The most telling moment in Starving the Beast comes very late in the documentary’s runtime. One of the film’s villains—some Texan tycoon trying to dismantle the University of Texas out of misguided libertarian zeal—is being interviewed and, after making some particularly hateful response, he accidentally lets his face curl into a self-satisfied grinning sneer. It is apparent: he gets off on this, on being the heel, on having cameras heap negative attention and notoriety in his direction. The film, crafted as a bold takedown of this particular villain and his cronies, is instead bringing him great joy because it grants him the spotlight and does not threaten his wealth or position. After the interview, one imagines he drove away in some hundred-thousand dollar luxury car to his country club and bragged about his performance to his rich asshole friends.
This scenario is fully beyond the control of Starving the Beast’s creator, Steve Mims. He cannot dictate how the cast members feel about his project. Even still, that grinning sneer is emblematic of the film’s grandest shortcoming: its social efficacy is minimal.
Mims has written and directed a rampaging screed that gamely takes on a billionaire-backed movement to hijack public higher education and destroy its social mission of affordably educating citizens. Starving the Beast hits it marks: it is a successful, impassioned argument that unambiguously exposes the ill-informed and bigoted reformers as misguided and/or self-interested. While it is far from aesthetically interesting or formally vibrant, Mims clearly is not aiming for such. Instead, he infuses life by juxtaposing the creation of the land-grant university by Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, with the Republican-led effort to neuter the land-grant university today. He makes a concise, irrefutable argument with which any rational or empathetic person will agree.
Rather, the problem lies in the purpose of it all. The documentary premiered at South by Southwest, it will air at some arthouse cinemas and then it will become available to interested viewers online in various forms. All of these viewers are people who already agree with its points; hateful tycoons who get off on upsetting “liberal intellectuals” will never watch it nor will it harm their reputations. Furthermore, it does not provide a call to arms or seek to mobilize. And if it tried to do so, it would fail: the only people who show up on camera on either side of the debate are old white men, who are not catalysts of social revolution. Even after the creation of this well-intentioned documentary, the inexorable and unrelenting beast of neoliberalism—not the eponymous one referring to the libertarian mythos of government as monstrous—will continue its attack on public higher education.
Perhaps more damning than Starving the Beast’s pointlessness as a piece of cinematic activism is its unambitious argument. It is undeniable that neoliberalism is further widening the already-gaping chasm between rich and poor in the United States. It is equally obvious to any moderately-aware observer that this noxious ideology has invaded the education system. This is harmful to society. This is the argument of Starving the Beast. But what does this add to the conversation? Even if hundreds of millions were to watch it, what new information would they glean from Mims’ documentary that they did not already get from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix—a film actually viewed by hundreds of millions?
Furthermore, the universities lauded in the film are also places currently embroiled in sexual assault scandals, as detailed in The Hunting Ground. These are universities whose highest paid employees are coaches of athletic teams, not professors, and where budgets allocate tremendous sums to baseball travel expenses instead of financial aid. In other words, the film’s heroes are tarnished. The documentary’s celebration of universities’ resistance to change is also misplaced; our universities, including the enormous public ones in Starving the Beast, need to be transformed. The film’s castigation of neoliberalism is well-founded, but its fetishization of higher education’s intransigence is infuriating. Mims seems wholly uninterested in these complicated, more-balanced lines of investigation.
In sum, Starving the Beast is a concise argument on one of the essential questions of our age. It is a capable and convincing takedown of neoliberalism and its proto-libertarian funders. But the film never ascends higher than the very lowest hanging fruit, so even though it whacks such targets with the appropriate exuberance, it ultimately reiterates arguments already convincingly made elsewhere while ignoring inquiries that may muddle its simplistic take.
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