus for students is only one of many negative aspects that politics has in academia. Classrooms themselves often are the location for promoting politics over the appropriate core activity.

Again, the impact is negative for most students. Treating them this way, regardless of how great their mistreatment was for Jane Elliot’s career or even how enlightening it is to watch movies about this experiment. Jane Elliot is not a model for innovative ways of teaching about prejudice in the classroom. She is instead, a walking advertisement for home-schooling.

The negative impact of politics imposed on students ranges from the minor irritation of bad movies chosen for our consumption to almost nightmarish experiments on young children.

However, there is an up-side to all of this. After all, it does simplify the task of improving education. Looking for areas in academia that need improvement? Start smelling for politics and, in the words of Toucan Sam, “Just follow your nose.”

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Benjamin Studenski is a junior in industrial engineering from Mt. Pleasant.