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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (Feb. 20, 1986)
Much Talk, Little Action Accuracy in Academia started slowly, but it has already drawn fire from both the left and the right What 'a to be made of Accuracy in Aca demia? Is it just a roup of feisty consumer activists, eager to correct professorial errors and expand the bound aries of campus debate-’ Or is it a gang of neo-McCarthyite*, determined to first chill and then skewer any left ist t hey find teach ing on campus-’ The answer may depend on the eye of the beholder This much, howev er, is clear: after a semester's work, the young men who run AlA have shown a genius for at trading publicity, but thus far have produced only a handful of teachers whom even they might cart* to indict A! A was born during last summer’s vaca tion, an outgrowth of Accuracy in Media (AIMi. which is committed to combating left-wing influence in the mass media AIM founder Reed Irvine,“a right-wing activist who prefers the description "freedom de fender," edits AIA's news|>aper and pro vides office spuce for AIA’s staff -two young veterans of campus ideological wars lea (sorha III is a 19KT> graduate of the Universityoft’aliforniu,Davis Asasenior, he organized protests about the lectures of a filmmaker named Saul landau, who, among otherthings, had made what Oiorba considered a favorable profile ofC’uban dic tator Fidel Castro. The other is Matthew Scully, a former columnist for the student (wiper at Arizona State, where he had publicly flayed teachers for what he thought to be objec tionable instruction The AIA men have opened t wo fronts First they criticized a few professors in their news letter, in a column they sent to college pupers and in various public appearances. Several of AIA’s targets were already • ell-known leftists Hut they •ilsoattuckcd an Knglish teach er at the University of Mary land for allegedly sugg**sting ' hut there was more injustice in 1 he Unit«>d States than in Hit ler’sfiermany. And they indict “d an old foe of Scully’s, a pro le,ssorat Arizona State, who was harged with converting a sur vey course in Western political ihought into a personal plat form todenounce nuclear urms, warfare and energy More at tention was attracted by their econd front taking informa tion from student "reporters"about profes sors whose classroom performance seemed suspect to A1A They rented a toll-free num Is-r i8<X) 334-9141* and promised to keep secret the names of tipsters, lest they be penalized with a lower grade. frightsitimmemories Tocritics, AlA’sopen ing siilvos echoed the turmoil of the early 1950s. AIA staffers talked about lists of K).(XX) Marxists teaching on campus. The invocation of the word "list” reminded many of Sen Joseph McCarthy, who spoke of having a list of communists in the federal government He didn't, but his movement was launched And the prospect of students reporting on their teachers caused its own sensation For some, it was a reminder of the secret informers of the '50s, for others, the radicals of the '60s—an odd coupling joined by a common taste for tormenting professors whose views t hey opposed. The. informant label stuck to—and stung—AIA The chancellor of the City University of New York, Joseph Murphy, called AIA the "thought pol ice. "Such com ments hurt For instance, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the Republican club quickly reassessed its interest in AIA "The idea of harassing professors is not what we had in mind,” says James L. McFarland, president of the GOP group In response, AIA staffers insist that they are not trying to build a network of "spies.” Says associate editor Scully: "The idea got exaggerated into a nationwide network of classroom monitors. The idea was to raise the whole question of academic freedom... | with] a few students here and there send ing in complaints.” As for their basic mission, they point to the views of other academics, most notably comments made by Boston University president John Silber. "To the extent that (AIA ] is con cerned simply in pointing out errors, in argument or fact. 1 don’t know why any honest professor would worry about it,” Silber said in a CBS interview. For all this push and pull, the most inter esting aspect of the debate is that AIA has drawn fire from the right as well. Secretary of Education William J. Bennett and neo conservative writer Midge Decter, the ex ecutive director of the Committee for the Free World, agree that America’s faculties are too sympathetic to the left But both find fault with AIA Bennett argues that "criticizing individual professors . . . will ullow the left to portray itself as an embat tled minority ..Decter says that bias itself isn't the problem, because educated people are entitled to their opinions. The issue is whether teachers have the "decen cy and honor” to test their views against other texts and opinions. Assessing that, and instilling that, she says, is "no job for kids ” AIA respectfully disagrees, proving that at least when it is taking incoming fire, the group can find something critical to say about conservatives, too. Amr I’hkbsu’iM Annk McOrory in Amherst, Mass. Angila Cam hi i.i. in College Park. Md, Elizabeth Cosin in Washington. RC, Tim K K1.1. R Y hi Madison, Wis. and bureau reports IINIVKIOIAt.PRISM8VNIMCATK I 1«H* <iH THI'ltKAU I-—-1 I G. B. TRUDEAU